Art for Art’s Sake Gallery10- How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink”

How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink”

Aubrey Beardsley
“How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink”
Sir Thomas Malory, The birth, life, and acts of King Arthur, of his noble knights of the Round table, their marvellous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the San Greal and in the end Le morte D’Arthur, with the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all, London: J.M. Dent & Company, 1893–94, 3 vols., Vol. 2, open to pages 334 and facing illustration 

Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, published by William Caxton, cast a profound spell over the Victorian imagination. The Pre-Raphaelites culled numerous subjects from its pages, and it was a key source for Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859). Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the lavish edition published by J.M. Dent offer a distinctively fin-de-siècle response to the Arthurian legends, emphasizing the sensuous and nihilistic rather than the chivalric elements in the text. His treatment of the story of Sir Tristam and Isoud was undoubtedly influenced by Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (first performed in Munich in 1865; produced in London in 1882), in which richly chromatic writing for orchestra emphasizes the themes of sexual passion and betrayal. Perhaps Beardsley’s use of a cello-playing, melancholy female figure for the chapter heading alludes to this musical connection. Beardsley’s “How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink” characteristically renders the figures androgynously. Although the two lovers are separated by a mysterious vertical form in the illustration, the serpentine lines and fecund, floral imagery surrounding them alludes to their ultimately fatal passion. 

Beardsley’s vision of the audience for a production of Tristan und Isolde can be seen in this illustration from the Yellow Book of 1894. By this date it had become commonplace to suggest that followers of Wagner’s music were decadents, and this audience is mainly made up of unchaperoned, wealthy women, suggestive of that voguish figure of the 1890s, the femme fatale. 

LENT BY THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSIY