Aubrey Beardsley, born this day in 1872

Born today, Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator, journalist and man of letters.

Beardsley will be forever associated with Oscar Wilde and the English Decadence movement of the 1890s. His illustrations for Wilde's Salome and the periodical The Yellow Book as well as the erotic drawings for Lysistrata have cemented this reputation. Beardsley started out as an admirer of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his angular Pre-Raphaelite style and Burne-Jones encouraged Beardsley towards a career in illustration. Beardsley's illustrations for La Mort D'Arthur show the influence of Burne-Jones and William Morris with their spikey lines and medieval typography but his illustrations for Wilde's scandalous play Salome were somewhere else entirely. A fluid, spare, curving line and a open space had replaced the heavy medievalness. Curiously, Wilde and Beardsley really didn't like each other and Beardsley cheekily included some caricatures of Oscar within the illustrations to Salome. By the end of his entirely too-brief life, he was dead from tuberculosis at 25, Beardsley's style had evolved into a heavy, highly ornamented, Baroque style which is quite curious.