Appraisals of Beardsley have also fluctuated over time. In 1894, he was celebrated as the founding art editor of the trailblazing periodical The Yellow Book. 1894 also saw the controversial publication of the English edition of Wilde’s play Salome — illustrated by Beardsley. The precocious artiste, having learnt from the older dandy, proceeded to poke fun at him. In Salome, he featured Wilde’s likeness as the Moon, compared in the play to a mad, drunken, naked woman “seeking everywhere for lovers”. The following year, Wilde was tried and imprisoned for gross indecency. Tainted by association, the draughtsman fell into disrepute as well. After a scandalised mob defaced the premises of the magazine, Beardsley was sacked from his editorial position. With other doors shut, Leonard Smithers — a less scrupulous, seedier publisher — stepped in to provide a lifeline for Beardsley’s imperiled artistic career. The result was The Savoy, a visionary successor to The Yellow Book but even more daring as well as short-lived. The choice of name was as bold as it was curious. Amid the fallout, The Savoy brought to mind the grand hotel notorious from Wilde’s trial as a setting for his trysts. Ever one to toy with expectations, Beardsley appeared to be leaning in just as he was definitively backing away. At the height of his creative powers but with rapidly declining health, Beardsley applied himself to a whole series of projects whenever he was able, albeit most left unfinished. Still, in just several short years of professional output, his oeuvre reached over a thousand drawings. Despite his earnest conversion to Catholicism at the end of life, this body of work has cemented Beardsley’s legacy — perverse, grotesque, sensuous, inimitable.
