Siegfried, Act II thumbnail 1
Siegfried, Act II thumbnail 2
+1
images
Image of Gallery in South Kensington
Request to view at the Prints & Drawings Study Room, room WS , Case R, Shelf 47, Box R

Siegfried, Act II

Drawing
ca.1892-93 (made)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

This drawing is an illustration relating to Act II of Richard Wagner's opera Siegfried. It was published in the first issue of the art magazine The Studio in April 1893. It is very finely detailed, and is characteristic of Beardsley's style at this period, with its so-called hairline calligraphic flourishes used for decorative effect. It demonstrates some of the many influences on Beardsley's distinctive drawings. These include reminiscences of prints by Andrea Mantegna and details from paintings by other Renaissance artists that Beardsley had seen in the National Gallery in London. It also carries echoes of the elongated figures and dense linear style characteristic of the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who was an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Burne-Jones was an important mentor and inspiration for Beardsley, who presented him with this drawing. Beardsley was flattered when he hung it in his drawing room alongside prints and drawings by Albrecht Dürer and others.


Object details

Categories
Object type
TitleSiegfried, Act II (generic title)
Materials and techniques
Pen, ink and wash on paper
Brief description
Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, 'Siegfried, Act II', illustrating Wagner's lyric drama, pen, ink and wash, ca.1892-93
Physical description
Pen and Indian ink drawing depicting a dragon and a youth set within a fantastic forest landscape.
Dimensions
  • Sheet height: 41.4cm
  • Sheet width: 30.1cm
  • Image height: 385mm
  • Image width: 285mm
Style
Marks and inscriptions
A.V.B. (Signed.)
Object history
Provenance: Sir Edward Burne-Jones; Mrs Ellen Agnus Beardsley; purchased from Guy Little, Mrs Beardsley's executor, in 1932.

