Edmund Dulac, She made her escape as lightly as a deer, from Cinderella in The Sleeping Beauty and other Tales, 1910, watercolour, Private Collection
Dulwich Picture gallery is taking visitors back to the age of enchantment and fin de siècle decadence with a fascinating look at the book illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley and the artists who followed in his wake.
Beardsley was a peculiarly fin de siècle kind of artist; self taught, bohemian and for many, the embodiment of late Victorian decadence and the exhibition begins by exploring his exotic world of sultry maidens with their opulent gowns and vampyric complexions.
Aligned with the Yellow Book, the literary and artistic journal that attracted a coterie of artists and writers, including Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent, Henry James and William Butler Yeats, Beardsley produced images that are today best known for their dark content and some would say perverse erotica.
Aubrey Beardsley for Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Launcelot and the Witch Hellawes. 1893-4. Private Collection
The death of this skewed genius in 1898 not only deprived the world of an extravagant fop and aesthete, but it dramatically changed the world of the illustrated book.
Gone were the images of scandal and deviance as the age of decadence was softened to delight rather than shock.
Whimsy and a pastel toned world of childish delights and an innocent exoticism soon unfolded in the pages of familiar fables, classic tales and children’s stories like The Arabian Nights and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen.
Published in lavish colour plates and fine bindings, these were to become the fashionable coffee table books of a new age.
Edmund Dulac, The Ice Maiden, 1915, watercolour, The Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery & Museums, Brighton
Fuelling this new movement was a new generation of illustrators who were intent on creating fantastical worlds that borrowed from the ornate fantasises of rococo style, the rich decorative elements of the Orient and Near East and the fairy worlds of the Victorians.
The masters of this new artform were the artists Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielson whose inventive book productions became feted. Disciples soon gathered, like Jessie King and Annie French, the Scottish masters of the ethereal and the poetic as well as the Detmold Brothers who perfected a naturalistic style of fantasy.
The exhibition also features the talents of some lesser-known illustrators including those who remained in Beardsley’s shadow like Sidney Sime, an eccentric coal miner turned illustrator, who produced warped yet fascinating works that seemed to capture a Blakean sense of mysticism wrapped up in gothic fantasy.
Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock Skirt, 1894, Line block proof on Japanese vellum, Collection of Dr. Michael Richard Barclay
There are also precious inventions by the likes of Charles Ricketts, Harry Clarke and, master of fairy tale, Laurence Houseman.
Unsurprisingly, children’s stories were transformed as the 20th century progressed and new artists like Charles Robinson, Patten Wilson, Robert Anning Bell, Bernard Sleigh and Maxwell Armfield brought their own colourful intensity to bear on the world of the illustrated book.
The Age of Enchantment is a remarkable tour through this world of British fantasy illustration and, perhaps most remarkably, is the first such exhibition in Britain.
The exhibition runs at Dulwich Picture Gallery until February 17 2008.
