ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses Robert de Montesquiou role in propagating Aubrey Beardsley’s reputation, it is necessary to pause and considers the emergence of the term ‘fantastic’ which came to be applied to Beardsley’s imaginative processes. Montesquiou had been bom into the aristocratic family of Montesquiou Fezensac in 1855. He spent a solitary childhood at a Jesuit school and at his grandfather’s chateau. In the mid-i870S, Montesquiou enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he developed a modest but undistinguished talent for painting and drawing. The inaccessibility of Montesquiou’s prose probably contributed to his obscurity as an art critic. Art criticism was merely a sideline for Montesquiou; his primary motivation was creating not analysing Beauty. Montesquiou remains a key figure in Beardsley’s critical reception because of the influence he exercised in fashionable circles throughout Europe. He kept Beardsley’s reputation alive at various Parisian Salons.
