?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
FREDERICK EVANS (1853-1943) Portrait of the artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Photogravure, the image measuring 5x4 1/8 inches (12.7x10.5 cm.), the sheet 11x7 1/2 inches (27.9x19.1 cm.), with Evans' credit and the Swan Electric Engraving Co. credit printed on recto. Circa 1894
Provenance: The Harry Lunn Collection
The important British Pictorialist photographer Frederick Evans owned a bookshop in London and there met the young and eccentric Aubrey Beardsley, who was then an insurance company clerk. He recommended the illustrator to a publisher, giving him his first commission. Beardsley would achieve fame and notoriety, though he died young. Evans issued two portraits, including this one, he made of the artist as a mounted diptych, in an edition of 20 to commemorate his friend. Both images show the artist unself-consciously introspective, the composition highlighting his unusual and elegant features. Beardsley's friend Oscar Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair."
