Excerpt from Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 1: Supplement, Abbott-Childers

Beardsley had musical gifts of a high order, the charms of his conversation were great, and he had an extraordinary know ledge of books for so young a man. Certain sotto race whisperings of his art were, perhaps, to be accounted for by the want of physical balance of the poitrinaire. Through out his life he suffered from weakness of the lungs, and his abnormal activity had seemed to his friends to be at least partly due to a desire to forestall death, and, in spite of its imminence, to leave a substantial legacy behind him. Few men have done so much work in so brief a s ace of time - work, moreover, which was alivays deliberate and finished in the true artistic sense. Shortly before his death Aubrey Beardsley was re ceived into the church of Rome. He died of consumption at Mentone on 16 March 1898, and was buried there.

Beardsley's critics see in his art three distinct phases: first, a romantic and Pre Raphaelite phase, in which the in¿uence of burns-jones and I'uvis (le Chavannes may be traced, secondly, a urely decorative phase, based mainly on tile Japanese con vention, thirdly, a more delicate and com plex wa of Seeing things, induced by his study 0 French art in the eighteenth cen tury. T 0 these Mr. Arthur Symons would add a fourth manner, adumbrated in the 'volpone' initials, in which the grotesque forms of his earlier styles are discarded for acquiescence in nature as she is or may be. The weak point in his art is its capricious ness. Lie fails to convince as completely of his sincerity. Iiis peculiarities seem oc casionally to have no sounder foundation than a wish to be different. They too often lack that inevitable connection with a root idea which should characterise all design. 0u the other hand, his inventions betray extreme mental activity, and his technique a hand at once firm, delicate, and sym a thetic. To some the strange element in is work seems merely fantastic, to others it appears morbid in the last degree, if not worse. One anonymous critic describes his art as 'the mere glorification of a hideous and putrescent aspect of modern life.' A more sober judgment might call him a pagan infected with a modern interest in psycho logy. A list of his works, complete to the end of 1896, was compiled by Mr. Aymer Vallance for the 'book of Fifty Drawings'

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