NICHOLS, H.S.; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (attributed). Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley Selected from the Collection owned by Mr H.S. Nichols.

‘Feeble, Pretentious’ Forgeries

NICHOLS, H.S.; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (attributed). Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley Selected from the Collection owned by Mr H.S. Nichols. NY: H.S. Nichols. 1920

4to. Original black cloth with elaborate gilt floriate design and lettering to upper board, spine lettered directly in gilt; pp. [7], [1 (blank)], 50 ff. plates, each preceded by leaf of text with text to rectos only; wanting the rare dust-jacket, spine a little sunned, front hinge tender; internally very clean; a very good copy.

Number 366 of limited edition of 500, signed by the publisher, of a notable forgery of Beardsley’s work by Harry Sidney Nichols (1864–1941), British pornographer and erstwhile colleague of Aubrey Beardsley’s publisher Leonard Smithers.

Nichols founded the Erotika Biblion Society with Smithers in 1888, the partnership ending with Smithers’s death in 1907. The following year, Nichols fled to New York in 1908 to avoid British obscenity laws and there continued to hustle his way around the erotic literature market. This book, designed to exploit the fashionable interest in Beardsley’s work, was his greatest wheeze: the publication of fifty apparently unpublished illustrations by Beardsley that he had uncovered. He launched these plates in an exhibition in New York in 1919 and this lavish limited edition followed a year later.

The problem was that the plates were all forgeries. Critics, including Gallatin and Pennell, were quick to deride these efforts as fake. Nichols replied to his critics that he had more knowledge of Beardsley than even Leonard Smithers, ‘but I absolutely decline to make known to the world what I do know’ (Evening Post, 18 April 1919). It did little good. C. Lewis Hind, the founder of The Studio and therefore well acquainted with Beardsley’s work, wrote in the same paper that the pictures ‘are a travesty of his work; they are an insult to his memory […] These feeble, pretentious things by Beardsley? Pooh!’ (‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Evening Post, 28 May 1919).

The identity of the actual forger remains a mystery, but what is certain is that by 1919 there were plenty of Beardsley forgeries in circulation, mostly done for Leonard Smithers, and it is highly likely that Nichols would have been able to access the stock through his association with his old fellow in erotic publishing.

Samuels Lasner notes that ‘ According to Gallatin, Haldane MacFall believed them to be the work of “at least two forgers,” probably Nichols and one of his associates’. Whoever the artist and however poor the artwork, the result was the same. Nicols made a tidy $7,500, the equivalent of $125,000 today, from the sale of the books.

Samuels Lasner 222.

SKU: 2125419