As with every great artist in the 19th century, rumours were plentiful; it was believed that Beardsley possessed an incestuous relationship with his sister Mabel, who bore his miscarried child. Like Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, Beardsley was also labelled under the homosexual cliqué. This had some part in his downfall from his fleeting six year career.

Ambitious and gifted, this artist began his impressive career by arriving uninvited with his sister to Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ studio. After being turned down by a servant, Sir Burne-Jones noticed Mabel’s flaming red hair and invited them inside. Mabel was instrumental in initiating Beardsley’s career; due to her, Beardsley was told, “You will become a great artist” and was advised to attend night classes at Westminster School of Art.

Beardsley was often referred to as “Burne-Jones gone to the devil”. Even in his early work, Beardsley’s fine eye for beauty in the grotesque is exposed. 

The years 1893-94 were the busiest times for Beardsley as he illustrated for Le Morte Darthur. This book was published in twelve parts containing 300 illustrations, vignettes and chapter headings. The Birthday of Madame Cigale exhibits the evolution of Beardsley’s art as he inserted elements of Japanese styled imagery, though the greatest influence of bold Japanese styles can be evident in The Black Cape (pictured above at the left). The Black Cape displays a woman, insignificant to the image, with exaggerated clothing consisting of a dramatically sweeping skirt and prominent black cloak.

In 1893, Beardsley met the man who would lead him to his ruin: Oscar Wilde. They formed a friendship that would soon mature to controversy. The two worked together on the scandalous play Salome that was accompanied by Beardsley’s finest work. Based upon sex and corruption, it was well suited to Beardsley’s unusual style as revealed in The Dancer’s Reward; within this piece, the character Salome clutches the hair of St. John’s lifeless and open-mouthed head. The fall of Salome’s cloak and long drip of St. John’s blood lying upon a white background represents Beardsley’s talent for illustrating the monstrous in detail. Beardsley’s fellow critics largely despised these illustrations as The Times described it as “unintelligible for the most part, and, so long as they are unintelligible, repulsive.”

Beardsley and Wilde possessed an uneasy and unpleasant friendship as their celebrity status caused them to be placed in scrutiny under the public eye. Though upon hearing of Beardsley’s illness, a lifelong battle with consumption, Wilde expressed in Ballad of Reading Gaol that he believed Beardsley “brought a strangely new personality to English art... was a charm of the unreal... behind his grotesque there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy.”

Becoming art editor for The Yellow Book, which was well received by the public, though labelled indecent, led to Beardsley’s deposition. It was found under Oscar Wilde’s possession as he was being arrested on the charge of committing the indecent act of exposed homosexuality. Beardsley was let go from The Yellow Book due to his relations with the homosexual Wilde, and taken in by The Savoy where he found outlets for his writings as well as his visual arts; two such pieces included “Under the Hill” and “The Ballad of a Barber”. After The Savoy ceased publication Beardsley worked on a few more illustrations for Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The Lysistrata of Aristophanes. Beardsley created his own works in A Book of Fifty Drawing.  

Due to his driving ambition, this great artist continued working, even upon his deathbed. Valpone Adoring His Treasure was the last piece he ever produced and evidently displayed that he was still at the peak of his talent. Oscar Wilde and many others of his time were convinced “He still had immense powers of development, and had not sounded his last stop. There were great possibilities always in the cavern of his soul.”  

On March 16, 1898, tuberculosis had finally taken its toll on his 25 year old body, “at the age of a flower” as Wilde described. The year before, Beardsley had converted to the Roman Catholic Church. On that early morning in the Cosmopolitan Hotel at the seaside resort of Menton, France with his mother and sister beside him, Beardsley lay with his fingers entwined with the rosary and silently passed in his sleep. His dying wish was that his indecent drawings and editions of Lysistrata be destroyed, though, thankfully, this did not come to pass.  

Though excluded as a mainstream artist today, his illustrations still remain on demand by booksellers associated with curiosa. Beardsley once firmly stated, “I have one aim – the grotesque. If I’m not grotesque I am nothing.” By far, this artist will be remembered for this aim, which he successfully achieved.