It is startling to realize that if Aubrey Beardsley had been fortunate enough to live out his biblical three score years and ten, he would have survived well into the Second World War. What might not he, the contemporary of Matisse, Picasso, Picabia, Marinetti, and Braque, have achieved? But Beardsley came of age, flourished, and died in the 1890s, and thus it is with the Nineties—the “mauve decade”—that he will forever be associated. In his Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, the British writer and critic Matthew Sturgis has presented a detailed, generously illustrated, and frequently amusing account of the artist’s brief (a mere twenty-five years) and rather fantastic life.

A conscious dandy, Beardsley liked to pose as a man of leisure, and he cultivated a front of conspicuous idleness. Nothing could have been further from the real story, for the career of this poster boy for the decadent movement was in fact a shining testament to the virtues of hard work and strong family values.

Born August 21, 1872, Aubrey was the second child of Vincent Beardsley, a clerk in a London brewery, and the more genteel Ellen Pitt Beardsley, daughter of a Brighton surgeon. Vincent was at best a shadowy presence in the lives of Aubrey and his older sister, Mabel; it was the dynamic Ellen who filled their horizon and nurtured their artistic ambitions, launching them into “the great ocean of culture: the piano lessons, the evening programme of suitable pieces, the directed reading, the drawing and copying.”

In 1884 Vincent lost his job, and Mabel and Aubrey were sent temporarily to live in Brighton with their great-aunt, Sarah Pitt. The sickly Aubrey, who had been diagnosed with early symptoms of tuberculosis at the age of seven, flourished in the sea air, and Sarah Pitt proposed that he stay in Brighton and attend the excellent Brighton Grammar School at her expense.

This was a pleasant place, where every sort of extracurricular interest was encouraged, and unlike many schools it tolerated and even enjoyed eccentricity—fortunately, for at the age of thirteen the preternaturally sophisticated Aubrey was already noticeable. A mediocre student, inattentive and dreamy in class, he managed nevertheless to become renowned in the school as an intellectual and as someone in possession of the most recherché knowledge: “Even among the conventional canon of boyhood literature,” Sturgis remarks, “he had an instinct for the outré.” Beardsley had always enjoyed drawing; now, at school, he became a sought-after caricaturist and illustrator. His purpose seems purely to have been that of entertaining his friends, and he produced little or no “serious” work at this time.

When he turned sixteen, however, it was time for him to earn his living and help support his family. He moved to London and obtained the depressing position of clerk in a district surveyor’s office, spending whatever spare money he could scrape together on books, music, and the theater. But Beardsley’s bad lungs suffered from the regime, and in 1889 he had to leave his job and take to his bed for several months. He turned this enforced rest to profit, however, by plunging into the hitherto unknown world of French literature: Daudet, Dumas, Zola, and above all Balzac, whose Comédie humaine he read in its entirety, inspired by the author’s frank presentation of life, and more particularly of sex.

He also wrote a story of his own, which to his astonishment was accepted for publication in the mainstream magazine Tit-Bits. A world of possibilities now opened to him: people were actually willing to pay for his work! Beardsley’s career as a writer stopped nearly as soon as it had begun, but the idea that his creative efforts might earn him a living had taken irresistible hold. From then on, although he had for the time being to continue in clerical drudgery, he began to educate himself seriously in art and literature.

It was an interesting and in many ways explosive period for British art. There was the “old” school, followers of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, led by the still-active William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Then there was the “new” school which looked for inspiration to Whistler and to France, and for which Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), Oscar Wilde’s Intentions and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and George Moore’s Impressions and Opinions (1891) were noisy advertisements. Beardsley initially embraced both movements, and considered Burne-Jones to be the greatest living painter.

Beardsley ventured to show his own work to his hero, whose reaction was everything the young man could have hoped for, and more: “Nature has given you every gift to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.” Burne-Jones directed him to the Westminster School of Art, and Beardsley undertook a crushing schedule: two hours of class every evening after a full day at the office.

Soon he began to be noticed, not just for his gifts but for his character. Dandified, affected, as elongated and grotesquely stylized as one of his own caricatures, he drew attention. Up-and-coming art critics sought him out, and these new contacts led to his first commission, that of illustrating J. M. Dent’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in mock-medieval style. The money he would receive for this plum job emboldened him to resign from his office job: permanently, as it turned out, for Beardsley was quickly signed on by two new art journals, The Studio, edited by Gleeson White, and Lewis Hind’s avant-garde Pall Mall Budget. One of the Budget’s employees recalled Beardsley’s first appearance at their offices. “Sauntering or lounging from one part of the room to another, he looked intently at various uninteresting objects, humming and hahing half inaudibly to himself in the manner of one accustomed to be looked on as a kind of curiosity, and somewhat sensitive on the subject.”

In 1893 Oscar Wilde’s scandalous Salome was to be published in England, and Hind asked Beardsley to produce an illustration of it for the magazine. The artist obliged in a spectacular fashion, going directly to the climax of the piece with a picture of Salome kissing the severed head of John the Baptist full on the lips. He had gone too far for Hind, who “nearly had a fit,” and declined to publish the offending drawing; Gleeson White saw his chance and nabbed it for The Studio. Thus began the uncomfortable and ill-fated friendship between the middle-aged and self-indulgent Wilde and the watchful, judgmental younger man, who was always, as Wilde was well aware, “not so much a disciple as a rival.” The relationship started propitiously enough, though: Wilde loved the picture and told Beardsley that he was “the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.”

