| Bibliographic references | - Cogeval, Guy & Avanzi, Beatrice (Eds.), De la Scene au Tableau, Paris : Flammarion, 2009
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- P.148
Stephen Calloway Aubrey Beardsley London: V&A Publishing, 1998.
- 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:
1014
Cover for issue No. 6
Completed 15 October 1896
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.307-1972)
Pen, brush and Indian ink over traces of pencil on white wove paper secured to backing with slotted hinges; 12 x 8 5/8 inches (305 x 219 mm); signed.
INSCRIPTIONS: Recto in ink in artist’s hand: [monogram at lower left corner in square block border]; A B; Verso in pencil at top centre and circled: pierce [within an oval flourish]
FLOWERS: Rose [Bourbon type] (love, passion).
PROVENANCE: Leonard Smithers; bt. Sir Gerald F. Kelly (by 1909); bt. Colnaghi (London) 18 September 1919; bt. Morton Sands on 10 October 1919; bt. R. A. Harari c. 1962, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund in 1972.
EXHIBITION: London 1898 (180), 1923-4 (50), 1966-8 (524), 1973 (55); Tokyo 1983 (104); Munich 1984 (218); Rome 1985 (17.14); London 1993 (109); Montreal 1995 (13); Tokyo 1997-8 (67).
LITERATURE: Vallance 1897 (p. 211), 1909 (no. 146. xxviii); National Gallery catalogue, London 1923-4 (no. 50); Gallatin 1945 (no 1011); Reade 1967 (p. 357, n. 438); ‘Letters’ 1970 (pp. 160-5); Wilson 1983 (fig 29); Chan 1983 (pp. 90-2); Heyd 1986 (pp. 179-80); Fletcher 1987 (p. 149); Snodgrass 1995 (p. 33); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no. 103); Wilson in Wilton and Upstone 1997 (pp. 188-9); Wilson in Wilson and Zadin 1998 (pp. 243-4 n.139); Sutton 2002 (pp. 179, 182, 189-90).
REPRODUCED: Front cover, ‘Savoy’, No. 6, October 1986; ‘Savoy’, No. 8, December 1986 (p. 11); ‘Book of Fifty Drawings’ 1897 (p. 199); ‘Later Work’ 1901 (no. 133); ‘Best of Beardsley’ 1948 (plate 91); Reade 1967 (plate 440); Wilson 1983 (fig 29); Sutton 2002 (plate 13).
This drawing is also known as ‘The Fourth Tableau of Das Rheingold’. Returning to England in early May 1896 to recuperate from the severe illness that had kept him in Brussels for several months, Beardsley moved from Crowborough to Epsom and by mid-August was in Pier View, Boscombe, Dorset. He had been reading Wagner and in mid-September requested from Smithers the Kegan Paul edition of the composer’s prose works. ‘If you haven’t the Wagner prose works, will you sweetly get me such volumes of them as have already been published (Kegan Paul, Trubner, Charing Cross Road)’ ( ‘Letters’ 1970, p. 162 [postmark 11 September 1896). Smithers sent them quickly and Beardsley thanked him in a letter postmarked 15 September 1896 (p. 163). Beardsley intended the ‘Fourth Tableau’ to be the front cover design for the October issue of the ‘Savoy’, and he completed it before his 16 September letter to Smithers, when he delightedly agreed with the publisher’s estimate of the drawing, ‘it is A1’ (p. 164). Beardsley then described the drawing:
“The names of the characters in my Rheingold picture are Loge (the fire god), Wotan. In the depths of the valley below, the Rhine maidens are singing unseen and are bewailing the loss of their gold. Loge turns round and speaks to them jeeringly, whilst the gods, with Wotan at their tail, pour into the new palace which they have built with the wealth they have robbed from the daughters of the Rhine” (p. 165).
In this letter he also thanked Smithers again for the Wagner prose works and announced that he was ‘writing an elaborate version of ‘Das Rheingold’ called ‘The Comedy of the Rheingold’. I will send you the MS directly it is finished. It will make a little teeny book. I wonder if you will think it worth illustrating’ (p. 164). If Beardsley completed a manuscript, it is not recorded and probably not extant. Between 18 and 20 September, however, he commenced work on the last four drawings for ‘Das Rheingold’ and probably completed them around 26 September (p. 164; Chan 1983, pp. 90-1).
As Beardsley recounts, the subject of this drawing is the success of the gods who tricked Alberich into becoming a toad and stole the ring (scene 3). Like the ‘Third Tableau’ (no. 1006 above), Beardsley traded an indoor stage with footlights (for example, no. 988 above) for an outdoor scene in which Loge and the rest of the gods triumphantly process to their new palace. Although Walker believes that the drawing, influenced by Poussin, is not ‘such a fine composition’, the figure of Wotan ‘is a very fine conception’ (National Gallery catalogue 1923-4, no. 50). Reade elaborates, this is ‘one of the most boldly disbalanced of all Beardsley’s inventions; and the flame-shaped hair on the head, chest and navel of Loge, harmonising with his draperies, has no president in European art, except in the hair of the elderly Lacedaemonian ambassador in plate eight of the ‘Lysistrata’ (1896), which however grows in clusters downwards’ (1967, p. 357, n.438). The classical background, like that of ‘The Ascension of Saint Rose of Lima’ (no. 1005 above), comes from Poussin. This was one of five Beardsley drawings to be restaged in colour in Margaret Dawson’s ‘Under the Hill’, a collection of colour photographs exhibited at the Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 1996.
Discussion of this drawing is incomplete without observing ways the figure of Loge has been viewed as Beardsley’s alter ego. Loge jeers at the Rhine Maidens because they lost the gold by flirting with Alberich. Loge this becomes ‘an appropriate image for Beardsley to assume… the most favourable of those he chooses for himself. Loge is a strange, independent god, sexless and implicated in the sexual conflicts of the work (like all of Beardsley’s personae); he remains as ungraspable as a will o’ the wisp… He is the life-essence, the divine spark’ (Fletcher 1987, p. 149). Furthermore, Loge is the god of fire, and his body radiates flames identical to those of the flames or lights of the Rheingold in the frontispiece (Chan 1983, pp.91-2). If Loge is Beardsley, the flickering flames consuming Loge’s chest might be an outward manifestation of the burning feeling experienced by tubercular patients (Heyd 1986, pp. 179-80). That feeling was perhaps responsible, as one reporter recorded, for Beardsley’s refusal to wear an overcoat during the winter because, he said, ‘I am always burning’, a reference possibly also to Pater’s dictum that an artist should ‘burn always with [a] hard gem-like flame’ (Boston ‘Sunday Herald’, 21 April 1895, p. 36; Snodgrass 1995, p. 33; Pater, 1873, p. 210).
A pastiche of the ‘Fourth Tableau of Das Rheingold’ has long been accepted as a long-lost portrait of Alfred Jarry. More recently it has been accepted by the Pataphysical Society. John Stokes believes that there is a missing portrait and suggests various possible ways Beardsley would have portrayed Jarry, concluding that he might have shown Jarry as a troll, a part Jarry played in Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt’ in November 1896. There is a scholarly argument that flatly states that ‘Alberich’ (no. 1025 below) represents Jarry, and one that says ‘Alberich’ is Beardsley.
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