Flippant Victorians parodied his name as Weirdsley Daubery or Awfly Weirdly. For the art of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, whose sinuous draftsmanship fluttered through the pages of the 1890s farthest-out books, was the scandalous titillation of his day. He seemed to have dipped his pen in laudanum and night shade; his dark silhouettes fairly rippled with overtressed vixens, leering harle quins and glinting grotesques.
Beardsley was decadent and dainty, the epitome of the late-Victorian dandyism that prized artificiality over nature. It is a pity that he never used mauve ink. Oscar Wilde once paid him the compliment of calling him "a monstrous...
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