Exhibitions: V&A 1966, no. 163; New York, 1967, no. 41; Royal Academy of Arts 'Vienna Secession', January 1971.
Historical context
Reproduced in the first number of 'The Studio', April 1893 p.11 in 'A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley', by Joseph Pennell.
Subjects depicted
Literary reference'Siegfried' by Richard Wagner
Summary
This drawing is an illustration relating to Act II of Richard Wagner's opera Siegfried. It was published in the first issue of the art magazine The Studio in April 1893. It is very finely detailed, and is characteristic of Beardsley's style at this period, with its so-called hairline calligraphic flourishes used for decorative effect. It demonstrates some of the many influences on Beardsley's distinctive drawings. These include reminiscences of prints by Andrea Mantegna and details from paintings by other Renaissance artists that Beardsley had seen in the National Gallery in London. It also carries echoes of the elongated figures and dense linear style characteristic of the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who was an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Burne-Jones was an important mentor and inspiration for Beardsley, who presented him with this drawing. Beardsley was flattered when he hung it in his drawing room alongside prints and drawings by Albrecht Dürer and others.
Associated objects
Bibliographic references
  • Owens, Susan, The Art of Drawing British Masters and Methods since 1600, V&A Publishing, London, 2013, p. 144, fig. 117
  • Geneviève Lacambre, Luisa Capodieci and Dominique Lobstein Il Simbolismo. Da Moreau a Gauguin a Klimt Ferrara, Ferarra Arte, 2007.
  • Lang, Paul, Richard Wagner: Visions d'Artistes, d'Auguste Renoir a Anselm Kiefer, Paris, Somogy éditions d'art; Genève: Musées d'art et d'histoire, 2005 no.32
  • Greenhalgh, Paul (Ed.), Art Nouveau: 1890-1914 . London: V&A Publications, 2000
  • Victoria & Albert Museum Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings, Accessions 1932. London: HMSO, 1933.
  • Lacambre, Geneviève (ed.) Il Simbolismo. Da Moreau a Gauguin a Klimt, Italy : Ferrara arte, 2007 no.1
  • Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279 The entry is as follows: 246 Siegfried, Act II July 1892 Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.578-1932) Pen, brush, Indian ink and wash over pencil on white wove paper laid down and secured to thick cream backing sheet with slotted hinges; 16 ¼ x 11 ¾ inches (440 x 299 mm); signed INSCRIPTIONS: Recto inscribed by the artist in ink: [signature device at lower left] / [monogram in vertical sequence lower right]: A /V / B FLOWERS: Clematis (mental beauty), sunflower (dwarf, adoration; tall, haughtiness); stylised cypress tree (death, mourning). PROVENANCE: Presented by the artist to Sir Edward Burne-Jones; bequeathed to Georgiana (Mrs Edward) Burne-Jones; given to Mabel Beardsley Wright; bequeathed to Ellen Agnes Beardsley; loaned to the Edmund Davies collection at the Luxembourg, Paris; Ellen Beardsley; bequeathed to Lilian Dash; sold through Guy Little [Ellen Beardsley’s executor] to Victoria and Albert Museum in 1932 (NYHS-AEGP, als Guy Little to A. E. Gallatin, 29 May 1945). EXHIBITIONS: London 1904 (95); Paris 1907 (91?); London 1910b (181);, 1911 (326), 1996-8 (163), 1971 (290); Providence, R.I. 1979 (11); London 1993 (97); Montreal 1995 (12). LITERATURE: Artist I September 1893 (p. 259); Vallance 1897 (p. 204); Beerbohm May 1898 (p. 546); Roger Fry Athenaeum 5 November 1904 (p. 628); Vallance 1909 (no. 577. iii); Hind 17 May 1921 (p. 3); Gallatin 1945 (no. 229); Reade 1967 (p. 325 n.164); Letters 1970 (pp. 43-4, 45); Brophy 1976b (p. 8); Clark 1979 (p. 66); Hodnett 1982 (pp. 221-2); Wilson 1983 (plate 2); Heyd 1986 (pp. 169-70); Fletcher 1987 (p. 41); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no. 16); Sutton 2002 (pp. 32 n. 23, 35-9, 49, 61, 64); Fischer 2011 (pp. 219-20). REPRODUCED: Studio I.i April 1893 (p. 11); Emporium II.9 September 1895 (p. 204); Early Work 1899 (no. 20); Second Book of Fifty Drawings 1899 (plate 28); Reade 1967 (plate 164); Clark 1979 (plate 11); Wilson 1983 (plate 2); Sutton 2002 (plate 3). Beardsley seldom missed a performance of Wagner at Covent Garden when he was in London (Beerbohm May 1898, p. 546). In summer 1892, Augustus Harris imported an entire production company of Wagner’s Ring cycle from Bayreuth with Gustav Mahler to conduct two complete cycles of the Ring from the end of May through to the end of July at Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres (Fischer 2011, pp.219-20). Beardsley could have seen Siegfried at Covent Garden on 8 or 13 June, or 6 July 1892, or at Drury Lane on 11 July (Fischer 2011, p.219; Wearing 1976 for performance details; Brophy 1976b, p.8; Sutton 2002, p.32 n.23). He made the drawing in his ‘new method’, begun before and continued after his trip to Paris in June, ‘something suggestive of Japan, but not really Japonesqu, [which] culminated in a large picture of Siegfried (which today hangs in Burne-Jones’ living room)’ (Letters 1970, pp. 43-4 [c. 15 February 1893]). Despite his new style, Beardsley said that he maintained adherence ‘to the best principles of the P.R.B [Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood] and am still the beloved of Burne-Jones’ (1970, p. 45 [c. 15 February 1893]). By way of perhaps subconscious rebellion, however, he asked his new style with his ‘trade mark’ and this is one of the first (if not the first) drawings to bear Beardsley’s three-pronged ‘Japonesque’ signature device (1970, p. 45 [c. 15 February 1893]; see also Macfall 1927, p. 62 and no. 338 below). MacColl remembers seeing