Aubrey Beardsley, H. S. Nichols, and the Decadent Archive
Abstract
The spring of 1919 in New York must have been an exciting time and place for devotees of the work of the decadent British artist Aubrey Beardsley. On 20th March of that year, the Anderson Galleries, a prominent auction house, held a sale of original Beardsley drawings formerly in the collection of Frederick H. Evans. Evans, a British photographer, had been Beardsley’s friend, and the artist responsible for the famous portrait photograph of Beardsley posing with his head held in his long, tapering fingers. The sale, which had been preceded by an exhibition, proved that the appetite for Beardsley’s work had only grown in the 21 years since the artist’s death; one drawing was reported to have sold for the tidy sum of $630 – an unequivocal sign that, among art collectors at least, ’nineties decadence could still command a robust market.
