Victorian London’s Last Illustrator

Great artists who die young tend to get embalmed in their eras. The cliché is poetic and convenient at once: artists are supposed to channel the Zeitgeist anyway, and if there’s no other Zeit to complicate things, so much the better. Aubrey Beardsley, who died in 1898 at the age of 25, was a friend of Oscar Wilde and a protégé of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. He looked like a waif and dressed like a dandy. He died of tuberculosis, the same disease that claimed Shelley, two-thirds of the Brontës, and Mimì from La Bohème. The whole, dizzying opera of 19th-century aestheticism seems to reach its finale in him. READ ON