Description Of The Death Of Pierrot, By Aubrey Beardsley

Description
The Death of Pierrot by Aubrey Beardsley depicts in a black and white illustration, four characters visiting an ill pierrot lying on his back in a bed. The picture is framed in a way that the audience is looking into a small room, and at the very back is a window covered with curtains. In the bed on the left corner, a pierrot is seen to be sleeping in a big white bed. He is looking down with his eyes closed. Four other characters are drawn closer up, walking towards the pierrot in the bed. One character at the very center is a lady with black lace covering her hair, down her back. Her small face is looking back directly at the audience, her left hand brought up to her mouth in a shushing motion. She is wearing a voluminous dress,
Incredibly fascinated with lines, it can be seen in many of his works including The Death of Pierrot the amount of precision that went into each and every one of his inked lines. In this illustration, at the very back top, many straight lines are drawn to capture the window frame, with a black lace hanging from it, as well as a long length cloth underneath as a curtain covering the window. The curtain cloth is captured softer, by thin, dotted lines while the lace at the top is given it’s fabric like quality by shading it in a form of cross hatching, and leaving small circles white. This also applies to the pillow and sheets that the pierrot is lying in, as well as the unworn pierrot costume where the outlines of it are drawn in dotted lines to give a softer, shapeless look. Influenced by Chinese and Japanese designs that were gaining popularity in Europe, Beardsley only uses black ink, thus two colors of black and white in many of his work. He is incredibly skilled at balancing huge areas of solid black against the whiteness of the paper. This contrast creates great dimension in the drawing with the limited colors available. In the top left corner of the work, at what appears to be the back of the room, a small, white head of the pierrot can be seen sunken amongst a mass of pillows and sheets. Below that, the loose white
It captures his outlook on death and mortality that he has reached throughout his short life, constantly flirting with death. I believe that this work is an expressive one, as it craftily manages to capture the imminent threat of death and the poignancy of mortality, all the while playing with the dark humor that surrounds the idea of death. It successfully captures this outlook on death by Beardsley, and it can be seen through his thin delicate ink lines the amount of thought that he must dwelled on death in his short life span, still sorrowful, but learning to have some acceptance towards it. The work in itself is extremely aesthetic, with the simple black and white coloring and the delicate detail of each feature such as lace and the eye mask. Seeming more like a design, yet containing layers and layers of depth in it’s meaning, it is a great work to symbolize his unique style of creating dimension with monotonous illustrations. Pioneer of the poster illustration era, which focuses in aesthetic, simplicity and most of all balance, in this work I think he is able to find the perfect balance of everything. Not just the balance between the black and white or the curve and straightness of the lines, but also between the prioritization of visual aesthetics and the depth of the embedded meaning of the work. I believe that Beardsley's goal was to