AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898) KEYNOTES SERIES. 1896. 19x13 1/2 inches, 48x34 cm. Forbes Co. Condition A- / B+: expertly overpainted margins. Various figures populate a poster promoting a series of books published in England and Boston. Beardsley, "with his erotic grotesquery, his tuberculous capacity for a fine, punctilious decadence . . . ushered out the century in a sensuous shiver" (Rickards, Posters at the turn of the Century, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1968, p. 36), "he so far despised the society that suffered him that he allowed his mockery to invade his work; more often than not his assignments in illustration and decoration carried him off in flights of irrelevant rudery; he was compulsive, abstruse, and rapturously sick" (ibid). DFP-I 11, Maitres 1900 p. 105.
