English artist and poet Aubrey Beardsley was BOTD in 1872. Born in Brighton to an impoverished middle-class family, he showed an early proficiency in music and art, and began publishing his drawings and cartoons. After completing high school, he found work as an insurance clerk. Encouraged by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, he relocated to London to study at the Westminster School of Art. In 1892, he visited Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the new fashion for Japanese art, both heavily influencing his later style. He received his first commission in 1893, illustrating a new translation of Thomas Malory’s medieval poem Le Morte D’Arthur. The following year, he co-founded and edited The Yellow Book, a quarterly literary periodical that popularised the emerging Art Nouveau and Decadent art movements. Typically drawn to erotic and morbid themes, he produced illustrations for the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, and shocked Victorian society with his erotic illustrations for Oscar Wilde‘s play Salomé, emphasising the princess’s necrophilic attraction to John the Baptist. In public, he cultivated an eccentric persona, dressing in dove-grey morning suits, top hats and yellow gloves, and formed close friendships with Wilde and celebrity gay couple Charles Haslewood Shannon and Charles Ricketts. His reputation was damaged by his association with Wilde, after the latter’s conviction for gross indecency, and he was fired from The Yellow Book in 1895. He became chief illustrator of Savoy magazine, producing more respectable drawings, including illustrations for a new edition of Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock. His sexually explicit illustrations for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, inspired by Japanese pornography and featuring characters with giant phalluses, was privately published in 1896. A long-term sufferer of tuberculosis, he moved to the French Riviera in search of a cure, dying in 1897 aged 25. A lifelong bachelor, he appears to have had no intimate relationships, leading to biographical speculation about his possible homosexuality. Rumours also circulated in his lifetime about an incestuous relationship with his elder sister Mabel, whom he may have impregnated. His work received a major revival in popularity during the 1960s. Now recognised as one of Britain’s leading fin-de-siecle artists, his work has been the subject of major retrospectives in London and Paris.