Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley died at 25 years of age of ill health at the close of the Victorian era. His black and white drawings were concepts of the aesthetic mode of “decadence,” a stylish iconography of subject matter and imagery that was widely available through the many publications of the popular press, magazines and printing houses commissioning his illustrations. Oscar Wilde wrote in 1896: “He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website