This exquisite drawing was made by Aubrey Beardsley whilst he was artistic editor of The Yellow Book and may well have been intended for publication. The sinuous design, showing a beautiful, naked youth playing a double bass contains all the languid eroticism and ambiguity of action which characterise Beardsley’s most celebrated illustrations. Aubrey Beardsley was perhaps the most remarkable and graphically inventive designer working in Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the present drawing is a rare sheet, preserved in exceptional condition and with an unbroken provenance.
Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton and had a hard childhood in London during which he contracted tuberculosis, a disease which would eventually result in his death at the age of just 25. Beardsley began his career as a clerk, before pursuing art professionally on the advice of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In 1892 he attended the classes at the Westminster School of Art, then under Professor Fred Brown. The same year, Beardsley travelled to Paris where he discovered the poster art of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints. His first commission was to illustrate Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for the publishing house of JM. Dent (1894). Beardsley’s illustrations were widely praised and the subject of an article by the graphic art expert Joseph Pennell which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Studio magazine. Amongst the drawings Pennell reproduced was a design for the climactic scene of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. This, in turn, convinced Wilde and his publisher John Lane, to commission Beardsley to illustrate an English edition of Wilde’s play. The result was one of the most remarkable graphic projects of the period. Beardsley’s designs included some with caricatures of Wilde, several with highly indecent details, and others which Beardsley declared ‘simply beautiful but quite irrelevant.’[1] The critical reaction was negative, The Times declared Beardsley’s illustrations to be ‘unintelligible for the most part and, in so far as they are intelligible, repulsive.’
Following the publication of Salome Beardsley became one of the founders of the quarterly literary periodical The Yellow Book, acting as its first art editor. Beardsley’s contributions were graphically daring, iconographically obscure and frequently obliquely erotic. The eroticism of the images forced The Yellow Book’s publisher, John Lane, to police Beardsley’s contributions closely, which in turn tempted Beardsley to present ever more complex and daring images. It is possible that the present drawing, which shows the languid figure of a youth profiled against black, dextrously playing the sinuous bass, was considered too explicit for inclusion and was one of those designs rejected by Lane. Certainly, the design did not appear in the four issues of The Yellow Book on which Beardsley worked.
Beardsley’s best illustrations are frequently studied essays in eroticism. In the present drawing, the beautiful young man holds the bass close to his naked body, the string instrument, with its sinuous shape initially recalls the female form. But Beardsley subtly subverts the heterosexual dynamic by elongating the neck of the bass, giving it a decidedly phallic appearance. The beautiful youth is shown idly bowing and fingering the instrument, which is pressed against his own naked genitals, it is an action which Linda Gertner Zatlin has suggested implies masturbation. Beardsley enjoyed the inherent ambiguity of such images, forcing the viewer to seek meaning. For Beardsley the sexual ambivalent youth is a powerful motif, in his most notorious illustrations to Wilde’s Salome, Beardsley shows a grotesque, priapic old man fondling Herodias, whilst a beautiful youth stands impassively watching. This illustration did not escape the intervention of Lane, who insisted on the addition of a fig leaf in the final plate.
In form, the drawing shows both Beardsley’s ability to absorb diverse visual stimuli and his awareness of modern printing techniques. The sinuous line of the figure seen in profile recalls Greek attic vases, particularly the way in which the figure is created in reverse. Beardsley was highly aware of the technological advances being made in modern printing. He always drew with the intention of his designs being reproduced by the recently perfected technique of printing from zinc line blocks made photographically from original drawings. This method made it possible to capture precisely the wiry intricately calligraphic character of his pen line, as Stephen Calloway has observed ‘at once so nervous and so assured.’[2]
Shortly after Beardsley made this drawing The Yellow Book and Beardsley were overrun by scandal. Oscar Wilde’s libel trial against the Marquess of Queensbury collapsed in April 1895. Although Wilde never contributed to The Yellow Book in the popular imagination he was associated with it and many of its contributors, especially Beardsley. The offices of John Lane in Vigo Street were attacked by a mob and Beardsley was forced to flee to Dieppe, he remained in France until his death a few years later.
