INSPIRED BY | MASTERS & MUSES | WORLD OF CABANA

Charlotte di Carcaci explores the work of Aubrey Beardsley, whose distinctive illustrations have captivated her since childhood. She recalls the “sinuous black of his nib which, with such economy, seemed to suggest a breast, a cloak or a lock of hair” and delves into the life of the complex artist and his most notable works. 

BY CHARLOTTE DI CARCACI | MASTERS & MUSES | 26 JULY 2025

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Hollyer, 1893

At the age of 11, I was sent to boarding school in Berkshire. The aim of the establishment, rather than educate the girls in its care, was to produce ladies of the old-fashioned sort who would not feel out of place in the drawing rooms of stately homes. We learnt to play the piano and to sing; we were taught needlework and the Scottish reel. But, proficient as we were in embroidery and dance, I’m afraid that grammar, the sciences, and anything beyond the most basic mathematics passed us by. It was as if feminism had never happened, for our teachers seemed determined to turn us into simulacra of those outdated debutantes whose sole ambition had been to make good marriages.

And yet, somehow, the spirit of the ‘70s still managed to seep through the banks of rhododendrons that set our school apart from the outside world. The zeitgeist, like an airborne seed, floated over the lacrosse pitch and past the netball courts to plant itself in our young minds. The more fashionable among us dared to wear shoes with platform soles and bell-bottomed denims, and we listened surreptitiously, after lights out, to the hit parade on our transistor radios. Posters went up of the heartthrobs of the day, all cheesy grins and mullet-cuts; but I, being less mature than the rest, chose to decorate my own small cubicle with images by illustrators of Edwardian children’s books, such as Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham, who had lately come back into vogue.

One day, I came across the work of Aubrey Beardsley, whose monochrome style had also taken root in the aesthetic of the ‘70s. At the instant, I was smitten by the sinuous black of his nib which, with such economy, seemed to suggest a breast or a cloak or a lock of hair. My schoolgirl self had caught the whiff of fin-de-siècle decadence which imbued his every line, and I became intrigued.

During the Christmas holidays I visited a bookshop near the V&A, where I found two large-size paperbacks containing my new hero’s work, which I bought with my pocket-money. For the next few weeks, I sat in the nursery at home, back turned to my old dolls’ house, trying to copy Beardsley’s illustrations for the Lysistrata. At the time I was unaware that the reproductions I was studying had been censored, so that, when later I came to see the originals, complete with vast erect phalluses, I was shocked to say the least. I also tried to mimic the curious profile of Madame Réjane, a celebrated Parisian actress whom Beardsley had immortalised while she’d been performing in London. But for me, the apogee of Beardsley’s art lay with his illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

As a child, I had loved Wilde’s fairy tales, The Happy Prince, The Selfish Giant, The Nightingale and the Rose, but this specific work, Salomé, was of quite another order. Ever since Oxford, where he had read Flaubert’s Hérodias, Wilde had been obsessed with this story; and, after being further inspired by descriptions of Moreau’s painting of Salomé in Huysman’s À Rebours, Wilde resolved to write about the same subject. He even wrote in French, the mother-tongue of 19th-century decadents.

An excerpt from a 1907 edition of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.

Oscar’s one-act tragedy deviates somewhat from the tale in the gospels, for in his version, rather than demand the execution of the Baptist at the instigation of Herodias, Salomé, rebuffed by the saint, wishes him dead in punishment for having spurned her advances. And when, having performed her infamous dance at the bidding of her over-enamoured stepfather, she receives the Baptist’s head in tribute, she kisses its lips as one might those of a living lover.

In 1893, the 22-year-old Beardsley, whose draughtsmanship had already met with much acclaim in aesthetic circles, was commissioned by the Pall Mall Budget Magazine to make a drawing in homage to Wilde’s play. He delivered an elegant, if singular, depiction. His Salomé, an androgyne, seems to hover on an abstract cloud, nose to nose with the severed head of the Baptist, which drips long ribbons of blood into a swamp beneath, whence has sprung a stylised lily, a true fleur du mal.

Wilde so admired this portrayal that when the play’s English translation, by Lord Alfred Douglas, was set to be published the following year, Wilde requested that Beardsley, whom he had once described as the ‘most monstrous of orchids’, be its illustrator. And indeed Beardsley did look like the denizen of some rarefied hot-house, being extremely tall, thin, and angular, and wearing his lank hair with a short fringe in the manner of a medieval page. He was meticulous in his dress, sporting dove-grey suits and yellow gloves; and although rumours swirled about his homosexuality, it was also claimed that he and his sister had been incestuous, and that she had lately miscarried their child. In truth, Beardsley was entirely celibate, his health being too fragile to allow for sex of any type. Ever since childhood he had suffered severe bouts of tuberculosis, and the ensuing haemorrhages had frequently left him bed-bound and unfit to work.

An excerpt from a 1907 edition of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.

When Wilde saw the new drawings that Beardsley had produced for his play, he purported to be disappointed: ‘They are cruel and evil, and so like dear Aubrey, who has a face like a silver hatchet, with grass green hair. They are like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margin of his copybooks’. But Oscar was in error: each rendering is a masterpiece of originality, deriving elements from Lautrec, the Baroque and the Japanese print, which Beardsley alchemised into something uniquely his own; and he portrayed women, rather than as the simpering maidens so beloved of Victorian artists, as outrageous dandizettes, erotic and predatory.

A year after the play’s publication, when Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel for gross indecency, it is said that he was carrying a French novel bound in primrose-coloured paper. The press, baying for the author’s blood, reported, quite wrongly, that the volume in question was the Yellow Book, a quarterly of which Beardsley was art-editor.

This link with the newly disgraced Wilde, however unfounded, wrought a calamitous effect upon Beardsley’s career. Whereas but a few months earlier, as the enfant terrible of the decadent movement, he had found himself in the highest demand, now he was dismissed as a mere peddler of obscenity. And when a mob attacked the journal’s offices, hurling stones through its windows, his colleagues petitioned for him to be sacked.

Thereafter, Beardsley struggled to make ends meet and was forced to give up the house in Pimlico which he had shared with his sister. He resorted to an increasingly ornate style, still black and white, but now showing an almost feverish Rococo influence. Dropped by his publisher John Lane, he was taken up by Leonard Smithers, a shady character who produced clandestine editions of risqué books, some of which Smithers now asked Beardsley to embellish with bawdy drawings.

But this type of work sat uncomfortably with Aubrey’s newfound spirituality, which had lately led him to the Roman Catholic faith; and at the age of only twenty-five, just a few months after his conversion, he succumbed to the effects of tuberculosis in a hotel-room at Menton. Despite his former notoriety, his death went largely unremarked, but his bold graphic style has, ever since, remained a source of inspiration to painters, designers and photographers alike. And although many have tried to emulate him, he remains entirely sui generis, as Wilde attested when he wrote of him, ‘The only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance’.