Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable: A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley
La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard, from an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley, 1893–94.
Few artists get to define an era in the way that Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) personified fin-de-siècle Britain. Even the manner of his death seems peculiarly fitting for his time. Beardsley passed of consumption “at the age of a flower”, as Oscar Wilde put it — that is, at twenty-five. His brief life was marked by contrasts. A masterful yet largely self-taught illustrator, he developed an intensely idiosyncratic visual language of solid black ink juxtaposed against the white of paper, “knit together with fantastic, nervous lines, almost or quite unrelated to nature”, noted editor Gleeson White, a colleague of Beardsley. Reactions to his artwork were likewise contrastive. His manifest world of aesthetic eroticism and self-conscious decadence captivated some Victorians as much as it repelled others. His influence was such that the phrase “Beardsley Period” was already coined by his contemporaries as a self-descriptor of their own time.
Appraisals of Beardsley have also fluctuated over time. In 1894, he was celebrated as the founding art editor of the trailblazing periodical The Yellow Book. 1894 also saw the controversial publication of the English edition of Wilde’s play Salome — illustrated by Beardsley. The precocious artiste, having learnt from the older dandy, proceeded to poke fun at him. In Salome, he featured Wilde’s likeness as the Moon, compared in the play to a mad, drunken, naked woman “seeking everywhere for lovers”. The following year, Wilde was tried and imprisoned for gross indecency. Tainted by association, the draughtsman fell into disrepute as well. After a scandalised mob defaced the premises of the magazine, Beardsley was sacked from his editorial position. With other doors shut, Leonard Smithers — a less scrupulous, seedier publisher — stepped in to provide a lifeline for Beardsley’s imperiled artistic career. The result was The Savoy, a visionary successor to The Yellow Book but even more daring as well as short-lived. The choice of name was as bold as it was curious. Amid the fallout, The Savoy brought to mind the grand hotel notorious from Wilde’s trial as a setting for his trysts. Ever one to toy with expectations, Beardsley appeared to be leaning in just as he was definitively backing away. At the height of his creative powers but with rapidly declining health, Beardsley applied himself to a whole series of projects whenever he was able, albeit most left unfinished. Still, in just several short years of professional output, his oeuvre reached over a thousand drawings. Despite his earnest conversion to Catholicism at the end of life, this body of work has cemented Beardsley’s legacy — perverse, grotesque, sensuous, inimitable.
The draughtsman’s reputational fortunes shifted again after his death, kicking off a cycle of periodic revivals. Among creatives, his influence has been extensive and enduring. Household names like Munch, Klee, Kandinsky, and Picasso are all demonstrably indebted to Beardsley. Yet his Victorian brand of subversiveness really took off in the swinging 1960s. In 1966, a major exhibition opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where one could thus respectably view the infamous Lysistrata illustrations. However, this was not to be done outside the walls of the storied institution, since the police decided to confiscate any reproductions put on sale on account of indecency. Somewhat predictably, the resultant outcry only served to increase the artist’s popularity. Beardsley’s challenge to the bourgeois sensibility of his epoch highlighted the anti-establishment chops of the psychedelic underground. At the peak of the boom, though, Beardsleyesque imagery came to proliferate on clothes, bags, mugs, wallpaper, posters, records, shops, among other paraphernalia of the everyday. The cool factor was bound to dissipate after that. But given the everlasting appeal of Beardsley’s engrossing “erotic and neurotic” visual universe, he may well gain it back, rediscovered and reinterpreted by a new rebellious generation.
Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.The Snare of Vintage, from an edition of Lucian’s True History illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Dreams, from an edition of Lucian’s True History illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
A year after Beardsley’s death, the publisher John Lane brought out The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1899) and, a couple of years after, The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1901), two curated volumes which gathered a wide selection of the artist's output — full-page illustrations, unpublished emblems, speculative designs, and more — previously spread over many books and magazines. The series was a huge success and saw subsequent editions in 1911–1912, 1920, and 1967, each of which introduced additional images and also shuffling as to which of the more-than-300 featured works fell under “the early” versus “the later”. The first edition came with a preface by art historian H. C. Marillier, which ends on a note of ambivalence and mourning — instead of a flower, he likens the artist to a butterfly: “Poor Beardsley! His death has removed a quaint and amiable personality from amongst us; a butterfly who played at being serious, and yet a busy worker who played at being a butterfly. Outwardly he lived in the sunshine, airing bright wings. Inwardly no one can tell how he suffered or strove.”
