Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

Inscriptionback to top

Signed, inscr. and dated on mount: ‘Aubrey Beardsley [...] by Frederick H. Evans 1895’;
inscr. top right of mount: ‘22’.

This portraitback to top

This is the slightly larger of the two photographs taken by Frederick Evans c.1894, and is less usually reproduced: see the entry for NPG P114. For this pose see Oscar Wilde’s description of Beardsley having ‘a face like a silver hatchet’.[1]

A print of the NPG P115 pose mounted in a full-page Morte Darthur border design (Bk 6, ch.1) was in the collection of Draper Hill.[2] A photogravure set in a different Beardsley border (Morte Darthur, Bk 2, ch.1, repr. Beardsley 1911, pl.75) is in the collection of George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, 1981:1198:008. There is a photogravure entitled ‘From a private portrait study by Frederick H. Evans’, formerly coll. Bodley Head, now U. of Reading Aubrey Beardsley Coll., MS160/8/7. A signed print of the NPG P115 pose was reproduced in The Year’s Art 1895.

Carol Blackett-Ord

Footnotesback to top

1) Pearson 1946, p.230.
2) Repr. Wilson & Zatlin 1998, no.42.

Physical descriptionback to top

Profile to left (no hands).

Provenanceback to top

With P114 given by Dr Robert Steele, 1939; transferred from Photographs Collection 1979.

Exhibitionsback to top

People in Camera 1839–1914, NPG, London, 1979 (ill. p.37).

Aubrey Beardsley: A Centenary Tribute, Kawasaki City Museum, Kanagawa; Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama; and Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan, 1998 (2).

Aubrey Beardsley and Decadence, Tate Britain, London, 2003–4 (no catalogue).

Reproductionsback to top

Reproductions of other prints of this image

Beardsley 1899, facing p.18 (photogravure by Swan Electric Engraving Co., 1895).

Benkowitz 1981, frontispiece.

Roy Davids Collection, Bonhams, London, 29 March 2011 (14)

View all known portraits for Aubrey Vincent Beardsley