He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler.

Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis.

The Pitts were a well-established and respected family in Brighton, and Beardsley's mother married a man of lesser social status than might have been expected.

[11] With the loss of Vincent Beardsley's fortune soon after his son's birth, the family settled in London in 1883, where Vincent would work first for the West India & Panama Telegraph Company, then irregularly as a clerk at breweries;[12][4] they would spend the next 20 years in rented accommodation, battling poverty.

In 1891, under the advice of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he took up art as a profession.

[16][15] Beardsley travelled to Paris in 1892, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints.

In mid-1892, the period of Le Morte d'Arthur and The Bon Mots, he used a Japanese-influenced mark that became progressively more graceful, sometimes accompanied by A.B.

[19] He co-founded The Yellow Book with American writer Henry Harland, and for the first four editions, he served as art editor and produced the cover designs and many illustrations for the magazine.

Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work.

[26] Although Beardsley was associated with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other aesthetes, the details of his sexuality remain in question.

Speculation about his sexuality includes rumours of an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Mabel, who may have become pregnant by her brother and miscarried.

The next year, the last letter before his death was to his publisher Leonard Smithers and close friend Herbert Charles Pollitt: Postmark: March 7, 1898 | Jesus is our Lord and Judge | Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings … By all that is holy, all obscene drawings.

By April 1897, a month after his conversion to Catholicism, his deteriorating health prompted a move to the French Riviera.

There he died a year later, on 16 March 1898, of tuberculosis at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton, Alpes-Maritimes, France, attended by his mother and sister.

[37] Beardsley's art is mentioned briefly in the 2011 version of the Car Seat Headrest song, Beach Life-in-Death.

[38] In 2019 the National Leather Association International established an award named after Beardsley for creators of abstract erotic art.