COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III
VII
THE GREEK VASE PHASE
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds today!
Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London. Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play the host—and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his “tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.
Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her dressing-table known as La Dame aux Camélias. The couch in his studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much of his all too short life lying upon it.
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When Beardsley began the Salome drawings at twenty-one he was, as we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work upon the Salome designs he was much at the British Museum and was intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in their line and mass fascinate Beardsley—not only was he struck by the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified” by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris, appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his Salome drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.