This vintage art nouveau framed mirror is from the 1970s and is full of beautiful style and design.
This lovely framed mirror depicts Aubrey Beardsley’s 1893 artwork Peacock Skirt, reproduced as a woodblock print in 1894 for the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome. Wilde wrote to Beardsley, recognising him as a “kindred spirit” and enclosing a copy of Salome, and commissioned him to illustrate the first edition of the play, published in English in 1894. The original pen and ink drawing was bequeathed by Grenville Lindall Winthrop to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in 1943.
The peacock Skirt drawing was influenced by James McNeill Whistler’s decorations in his 1876–77 Peacock Room, designed for Frederick Leyland’s house at 49 Princes Gate but now in the Freer Gallery of Art. Beardsley's refined curving lines were also influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and anticipate the forms of the Art Nouveau aesthetic.
It comes in a stylish wooden frame.
Comes in excellent vintage condition with minor signs of patina.
Dimensions
Height: 90cm
Length: 64cm
Width: 2cm
Beardsley travelled to Paris in 1892, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints. His first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), illustrated for the publishing house J.M. Dent and Company. In 1894, a new translation of Lucian’s True History, with illustrations by Beardsley, William Strang, and J. B. Clark, was privately printed in an edition of 251 copies.
Beardsley had six years of creative output, which can be divided into several periods, identified by the form of his signature. In the early period, his work is mostly unsigned. During 1891 and 1892, he progressed to using his initials A.V.B. Mid-1892, during Le Morte d'Arthur and The Bon Mots, he used a Japanese-influenced mark that became progressively more graceful, sometimes accompanied by A.B. in block capitals.