Home > Aubrey Beardsley Art > Frontispiece of 'Plays' by John Davidson

Beardsley illustration of a fat, bald man in a tuxedo standing at the center of a circle of several strange and mythic figures, including a faun, a beautiful naked girl, a fat girl with a wreath in her hair, a masked older woman and a beautiful elf-like girl with a butterfly perched on her finger. - Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (English; 21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings are characterized by an erotic nature, and his most erotic illustrations are those found in the Lysisrata; Beardsley drew these for a privately printed edition. Beardsley later converted to Catholicism, and would subsequently beg his publisher to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings...by all that is holy all obscene drawings." His publisher, Leonard Smithers, ignored Beardsley’s wishes, and actually continued to sell reproductions as well as forgeries of Beardsley's work. Beardsley was active till his death in Menton, France, at the age of 25 on 16 March 1898 of tuberculosis. He had been received into the Roman Catholic church in March of the previous year.