Aubrey Beardsley Wall Art

Aubrey Beardsley Wall Art

Art Nouveau Ink Illustration Wall Art Plainly: canvas is for the person who wants this line work large, on the wall, this month, without making a framing decision. It gives you scale, no glare and no glass to keep clean. It is not for the person who wants the crisp bite of ink on heavy paper, the plate mark, the deckle edge, the slight relief you can feel with a fingertip. That buyer should be looking at paper and a frame, and will be disappointed by any print on cloth, however good. The style is high contrast ink drawing from the turn of the last century: a single confident line describing a whole figure, enormous flat masses of solid black set against untouched white, decorative borders, hair and drapery drawn as pure pattern. There is almost no grey in it, which is why it survives being enlarged so well. Content is worth checking. This tradition ran to the sensual and occasionally the explicit, and a piece that looks purely decorative as a thumbnail can be considerably less so at wall size. Look at the whole image properly before you put it in a room where guests sit. Where it works is anywhere with a dark palette and some formality: a study, a dining room with deep paint, a hallway with panelling. Against a busy wall the fine linear passages disappear, since they need blank space around them to register at all. One caveat on scale. The hairline detail that makes this work sing is the first thing to go if the piece is small. Look at the thinnest lines in the image and judge whether they will still be visible from across the room; if they will not, choose a composition built on larger black shapes instead.