this drawing in Beardsley’s portfolio when he met the young artist in December ?1892, by which time Beardsley was asking ‘30/-’ for a ‘japonesque’, and Robert Ross, Aymer Vallance, their friends, and Count Eric Stenbock were purchasing his drawings (MacColl 1949, p.22; Letters 1970, pp.36-9 [1 December ?1892]). Beardsley has captured the moment when Siegfried has killed Fafner, the dragon-guardian of the Nibelungs; gold, and as he extracts his sword Nothung from the body, Fafner’s blood spurts onto his hand, burning the flesh, and he is able to understand the voice of the woodbird (Act II, scene ii). The dramatic license Beardsley took in his design - (although Fafner’s eyes have rolled back in their sockets and his wings are folding and there is blood on the sword’s tip, no blood pools around the dragon’s heart and no blood drips from Siegfried’s hand) - left critics in disagreement about Siegfried’s action. Following the drawing’s publication in the inaugural issue of the Studio, the poet Theodore Wratislaw, writing as Pastel, revealed himself ignorant of Wagner’s text. He described it as an illustration to ‘the second act of Wagner’s opera and [it] represents Siegfried, a lean youth with the curious hair of Mr Beardsley’s device, with drawn sword, apparently in act [sic] to kill the Worm, a winged snake which unfolds itself behind him. In the background recedes an exquisite bit of river landscape, and the drawing is filled up with spidery fantastic lines of which the artist is so fond’ (Artist September 1893, p. 259). Heyd believes that Beardsley adapted Wagner’s scene to show that he, Beardsley, tried to free himself of the monster (his mother?) which he was unable to do in How Arthur saw the Questing Beast (1986, pp.169-70; see no. 424 below). Wilson asserts that Siegfried has killed Fafner, and Sutton that Beardsley represents Siegfried ‘as an effeminate, passive figure… [with an] ambivalent attitude’ (1983, plate 2; 2002, pp.36-8). The drawing suggests varied influences. Allusions to John Martin’s distant cities and the background of Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian (1473-5) which Beardsley would have seen at the National Gallery, London, probably inspired the distant landscape, and the twining branches on the right recall motifs from Brighton Pavillion’s Music Room (Reade 1967, p.325 n.164; Clark 1979, p.66; Heyd 1986, p.170). All who write about this drawing agree that the dragon springs from Beardsley’s memories of Brighton Pavilion, its body particularly from the dragons on the clerestory windows of the Entrance Hall, the gilded beasts on the chandelier of the Music Room and at the top of the valances in the Banqueting Room and Music Room, and the unforgettable central chandelier in the Banqueting Room that is thirty feet long and eights one ton. The scales of Beardsley’s dragon resemble in shape the trees in the mid-ground and the centres of the clematis-passion flower. Beardsley’s unique contributions include Fafner’s peacock-feathered wings, the scraped black water which lends it depth, the branch of small flowers that may grow upward from a crack in the rock at centre right or downward from outside the drawing to be glimpsed only in the water’s reflection, and the strangely angular forms that indicate movement of the water. Beardsley’s sinewy and self-absorbed Siegfried has the youthful face of a figure by Simeon Solomon and is clad in a fur tunic and boots trimmed with curls of ribbon that bind the garment and shoes. He faces the viewer with his left arm holding Nothung in the same position as does ‘Childe Rolande’ in Burne-Jones’s pen and ink drawing of the same title (1861, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, UK). Beardsley also pays tribute to Frederic Leighton who encouraged Beardsley and owned one of his drawings (PUL-JHO’C, C0213, Box 3, folder 28, als Frederic, Lord Leighton to Beardsley, 16 August 1894; which drawing he owned is unknown): Siegfried’s balance as he steps off his left leg is the same as that of Leighton’s languidly stretching The Sluggard (1851), a sculpture which won a Grand Prix at the Paris Exhibition of 1891 and of which a small version was issued for mass consumption. Siegfried has been called ‘elegantly knock-kneed [and] comically un-Wagnerian’, his posture noted as similar to that of two of Beardsley’s self-portrait caricatures, in one of which ‘his sword [is] a dandy’s cane rather than the “fearsome sword” Nothung that he forged in Act I’ (Clark 1979, p.66; Reade 1967, p.325 n.164; see also nos 531, 1004b and 999 below, How King Marke found Sir Tristram, made shortly after Siegfried, Act II, A Footnote and The Abbe; Sutton 2002, p.36). A resemblance between photographs of Max Alvary, who sang Siegfried during 1892 and Beardsley’s Siegfried reveals that Beardsley blended Alvary’s face and costume with a posture of his own devising, later repeated in A Footnote (Heyd 1986, pp.169-70, figs. 60-1). Siegfried’s ‘shadowed eyes, full lips, and elongated fingers identify him… as a decadent or degenerate, possibly a homosexual or sexual “deviant”... in a characterisation following the contemporary view of Wagner’s characters who in Nietzsche’s words were “a pathological gallery” (Sutton 2022, pp.36-7). The figure can in this light be seen as close to a parody of both Wagner’s Siegfried and Pre-Raphaelite medieval knights, suggesting Beardsley’s ambivalence towards the subject, picked up in contemporary criticism that aligned this drawing with both Pre-Raphaelite Astheticism and decadent art (Sutton 2002, p.38) According to Fletcher, present in this drawing are ‘many of the constituents of Beardsley’s later successes: the