Beardsley Quotes & Sayings

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in 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. — Aubrey Beardsley

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy ... — Oscar Wilde

N MY early boyhood I was enraptured by the great fairytale illustrators of the period: Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Kay Nielsen. As a schoolboy, I was to discover Aubrey Beardsley, and I was extremely fond of an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with most imaginative drawings by Heath Robinson, — John Gielgud

I've had so many influences and sources of inspiration as an illustrator that it is impossible to name just one. I loved Aubrey Beardsley when I was a student, and then Edmund Dulac and other Golden Age illustrators made a big impact, as well as Victorian painters like Richard Dadd and Edward Burne-Jones. My long-term heroes though are Albretch Durer, Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Turner and Degas. What most of them have in common is brilliant draughtsmanship and a strong linear or graphic quality. Most are also printmakers. The one I keep going back to and who fascinates me the most is JMW Turner, the greatest watercolourist. — Alan Lee

I went at each race like there was a gold medal at stake. It wasn't like I ran one hard, then slacked off the next. Every time was my best effort. I didn't know how to go at it any other way. — Dick Beardsley

I could have signed for Newcastle when I was 17, but I decided I would be better off at Carlisle. I'd had a drink that night. — Peter Beardsley

When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare. — Aubrey Beardsley

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit? — Aubrey Beardsley

Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo — Andrew Bleiman

Things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them. — Aubrey Beardsley

The human heart has a staggering capacity for love. — Helen Beardsley

I have always done my sketches, as people would say, for the fun of it ... I have worked to amuse myself, and if it has amused the public as well, so much the better for me. — Aubrey Beardsley

I have one aim - the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing. — Aubrey Beardsley

A parent has to be silent much of the time. — Helen Beardsley

Certainly it is important to work hard for your children, but if the only legacy you can give them is money it is a poor legacy indeed. — Helen Beardsley

When you cross the finish line, it will change your life forever — Dick Beardsley

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions ... — Vladimir Nabokov

No language is rude that can boast polite writers. — Aubrey Beardsley

Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash. — Aubrey Beardsley

When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem 'with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse'.5 Aubrey Beardsley's caricature of Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde at Work', shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books. — Thomas Wright

When Peter Beardsley appears on television, daleks hide behind the sofa. — Nick Hancock

How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did - sly dog! — Aubrey Beardsley

I tell my kids in the Academy at Newcastle to watch Henry. He plays with such a swagger, not an arrogance, and that is a great quality. He always looks so comfortable. You talk about cars going from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds, and he is like that. He just explodes. I could sit there for hours and watch him. — Peter Beardsley

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too. — Audrey Niffenegger

A lot of people say they love running because of how they feel afterward. Not me. Well, I love that, too, but it's also so much fun while I'm out there. — Dick Beardsley

All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles. — Aubrey Beardsley

If I am not grotesque, I am nothing. — Aubrey Beardsley

It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician. — Aubrey Beardsley

Hell is all desire without the possibility of fulfillment. Heaven is all fulfillment without the possibility of desire. — David A. Beardsley

We are all in Love in the same way that we are all in air. Don't forget to breathe. — David A. Beardsley