ABSTRACT
The 1890s have traditionally been regarded as a fallow period for external influence on British art since it tended to look to itself for inspiration and was hostile to French art. Theodore Wratislaw was the first critic in England to bring attention to Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Frenchness’ or his ‘delight in anything strange and depraved’. Beardsley’s personally devised continentalism mirrored the charges against him in the national press that he was importing subversive ideas from France, which undermined the moral stability of English society. Beardsley’s French tendencies were parodied and caricatured both in the periodical press and in the fiction of the ‘fin-de-siecle’. The English view of Beardsley’s art as riddled with the degenerative influence of French art, and the expression of this view by conservative critics in terms of disease - virulent, infectious and dangerous to the national ‘health’ - were in truth reflections of Britain’s anxiety about the past and the future.
