Aubrey Beardsley by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1895 [National Portrait Gallery]

BORN in Brighton and later resident at 114 Cambridge Street, Pimlico, the apparently English artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) could in fact boast of a more exotic ancestry. During service in the British Raj, his maternal grandfather Surgeon-Major William Pitt had married an Indian woman, thus making Aubrey one eighth Bengali.

While described by WB Yeats as “the first satirist of the soul English art has produced”, many observers felt an uneasiness about Beardsley.

Sir William Rothenstein observed: “For Aubrey, perversities were largely an attitude he adopted pour épater les bourgeois… He had something harsh, too sharply defined in his nature. He had the eager, feverish brilliance of the consumptive.”

Gertrude Atherton said bluntly: “He looked as if he might die at any moment”, while Arthur Symons wrote that: “He was the thinnest young man I have ever seen – rather unpleasant and affected.” Someone added: “even his lungs were affected”.

He had suffered as a child from tuberculosis and from 1889 till his early death he was prone to haemoptysis – a sudden rush of blood from his mouth.

Beardsley was most influenced by Japanese art and by 18th-century European pornography. He realised that the camera was forcing artists to create portraits that had little to do with simple representation.

He once said: “In the old days before photography came, a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist ‘Paint me just as I am.’ Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.”

His insistence on drawing his subjects as he saw them rather than as they saw themselves inevitably led to dissatisfaction. The only portrait that was generally accepted was that of the French actress Madame Rejane.

However, a critic pointed out this was because: “Madame Rejane is the only woman in the world who actually looks like a Beardsley drawing.”

Although there is no real evidence to back the claim, there was a strong rumour that at one point Aubrey had an incestuous affair with his sister Mabel. Aubrey made little effort to dispel the gossip.

He told his friend Frank Harris: “It’s usually a fellow’s sister who first tells him about sex. I know it was Mabel who first taught me.”

Beardsley revelled in teasing his publishers and editors by concealing libellous obscenities in his work.

When someone noticed that his cover drawing of the British icon John Bull on the eponymous magazine displayed a tiny but still noticeable sign of sexual arousal, a hastily formed committee demanded that the normally complacent publisher Leonard Smithers withdraw the edition. As all 80,000 copies had already been distributed, the devious Smithers agreed immediately.

The publisher John Lane also experienced Beardsley’s dangerous whimsy when Aubrey presented him with a drawing based on Degas’s L’Absinthe, showing a fat prostitute waiting for clients in a café. To his horror Lane found out that the face of the woman looked remarkably like the wife of the litigious painter James McNeil Whistler. He hastily withdrew it.

The illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s Salome provided ample scope for Beardsley’s sense of humour, and Lane, almost paranoid over the possibility of concealed obscenities, took to examining every drawing with a magnifying glass.

While worrying over the obvious nude in Enter Herodias, he failed to spot the phallic candlesticks. However, he censored Salome on the Settle as he was suspicious over what Salome intended to do with her candle.

When Beardsley later suggested that he would like to illustrate the Book of Leviticus with special reference to “Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto”, it was reported that Lane choked over a cup of tea.

After he fell into financial trouble, Beardsley appealed to his wealthy friend Andre Raffalovich for aid. Raffalovich supported him for the last two years of his life but also persuaded him to convert to the Catholic religion.

Knowing his days were numbered, in a fit of remorse Beardsley asked Smithers to destroy his most obscene drawings. Smithers agreed but knowing their value did not carry out his instructions.

At first Aubrey’s sister Mabel was annoyed at Smithers’ dereliction but, realising later that he had acted for the best, she acquired a set of them for her own interest. Eventually she had become so blasé about their subject matter that when an innocent young actress asked to borrow some amusing reading material, Mabel absent-mindedly handed over a folder full of Aubrey’s wildest sexual fantasies.

Eventually moving to the French Riviera, Beardsley continued to work to the end: “How can a man die better than by doing just what he wants to do most?” When he died in 1898 aged 26, he was buried in Menton.

Although his Art Nouveau style died quickly, his work again became popular during the Swinging Sixties.

In an action that might have raised a ghostly chuckle from the Menton cemetery, in 1966 a collection of Beardsley prints was confiscated during a police raid on a London gallery, and the owner charged under the obscenity laws.

• Adapted from Neil Titley’s book The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip. See www.wildetheatre.co.uk – available at Daunts, South End Green