| Category | |
| Object type | |
| Title | Le Dèbris[sic] d'un Poète
(assigned by artist) |
| Materials and techniques | Drawing, indian ink and wash on paper |
| Brief description | Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, 'Le Dèbris[sic] d'un Poète', Indian ink and wash, London, June 1892. |
| Physical description | Portrait format drawing in black and white depicting a man sat on a high stool reading an oversized book which rests on a desk. The man has his back to the viewer. |
| Dimensions | - Sheet height: 367mm
- Sheet width: 138mm
- Image height: 340mm
- Image width: 123mm
|
| Marks and inscriptions | (Inscribed in capitals within the design with title)
|
| Credit line | Given by Canon Gray in memory of Andre Raffalovich. |
| Bibliographic references | - Victoria & Albert Museum Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design & Department of Paintings Accessions 1934 London: Published under the Authority of the Board of Education, 1935
- Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. London: V & A Publications, 1998. 224pp, illus. ISBN: 1851772197.
- 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:
Cat no. 244
Le Dèbris [sic] d'un Poète
June 1892
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.1965-1934)
Pen, brush, Indian ink and wash over traces of pencil on off-white wove paper secured to backing by slotted hinges: 13 13/16 x 5 ⅜ inches (354 x 137 mm)
INSCRIPTIONS: Recto in ink inscribed by artist using French accent mark incorrectly: LE DÈBRIS [sic] / D’UN POÈTE. / [on pot on left]: A / [on drawers] A B C / [on ledgers]: 1 3 [each circled]; Verso in pencil: [?] / 30 by 12 ins / in inch white frame / beaded / [in black ink, stamp of]: V. A. M. / E.1965-1934 / [in pencil]: E.1965-1934 / [in blue crayon]: Studio Currently.
FLOWERS: Sunflower (dwarf, adoration: tall, haughtiness)
PROVENANCE: André Raffalovich; bequeathed to the Canon John Gray; given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1934.
EXHIBITIONS: London 1966-8 (127); Tokyo 1983 (1); Rome 1985 (1.2); London 1993 (93).
LITERATURE: Vallance 1897 (p.201), 1909 (no.41); Gallatin 1945 (no. 208); Reade 1967 (p.313, n. 31); Letters 1970 (pp. 16, 33-4, 37, 38, 41); Easton 1972 (p.24); Brophy 1976a (p. 60); Wilson 1983 (pp. 14-15); Fletcher 1987 (pp. 4, 37-8); Samuel Lasner 1995 (no.130)
REPRODUCED: Symons 1898b (n.p); Uncollected Work 1925 (no. 12); Reade 1967 (plate 32); Wilson 1983 (fig 5 and on back cover).
Beardsley’s sketch in a January 1889 letter to A. W. King might have been the prototype for this drawing. Seated on a stool, tilted forward, one leg stretched in front of him, the poet holds a large, empty ledger propped open on a desk, next to which he wrote ‘Here I am looking very wise over an Empty Ledger’ (Letters 1970, p. 16; Appendix A, no. 5b). Having worked for the architect and surveyor Mr E. Carrett for less than a month, Beardsley did not ‘exactly dislike [his new job] but [was] not (as yet) frantically attached to it. My work however is not hard’ (p. 16; Appendix A, no. 5b). Later in 1889, on 30 July, Beardsley took up his subsequent job as a clerk at the Guardian Fire and Life Assurance Company. With a break for illness through 1890, he held this post until autumn 1892 when he obtained the commission to illustrate Dent’s edition of Le Morte Darthur and gladly relinquished it, a move over which his parents would make ‘ructions’ (Letters 1970, p. 38 [9 December 1892]). But in this drawing he knows nothing of his coming good fortune. He sits on a high office stool leading a clerk’s tedious, uninteresting life and records his boring position with a ‘comic disgust’ (Fletcher 1987, p. 4).
This is an early example of the style Beardsley calls his ‘black blot’ technique, ‘suggestive of Japan but not really Japonesque’, in which he establishes the characteristic Beardsley look: asymmetrically balanced pure black and white masses that he was to use dramatically in many of his best drawings throughout his career (Letters 1970, pp. 37 [9 December 1892], 43 [c. 15 February 1893]; Wilson 1983, p. 14). About the origins of his new style he would write, ‘I struck out [in spring 1892] a new style and method of work which was founded on Japanese art but quite original in the main. In certain points of technique I achieved something like perfection at once and produced about twenty drawings in the new style in about a couple of months’ (Letters 1970, pp. 33-4 [autumn 1892]). The perfection he achieved arose from ‘energizing space, from the fine ease and flow of the line and from the hair’s balance of pathos with mockery which Aubrey so often established in his best work’ (Easton 1972, p. 24)
The columnar shape of the drawing resembles a kakemono, a tall and narrow pictorial design adapted from Japanese scrolls and widely used in France and in England during the last thirty years of the century (for example, nos 250-3 below) and is one of Beardsley’s earliest in this format. He was not yet accomplished at creating the illusion of depth in a shallow space; consequently, like the predella border or possibly a rug in front of Carl von Weber (no. 251 below), the absence of horizon and perspective makes the rear edge of the rug appear to rise, creating a stacked effect. Here and in Raphael Sanzio (no. 247 below), Beardsley abraded and lightened the dried surfaces of black ink to vary texture, particularly of textiles (see also Black Coffee no. 922 below). In this drawing, for the first time Beardsley shows his musical composition ‘with “notes” of pure black placed in finely judged relationships to each other and then balanced against large areas of pure white, and to define forms by barely more than a single bounding outline. The austere beauty of effect thus achieved in no way diminishes the expressive power of the image which suggests an alchemist or a rather odd monk at work as much as the clerk it actually is (Wilson 1983, p.14).
The self-portrait is symbolic: Beardsley perceives himself equally as a ‘wordsmith and a draftsman [but his body as} a mere debris, his creative energies debilitated by disease and a tedious daily routine. …The severity of execution and severity in composition’ comment on Beardsley’s assessment of clerking at the Guardian; the figure has ‘some of the bodily pathos of a clown’ (Wilson 1983, pp. 14-5; Brophy 1976a, p. 60). At the bottom of the drawing, the predella-border-rug with sunflowers ‘may represent the aesthetic energies submerged by routine; the touch of humor and the absence of obvious self-pity are noticeable and typical’ (Fletcher 1987, pp. 37-8). The title comes from Madame Bovary: Le plus médiocre libertin a rêvé de sultanes ; chaque notaire porte en soi le débris d'un poète’ [The most commonplace libertine has dreamed of Suntanesses; every office clerk carries within himself the debris of a poet] (Editions de Cluny, p. 304; RA, information from D. J. Gordon to Brian Reade; thanks to the late Roy Waters for translating Flaubert’s sentence).
The writer J. A. Hammerton used this drawing as a bookplate.
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![Le Dèbris[sic] d'un Poète top image](https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GA4102/full/735,/0/default.jpg)
![Le Dèbris[sic] d'un Poète thumbnail 1](https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2006AT4981/full/220,/0/default.jpg)
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