At Wilde’s behest Salome’s publisher, John Lane, commissioned Beardsley to produce ten full-page illustrations for the play. The job made him famous. The young man, just twenty-one, found himself if not rich then at least momentarily comfortable, and he took a lease on a house in Pimlico: for the first time in twenty years, Aubrey, Mabel and their parents had a home of their own.

Beardsley continued to refine his dandified pose, affecting, for example, to be able to work only by candlelight, so that those who stopped by to visit at high noon would find his curtains closed tight and candles ablaze. His friends, though, recognized the real person behind the mask: his close companion Max Beerbohm, exactly his age and recently down from Oxford, remarked on his common sense and “inborn kindliness.” But Beardsley’s caricatures could be vicious, and he seemed to take special pleasure in tormenting the hapless Wilde, as, for example, with a drawing entitled “Oscar Wilde at Work,” showing the playwright as “corpulent and complacent, sitting at his desk surrounded by his study-aids: the works of Swinburne and Gautier, Flaubert’s Trois Contes, a ‘Family Bible’ and —most importantly—a French dictionary and a volume entitled ‘French Verbs at a Glance.’”

Beardsley and his friends had long had thoughts of putting together a magazine in which art and literature could appear together but unconnected to one another, a protest against the “story picture” in art and “sloppy sentimentalism and happy endings” in literature. Thus was born The Yellow Book, an idea which Beardsley proposed to the publisher John Lane. Lane fell for it, taking on Beardsley as art editor and Henry Harland as literary editor. Artists as different as the iconoclastic young Max Beerbohm and the elderly President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton, were recruited; Oscar Wilde, however, was deliberately left out, possibly because Beardsley feared that Wilde’s powerful personality would come to dominate “his” venture.

The first volume of The Yellow Book appeared in April 1894, and the critical reception, “though not generally favorable, was gratifyingly loud.” The Times, for instance, castigated it as a “combination of English rowdiness with French lubricity.” It was unwholesome, scandalous; Beardsley himself was widely assumed to be the same. The Yellow Book’s readers could not miss the whiff of sex in each and every one of Beardsley’s drawings, sex that to many seemed perverse, allied as it often was with ugliness rather than with conventional beauty.

Beardsley’s work dominated the first (most would also say the best) four issues; then disaster struck, in the form of Oscar Wilde’s arrest. Beardsley and Wilde were so closely allied in the public’s mind that the younger man was instantly tarred with the same brush as the older. Beardsley was always considered by his friends to be a heterosexual, or, perhaps more correctly, asexual, for he seems not to have had a significant sexual relationship at any time during his short life. Nevertheless, he was drawn toward the homosexual milieu, and many of his closest friends were openly homosexual, insofar as it was possible to be open at that time.

The backlash in the wake of the Wilde affair was intense, and Beardsley was its victim: The Yellow Book’s publishers were constrained to dismiss him from the magazine. The spirited Beardsley, in ill health and with no means of support, fought the philistine advance defiantly. He launched into other projects, including illustrations for Lysistrata, The Rape of the Lock, and The Way of the World. He also accepted a pension in exchange for regular work from one Leonard Smithers, who could be described, depending on your outlook, as either a courageous publisher or a high-class pornographer, the Maurice Girodias of his day.

In May of 1896 Beardsley’s health broke down, this time for good. Realizing that he was dying, he took a step he had long contemplated and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He then made his way to the Riviera, resigned to giving up the city life he loved. (During an earlier illness, banished to the country, he had been irritated at hearing a friend cheeringly refer to “Dame Nature”; “Damn Nature,” he snapped.)

In Dieppe he was still strong enough to hold court with a little of his old flair: an acquaintance recalled his tossing out anecdotes and reflections “like a prince throwing down golden ducats.” But by the time he reached the invalid resort of Menton he had rejected art and taken refuge in faith alone. In this new state of mind he wrote to Smithers, urging him to destroy “all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings.” Of course the canny publisher did no such thing; still, he wrote to the penitent telling him that he had, therefore allowing Beardsley to die in peace on March 16, 1898. Mabel, “her dramatic sensibilities unimpaired, laid Aubrey’s copy of La dame aux camélias inside the coffin.”

Aubrey Beardsley’s career had been brief, and not always very appetizing to the public; the waters soon closed over his head. His obituaries were grudging in England, more enthusiastic in France. Gleeson White deemed him to have influenced the nascent Art Nouveau movement; he was generally considered, also, to have influenced Diaghilev and Bakst. Soon, though, he was practically forgotten.

It was not until the 1960s that the Beardsley revival—a revival still in progress—began. A major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert brought him to the attention of a generation peculiarly receptive to his powerful, oddly “psychedelic” decorative line, his subversive humor, and his happy flirtation with obscenity. Beardsley —at least the pre-conversion Beardsley— would have been infinitely gratified that his work was still capable of shocking more than sixty years after his death, and pleased to know at the time of the exhibit reproductions of his infamous Lysistrata drawings were deemed obscene, and seized by the outraged London police.