At the time Frederick Evans and Aubrey Beardsley met, in 1889, Evans was a London bookseller and a sometime photographer, and Beardsley was a frustrated insurance clerk and a would-be artist who haunted the bookshop though too poor to buy anything. Evans recognized freshness and beauty in the seventeen-year-old’s sinuous drawings, traded books for them, and made and sold platinum-print copies of them. Most important, he recommended Beardsley to the publisher of a new edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, a commission that would prove to be the young artist’s breakthrough moment and enable him to become a full-time illustrator and artist.

Beardsley, whose gaunt face was described by Evans as like that of a gargoyle and by Oscar Wilde as “a silver hatchet,” proved to be a challenging portrait subject. Ultimately, Evans embraced, rather than masked, the artist’s beaklike profile and rapt attention, conveying something of the intense and dandyish image that Beardsley cultivated. After a brief career that included scandalously irreverent illustrations for Wilde’s Salome and The Yellow Book, Beardsley died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five.