How Sir Bedivere cast the sword Excalibur into the water

Ex Libris: the printed image and the art of the book, 2010

These illustrations by the celebrated artist, Aubrey Beardsley, come from a late nineteenth century edition of Le Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur). Written by Sir Thomas Mallory between the 1450s and 1470s, Mallory’s version of legends surrounding the fabled Camelot, King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table spanned a total of 507 chapters. First published in 1485, the book proved popular but fell into relative obscurity until a revival of interest in medieval literature during the nineteenth century. Like Millais and Tennyson, the stories of King Arthur appealed to Beardsley’s sense of romance and yet, the tales are more depraved than popular interpretations generally allude to.

These three illustrations refer to the affair between Sir Tristram and his aunt, the Belle Isolde; the murder of King Arthur, by his incestuously conceived son, Mordred and the moment at which Queen Guenever, following Arthur’s death, attempts to atone for her adulterous affair with the knight, Lancelot, by becoming a nun.

However, as the critic Arthur Symons wrote, in much of Beardsley’s work the sins he depicts are transformed by the beauty with which they are portrayed; indeed, it was for the beauty of his work that Beardsley became renowned. A prolific illustrator of literature during the late nineteenth century, Beardsley died at the age of 25, a time wrote Max Beerbohm, when ‘normal genius has yet done little of which it will not be heartily ashamed thereafter.’

Elspeth Pitt, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs