Aubrey Beardsley, avatar of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement. He may be the best remembered of Oscar Wilde's collaborators. Certainly he's left his mark on the world of illustration in the years since he worked.
One thing I didn't realize about him until very recently. Besides his getting a free bowl of soup with his haircut, I mean. With all the drawings he did, prints he made, all the indelible images, he was only 25 when he died. Who knows what he would have gone on to do.
In his death throes he begged his publisher and a friend to destroy all of his obscene drawings, which by some standards would be the majority of them. They didn't obey, of course. He could still tell St. Peter that he'd given it the old college try.
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One of the best things about the 60s is the movement that arose to revive Art Nouveau. Beginning with the influence of William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau designers and artists succeeded in achieving the synthesis of art and craft. Using undulating asymmetrical lines, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, and tendrils of vine Beardsley worked all of those elements into amazingly graceful black and white images.
Like many before me I spent some time trying to emulate his style in my own drawings without success. His work is deceptively simple looking and impossible to capture - rather like a few other favorites such as Alphonse Mucha, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielson and so many more I won't attempt to list.
There's a very fine overview of Beardsley's life and work in the Tate Gallery's introduction to their exhibition of his work. Much like other famous artists and poets who died young I have to wonder if Aubrey Beardsley was driven to squeeze a lifetime of work into a short exspanse of time.
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/aubrey-beardsley/exhibition-guide
Slightly off topic, I want to apologize for the lateness of this response. I spaced on it last night, and today I tried to log in so I could respond from another location. Yeah, Google is extremely paranoid about that kind of thing.
Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement were both reactions against an impoverished visual environment and the associated spiritual deficit. As such, they're reminders of the kind of reaching that we humans can do in even oppressive times, hint hint. Beardsley took all this in and made an indelible contribution of his own.
If it seems like you didn't succeed in emulating Beardsley in your own drawings, it was probably just a detour on the way to finding your own style anyway. I'd also like to thank you for brining up Kay Nielson. I wasn't really familiar with him, but he produced some beautiful illustrations. Disney put him to work on Fantasia but he was accomplished decades before there was a Disney.
That's a neat link to the Tate exhibition. It shows what kind of art he was doing. The kind with no need to explain itself, obviously. I've wondered the same thing about a few people. John Keats, who died, at the age of 26, is one example.
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