Brighton-born Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872, in his mother’s family home in Buckingham Road, just north of the seafront. He would become the late Victorian era’s most notorious black-and-white illustrator, a leading figure in the Aesthetic and Art Nouveau movements whose name now appears routinely in Brighton museum displays and heritage trails as one of the city’s most famous artistic sons.

Beardsley’s parents, Vincent and Ellen Beardsley, were from very different backgrounds: his father the son of a Clerkenwell jeweller with a fragile private income, his mother from the established Pitt family of Brighton. At the time of his birth the family lived at what was then 12 Buckingham Road, later renumbered 31, a mid-Victorian house that is now Grade II listed. He was baptised at St Nicholas Church and later attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School as a day boy, where he excelled in art and had early drawings, poems and cartoons printed in the school magazine Past and Present. 

In 1884 he appeared in public as an ‘infant musical phenomenon’, playing at concerts with his elder sister Mabel; the family then settled in London, and his working life began in clerical and architectural offices rather than on the seafront. On the advice of established artists, including Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Beardsley took up art as a profession in 1891 and studied at the Westminster School of Art. 

A visit to Paris exposed him to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and Japanese prints, which reinforced the graphic, high-contrast style that would make him famous. His first major commission came in 1893, illustrating Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for the publisher J. M. Dent. The following year he became art editor of The Yellow Book, designing its covers and providing many of its illustrations. His drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome and later for works such as The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata established him as the most controversial illustrator of his generation, celebrated and condemned for grotesque, erotic and highly stylised images in black ink influenced by Japanese woodcuts. 

Tuberculosis, first diagnosed when he was seven, dominated his short life. In 1897 he converted to Catholicism and moved to the French Riviera in search of better health. He died in Menton in March 1898, aged but twenty-five, and was buried there after a requiem mass. Brighton remained his birthplace and school town rather than a subject in his drawings, but the city has increasingly claimed him: exhibitions such as ‘Aubrey Beardsley: A Brighton Boy’ at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, and displays like ‘Queer the Pier’, present his work, his Yellow Book covers and his Brighton Grammar School medal as part of the wider story of Brighton’s cultural and seaside history.

Sources: Sussex ArtBeat; Wikipedia; Epsom and Ewell History Explorer; images taken from The Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley by Arthur Symons (Bounty Books, 1967).