COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” NO. 1
THE BILLET-DOUX
Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm.
Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be “unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all except in the atmosphere of its workshop.
He was now working keenly at The Savoy drawings and the illustrations for his bowdlerised Under the Hill, to be produced serially in that magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed, in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for The Yellow Book, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for The Savoy, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for December, The Savoy eventually had to be put off until the New Year; meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the famous sequence of masterpieces for The Rape of the Lock, announced for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March.
In January 1896 The Savoy appeared, and made a sensation in the art world only to be compared with the public sensation of The Yellow Book. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like beauty of the superb Title Page—the two black-masked figures in white before a dressing table—the deft witty verses of the naughty Three Musicians, the Bathers on Dieppe Beach, the three sumptuously rich designs of The Abbé, the Toilet of Helen, and The Fruit-bearers for the novel Under the Hill which began in this number, capped by the stately Christmas Card of The Madonna and Child lifted the new magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.
The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest, with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his Morte d’Arthur experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to The Rape of the Lock—masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, The New Star—with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of The Dream, the exquisite Billet-Doux, the Toilet, the Baron’s Prayer, and the magnificent Rape of the Lock and Battle of the Beaux and Belles.
