Studio: international art (13.1898)

Aubrey Beardsley

plished, a new discovery. Hogarth's famous " line
of beauty " is of small value, unless it play its
proper part in the scheme of beauty. The real
beauty of Beardsley's work is often overlooked. It
is true that it was rarely or never " pretty" ; but
that at times it possessed beauty according to
academic canons, both in figures and pattern, could
be proved up to the hilt. His caricatures and his
grotesques have blinded critics to the other side of
his art, which is present in The Coiffing and several
of his later designs, as it is also in some of the
earlier. Turning back to Hamlet patris manem
sequitur, a wonderful study (reproduced in The Bee,
the magazine of Blackburn Technical School,
November 1891), one is re-impressed by its weird
beauty; in the curious intensity of Hamlet's slim
figure, swathed in drapery, with one nervous hand
clutching his throat, while the other is outstretched
against a tree, one finds those qualities which first
revealed themselves had even then found clear ex-
pression. Yet at this time he was but nineteen
years old, and had not devoted himself to art as a
profession. His former schoolmaster, Mr. E. J.
Marshall, of the Brighton Grammar School, says
that he studied art privately, and was for a time in
an architect's office; but all that is wonderful in
the early work is entirely opposed to anything he
would have been taught in either place. Even in
the school-boy drawings to The Pay of the Pied
Piper, which appeared in Past and Present, the
Brighton Grammar School magazine, February
1889, there is a hint, slight but still definite, of his
personal manner. A fellow school-boy speaks of
his delight at that time in Japanese fans and lan-
terns which crowded the shop windows ; and this
glimpse of the art of Japan at its poorest,
coupled with evident study of Sir E. Burne-Jones'
work, are the only extraneous influences apparent
in his earlier designs. Nor, despite his keen
interest in contemporary work, especially French,
do we find any notable influence in his later
work.

After the few things which appeared in school
magazines, nothing of importance seems to have
been published until the time he was, in the pages
of T he Studio, formally introduced to the public,
and took it by storm. It may be as well here to
summarise the various incidents of this time—the
early months of 1893—by waY of correcting many
misconceptions that have arisen.

Still clerk in an insurance office in the city, he
had done a certain number of drawings for his own
amusement. These (including some afterwards re-
produced in The Studio, No. i) had been brought
256

to the notice of various people, including Sir
Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. Aymer Vallance, Mr.
F. H. Evans and others. Mr. Evans, by whose
kindness Hail Mary is here reproduced for the
first time, showed that drawing to Mr. J. M. Dent,
and said, " Here is the right person to illustrate
your 1 Morte d'Arthur.'" Mr. Dent was so far
impressed by it that he gave Mr. Beardsley an
opportunity of trying his hand on an Arthurian
subject, the result being the design reproduced in
the photogravure to the second volume of the
work—The Achieving of the San Great, which
won him his first big commission. Meanwhile
preparations for the publication of The Studio
were in progress, and the promoters of the magazine
had seen the portfolio, and chosen certain draw-
ings for their first number, for which Mr. Pennell
had written his well known appreciation. At this
time Mr. Lewis Hind had just accepted the
editorship of the Pall Mall Budget, and gave
Mr. Beardsley a commission to illustrate current
events in his weekly paper. But the drawings
representing characters in Tennyson's " Becket"
and in Gluck's " Orpheus," both performed at the
Lyceum, which appeared in the Pall Mall Budget,
February 9 and March 16, 1893 (with others of
less importance in the numbers for February 2, 16,
23, March 9, 23, and 30), do not appear to
have aroused much curiosity regarding the new
illustrator. It is with No. 1 of The Studio, April
1893, which contained Siegfried, The Birthday
of Madame Cigale, Les Revenants de Musique,
Salome and three subjects from the " Morte
d'Arthur," accompanied by Mr. Pennell's sym-
pathetic article, that Beardsley's formal recog-
nition is to be dated. The first part of the
" Morte d'Arthur " was therein announced as ready
" in June next." In The Studio, No. 2, appeared
a large reproduction of a pen drawing of the
Jeanne aVArc Procession (another version of the
pencil study of the same subject owned by Mr. F.
H. Evans). Then came the serial issue of the
" Morte d'Arthur," the " Bon-Mots " grotesques,
two notable compositions for The Pall Mall Maga-
zine, and not long after The Yellow Book, No. 1,
April 1894, which in its first four volumes con-
tained seventeen of his designs. The idea of this
periodical with Mr. Aubrey Beardsley for its art
editor, grew out of a suggestion for a book of
masques he was preparing. Still later followed
cover and title designs for twenty-one volumes,
the " Keynote Series," and "Salome," decorations
for the Pierrot Library, and many another work
published by Mr. John Lane, which established