Beardsley's Le Morte D'Arthur: Selected Illustrations

by Aubrey Beardsley

Beardsley's illustrations for the Dent edition of the great Thomas Malory classic made him famous virtually overnight. This volume contains a rich selection of those splendid drawings, including floral and foliated openings, fauns and satyrs, initials, ornaments, and much more. Characters from Arthurian legend are portrayed in 62 splendid full-page black-and-white illustrations.

Genres: Art

48 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2001

About the author

Highly individual black and white, often erotic drawings of British illustrator Aubrey Vincent Beardsley typified the art nouveau style.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley identifies an English author. Japanese woodcuts influenced his executions in ink; he emphasized the grotesque, the decadent. This figure led in the aesthetic movement, which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley significantly contributed to the development of the poster movement despite the brevity of his career before tuberculosis caused his early death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_...

Reviews

[reveurdart]

I have a great love for Beardsley's illustrations for Le Morte Darthur. This has a well chosen selection of them.

Beardsley seems an odd choice to have illustrated Malory—he was a modern satirist, not a Victorian medievalist. While Beardsley was able to imitate Burne-Jones’s style, he was also much influenced by the look of the Japanese prints then so much in vogue among European artists and designers.
The result is a Malory such as the world had never seen, with fauns and satyrs peering from behind the trees, and greater nudity and sexual frankness than one associates with any Victorian style.

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[TrumanCoyote]

Could've done without quite so many (over)elaborate borders.

[SuZanne]

This book published by Dover Art Library is a real treat. These are "selected illustrations" since Beardsley did over 800 of them for "Le Morte Darthur." One could read this 44-page text in one sitting or two; however, one also could spend hours examining each of Beardsley's drawings. It's sad to think Beardsley only lived till twenty two years old. What might he have produced if he had lived a few more decades?