Spotlight Guest Contributor – Dr Marianne Gilchrist
We always invite suggestions for our Spotlight lists and in February we welcomed the contribution of our library colleague and Historian, Dr Marianne Gilchrist, who as a child began a lifelong fascination with Aubrey Beardsley.
‘When you go into the University Art Collection, one of the first pictures you see is a pen-and-ink drawing of actress Winifred Emery (1861-1924). The artist, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, was one of the greatest talents of the 1890s – his entire career spanning only a few years as a young man of student age.
Born in Brighton on 21 August 1872, he was a teenaged insurance clerk when he first showed some of his drawings to the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones. His career took off with a commission to illustrate Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’. His art is extraordinary: mostly in pen or brush and ink, and often controversial for its erotic content.
Aubrey illustrated Oscar Wilde’s play ‘Salome’. He also became art editor and cover designer for the artistic and literary magazine ‘The Yellow Book’: his portrait of Winifred Emery was published in Issue 4. However, when Wilde was arrested in 1895 and imprisoned for gay sex (then classed as ‘gross indecency’), some of the publisher’s other authors threatened a boycott unless he sacked Aubrey from the magazine – an early case of ‘cancel culture’. They had assumed (wrongly) that he was one of Wilde’s lovers. It was a massive blow, but he picked himself up again and took up new projects.
Courage was something he had never lacked. At the age of 7, he had been diagnosed with TB – then a death-sentence. It flared up again in his late teens, as he was starting his artistic career. He worked against time, against increasing disability. After the Wilde scandal, he continued to draw: ‘The Savoy’ magazine, Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Aristophanes’ bawdy ‘Lysistrata’, Gautier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’… In late 1897, he went to Menton on the French Riviera, for a kinder climate. He worked on drawings for Jonson’s ‘Volpone’, but the lung haemorrhages grew worse. He died in Menton on 16 March 1898, aged only 25.’
The library has a number of books on Aubrey Beardsley – biographies, studies and collections of his drawings including ‘The Uncollected Works of Aubrey Beardsley’ in our Rare Books Room with his illustration ‘The Black Cat’ below.
