This essay will mainly discuss about Aubrey Beardsley, who was influenced by Edward Burne-Jones from the arts and crafts movement. When Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, he was just 25 years old. Although his career was tragically short, his work epitomizes the Fin de SiÃcle, with its decadent, and sometimes shocking, figures. Beardsley was born in Brighton, Britain in 1872. He knew at a very young age that he would slowly die of tuberculosis, an incurable disease at the time. So he moved to a quiet place to take rest and nourishment to regain his health. Aubrey Beardsley followed the Pre-Raphaelite Movement as a unique artist, drawing on many sources of inspiration to create his masterful black-and-white ink drawings. .
Beardsley painted only two known oil paintings in his lifetime, concentrating all of his talent and eager discipline towards his compositions filled with designs, patterns of decoration, caricatures, flowers, black spots and bold curvaceous lines. In the July of 1891 there was an important change to Beardsley. He was still young and impressionable when he first met Burne-Jones, who encouraged him to pick up oil painting and medieval subject matter. The le Morte d'Arthur drawings display Burne-Jones's early inspiration of subject matter for Beardsley. Meanwhile, Burne-Jones introduced Beardsley to a painting school to improve his painting skill, though Beardsley didn't go any more after a few times. It can be said that Beardsley's development was gained by his faith because this was the only training he has got.
Beardsley's graphic form of expression was one of the first calls for a major simplification of artistic expression, for rendering it down to its elements. Using just black and white, Beardsley, with the aid of lines and surfaces, achieved an unforgettably effective graphic pattern. The striving for perfection, often considered a typical feature of Beardsley's work, led him to a stage where he did not do extensive preparatory work for his final drawings in which he undoubtedly broke with academic tradition.
