Lysistrata shielding her Coynte

In 1896, Beardsley completed eight large drawings illustrating Aristophanes’s bawdy Greek comedy Lysistrata. He used a development of the style of the Salome drawings, purified and refined and possibly influenced by Greek vase painting. Lysistrata was the last of his four major works of illustration, which are all the more astonishing for being so different from each other.

One of the eight drawings, the present black and white print, shows a woman wearing a flounced neglig�, slippers and a diaphanous dress that exposes her right breast. Her right hand shields her genitals, whilst with her left, she adorns a giant phallus with an olive branch. To the left stands a garlanded Priapic herm.

The collotype print in the Victoria and Albert Museum was made after Beardsley’s frontispiece illustration of 1896 to the Lysistrata of Aristophanes. It comes from the folio of reproductions made from Beardsley’s original drawings and published in about 1929. Utilising the expensive collotype process, these prints are much closer to the originals than the earlier line-block prints of the 1896 edition of the book or the various, mostly very poor reproductions included in subsequent pirated printings.

Aubrey Beardsley’s distinctive black and white drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salom�, published in 1894, brought him extraordinary notoriety whilst still in his early twenties. His work for the periodical The Yellow Book confirmed his position as the most innovative illustrator of the day, but as a result of the hostile moralistic outcry that followed the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in early 1895, John Lane and other publishers panicked and dropped Beardsley. After that, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers. Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqu� books with the boast: ‘I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch’. Smithers encouraged Beardsley’s already growing interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal and, most famously, Aristophanes’s bawdy satirical play Lysistrata.