Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, design for the front cover of the prospectus of 'The Yellow Book', vol. I, April 1894, published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane of the Bodley Head, pen and ink and wash on paper, London 1894

Drawing in black ink depicting a woman wearing an elaborate hat browsing books outside a bookshop. In the doorway of the shop a pierrot figure is standing gazing genially at the woman. The scene is clearly supposed to be taking place at night due to the blackness of the surroundings and the brightness of the light emanating from the shop windows and the gas street lamp.

Bequeathed by John Lane, Esq.

According to Stephen Calloway in his book Aubrey Beardsley. London: V & A Publications, 1998, pp. 106-107: 'The prospectus, an essential factor in the marketing of books at this date, clearly reveals the extent to which the new publication aimed to connect the new quarterly with the rarefied world of antiquarian books, fine editions and 'collectors items', as much as with the brasher, more 'modern' milieu of London in the nineties...For the prospectus Beardsley drew a remarkable cover, which introduced a number of significant new elements in his stylistic development. Technically audacious, it was among the first of a highly important group of 'night pieces', in which the artist employed his growing skill in the management of increasingly large areas of black-ink washes, played off against finely reserved white lines and razor sharp patches of light, to suggest the vivid qualities of the London street scene captured by the flickering intensity of the gas jets of the street lamps or illuminated by the cold light of the moon...This image for the prospectus played deliberately upon the equivocal nature of the messages that its subjects and details would send out to a middle-class audience. On the one hand it depicted a bookshop, a comfortable, cultural location, but showed it by night, when no respectable bookshop should be open. In fact the drawing depicts a shop very like the premises of Lane and Mathews in Vigo Street, to which Beardsley adds, it has been always been said, a caricature of Elkin Matthews himself as the genial, if oddly garbed, Watteauesque pierrot-bookseller in the doorway. The handling of the effect of the light emanating from the shop is quite masterful, suggesting with wonderfully observed precision the way in which at night-time a figure in the street appears silhouetted against the brightness of a lit up window; it gives the lie to the much-repeated idea that Beardsley was unaware of, or unable to compete with contemporary artistic developments that placed so much emphasis on the subtle rendering of unusual light effects...In Beardsley's scene there is only one customer, a woman of the 'advanced' kind we are to supposed, immaculately dressed in the severest black in the height of fashion of the moment, her tightly gloved hand poised to exercise her own literary choice, rather than waiting to be offered a book to read. Elegant and assertive, she proclaims her, at best, dubious social position by the mere fact of her nocturnal shopping expedition, alone and unchaperoned in the street. As an image of English womanhood it was almost guaranteed to shock, but before long this very distinct and very modern type would automatically be referred to as the 'Beardsley Woman', a variant sub-species of that other alarming phenomenon of the period, the 'New Woman'.

E.518-1926