Aubrey Beardsley
Quotations

"I am eighteen years old, with a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop."

- Self description in a letter to A.W. King

 

"I am just now enthused to the highest degree about pictures, and am studying the life and works of Mantegna, who, as you know, has inpsired Burne-Jones all along..."

 

"It's too good a chance, I'm sure I shant be equal to it"

- On being asked to illustrate Morte d'Arthur

 

"There was a young man with a salary
Who had to do drawings for Malory
When they asked him for more
He replied 'Why? Sure
You've enough as it is for a gallery'."

- Beardsley supposedly came up with this limerick near the end of the work, when being 'nagged' for the week's designs.

 

"I am going to surprise you very much. . . All my life I have been fascinated by the spiritual life - when I was a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over the mantelpiece - but after all to do one's work when there are things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion."

 

"In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. "

- The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, or Under the Hill, dedicatory epistle