virtual elimination of any tones intermediate between black and white, black itself being used only for decor: no modelling of light or shade; the stylisation of forms as shown here by the twice repeated five-leaved [sic] flower [and the three flights of birdsat the top right corner] that encroaches on Siegfried from the left, echoing the ominous flora of The Awakening of the Sangreal [no.338 below]; the cryptic introduction of erotic form into the decoration [as in the double clematis buds that form buttocks]. The self-conscious theatricality of Beardsley’s subjects is foreshadowed here not only in Siegfried’s exotic costuming but in his shy gauche pose… [and] Beardsley’s fascination with transvestism’ (1987, p.41). These elements were also apparent to contemporary artists. The shape and smooth bark of the tree trunk at the right, which would shortly become ‘a formula of art nouveau decoration’, had an immediate influence on the panels made by the MacDonald sisters (two of the artists known as the Glasgow Four) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s tea-room furniture in Glasgow, in which the smooth trees become thin defining lines and chair backs (see also nos. 416, 424, 445, 869, 308 below; Reade 1967, p.325 n.164). Josef Hoffman shows bare-bark trees in the exhibit of the Imperial School of Decorative Arts, Vienna, at the Exposition Universelle, Paris (1900), and they reappear after the turn of the century in, for example, Frederick Cayley Robinson’s Youth (1923) where, as in The Achieving of the Sangrael (no.338), the trunks emerge from the earth like lazily rising phallic snakes. The smooth flower stems and Siegfried’s hair metamorphose into the hands of H. Privat-Livemont into candelabra holders and shades in his turn-of-the-century poster for Bec Auer, a manufacturer of incandescent burners. The Belgium silver designer Fernand Dubois probably knew Beardsley’s work from the early exhibitions of La Libre Esthetique if not from the Studio; his electroplated bronze candelabra (1898), now in the Musee Horta, interprets Beardsley’s passion flower by arcing the five blooms around the main stem and arranging them as if they were blown by the wind. The inescapable sexual imagery in this drawing would appear over and over in Art Nouveau designs. In 1904, Roger Fry concluded that in this drawing Beardsley ‘is already a complete and assured master of an entire personal style’ which, Wilson adds, ‘Japanese, early Renaissance and Whistlerian influences are absorbed’ (Athenaeum 5 November 1904, p.628; Wilson 1983, plate 2). Burne-Jones kept this drawing, and after both artists died, John Lane apparently requested the drawing to be returned to Ellen Beardsley. On 20 September 1898, Burne-Jones’s son Philip responded to the publisher: “I have only just returned to England or would have answered your letter of Aug. 9 before this. I have only received it today. With regard to the drawing by Mr. Beardsley to which you refer, I believe he did once leave a drawing here for my father, which has been mislaid somewhere. I have promised it (when I come across it) to Mrs. Beardsley (the young man’s mother) - as far as I am concerned you are quite welcome to make any use of you like - and you need not make the slightest acknowledgement as to its ownership - for I know that my father had long ceased to take any interest in Mr Beardsley’s work - or to feel any sympathy with it - As a lad he thought him promising and it was after a visit to show his work to my father (years ago) that he left the drawing to which you refer - If you reproduce it, you would be doing me a favour to omit any reference to my Father’s name. Yours truly. / Philip Burne-Jones (ML,LHMS Misc. 195829) One final, sad mission the drawing seems to have had to pay the fees to keep Beardsley’s sister Mabel in a nursing home until she died in May 1916. A letter dated 12 February [1916] from Ellen Beardsley to Robert Ross, begs him to help her sell this drawing so she could take care of Mabel, who is ‘so dreadfully ill and suffering… If I could sell my picture I should be able to keep her [in a nursing home] for at least four or five months longer and I doubt that she will live much more than that if as long’ (HRHRC-ABC, Box 2, folder 9). Edmund Davis may have arranged to ‘borrow’ the drawing from Ellen and secure Mabel’s comfort. A postcard dated 23 August 1920 from R. A. Walker to Martin Birnbaum, the American art dealer, states that he sold Siegfried for ‘30 guineas’ (AAA-S-PMB, Reel 1026, although he provides no date of sale; he may have been the intermediary in 1916 between Ellen Beardsley and Edmund Davis). A letter of 1 November 1923 from Charles Aitkin, Keeper of the Tate Gallery, London, to Ellen Beardsley asks if she thinks her friends, the Edmund Davises, ‘would be willing to bequeath the “Siegfried” and “portrait” [by Jacques-Emile Blanche] directly to us’ (PUL-ABC,C0056, Box 5, folder 18). Siegfried, however, returned to Ellen. The Victoria and Albert Museum has recently inlaid the drawing, making the verso inaccessible.
Collection
Accession number
E.578-1932

About this object record

Explore the Collections contains over a million catalogue records, and over half a million images. It is a working database that includes information compiled over the life of the museum. Some of our records may contain offensive and discriminatory language, or reflect outdated ideas, practice and analysis. We are committed to addressing these issues, and to review and update our records accordingly.

You can write to us to suggest improvements to the record.

Suggest feedback

Record createdDecember 29, 2003
Record URL
Download as: JSONIIIF Manifest