Our chronologically ordered gallery is assembled from three books: The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1912 edition) and the 1901 and 1920 editions of The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley. We also have a selection of the images available as prints in our shop.
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 | Source | Various |
 | Underlying Work Rights | PD Worldwide |
| Digital Copy Rights | Various – see source links. | |
 | Download | Right click on image or see source for higher res versions |
Vignette, from an edition of Mallarmé’s L'Après-midi d'un Faune illustrated by Beardsley, 1882.
Withered Spring, ca. 1872–98.
Perseus and the Monster, 1891.
Sandro Botticelli, 1892.
Hamlet, from The Bee magazine, 1892.
Incipit Vita Nova (Here begins a new life), 1893.
Siegfried, from The Studio magazine, 1893.
Of a Neophyte and How the Black Art Was Revealed unto Him by the Fiend Asomuel, from The Pall Mall Magazine, 1893.
The Kiss of Judas, from The Pall Mall Magazine, 1893.
Design from an edition of Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan illustrated by Beardsley, 1893.
Design from an edition of Bon-mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan illustrated by Beardsley, 1893.
Merlin, from an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley, 1893–94.
La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard, from an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley, 1893–94.
How Queen Guenever Made Her a Nun, from an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley, 1893–94.
Design for eight initial keys for John Lane’s Keynote series, ca. 1893–96.
Design for the cover of an edition of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, 1894.
The Snare of Vintage, from an edition of Lucian’s True History illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Dreams, from an edition of Lucian’s True History illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Unpublished design, intended for an edition of Lucian’s True History illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Baron Verdigris, frontispiece for an edition of Jocelyn Quilp’s Baron Verdigris: A Romance of the Reversed Direction, 1894.
The Fat Woman, 1894.
Design for the title-page of the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Design for the contents-page of the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Woman in the Moon, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Peacock Skirt, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Black Cape, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Platonic Lament, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Enter Herodias, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Eyes of Herod, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Stomach Dance, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Toilet of Salomé, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Dancer’s Reward, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
The Climax, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Salomé on Settle, from the first British edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, illustrated by Beardsley, 1894.
Madame Réjane, 1894.
The Scarlet Pastorale, 1894.
Cover design for the first volume of The Yellow Book, ca. 1894.
Cover design for the second volume of The Yellow Book, ca. 1894.
Design for a golf club card, ca. 1894.
Design for an invitation card, ca. 1894.
A Suggested Reform in Ballet Costume (Unfinished Drawing), 1895.
Design for the prospectus of The Savoy magazine, 1895.
Isolde, from The Studio magazine, 1895.
Design for the frontispiece of the first edition of John Davidson’s A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, 1895.
Messalina and her Companion, 1895.
Lysistrata, from an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata illustrated by Beardsley, 1896.
Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women, from an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata illustrated by Beardsley, 1896.
An Athenian Women, from an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata illustrated by Beardsley, 1896.
The Herald, from an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata illustrated by Beardsley, 1896.
A Design, from an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata illustrated by Beardsley, 1896.
Cover design for Leonard Smithers’ Catalogue of Rare Books, 1896.
The Toilet of Helen, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
The Ascension of Saint Rose of Lima, illustration for Beardsley’s story Under the Hill published in The Savoy magazine, 1896.
The Third Tableau of ‘Das Rheingold’, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
A Footnote (self-portrait), from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
The Fourth Tableau of ‘Das Rheingold’, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
The Death of Pierrot, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Ave Atque Vale, illustration for Beardsley’s translation of Catullus 101, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar, illustration for a translation of Molière’s Don Juan published in The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Erda, illustration for Wagner’s Das Rheingold, published in The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Alberich, illustration for Wagner’s Das Rheingold, published in The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, illustration for Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, published in The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Et in Arcadia Ego, from The Savoy magazine, 1896.
Atalanta, 1896.
The Return of Tannhäuser to Venusberg, from Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, 1897.
Frontispiece from an edition of Ernest Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute illustrated by Beardsley, 1897
Design for the front cover of an edition of Ernest Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute, 1897.
Design for the title-page of an edition of Ernest Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute, 1897.
The Cave of Spleen, from an edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley, 1897.
The New Star, from an edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley, 1897.
The Rape of the Lock, from an edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley, 1897.
The Battle of the Beau and the Belles, from an edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley, 1897.
The Baron’s Prayer, from an edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley, 1897.
Personal bookplate (ex libris), date unknown.
Nov 4, 2025
