The Exquisite Grotesques

of Beresford Egan
1905-84

His Private Secretaries, 1929 CAT. 1

 For more than 50 years Beresford Egan kept his deft sable The Abortionist CAT. 3 1930
brush trained on the foibles of the fashionable world,
combining his provocative artistic output with parallel
careers as playwright, novelist and actor.
“If I am not grotesque, I am nothing”
Aubrey Beardsley

1941

Egan with Joan Greenwood in ‘Latin Quarter’ 1945

This is the first selling exhibition of

Beresford Egan’s satirical and surreal
artwork for many years.
On one of the few occasions it has happened
before, in 1971 at the Keyser Gallery in
Mayfair, the dealer Charles Keyser cheekily
invited Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for
‘cleaner television’, to the preview. Her rather
disarming verdict was reported in the William
Hickey column in the Daily Express:
Self Portrait CAT. 2
“As a draughtsman Mr Egan is superb. I
feel, though, that some of his work would be
offensive to many viewers. As a trained artist, I
am quite accustomed to the nude human figure.
But I found some of the artist’s work too erotic
for my taste”.

2 3
 Not quite the ringing condemnation or 1953
clarion call for a ban that the dealer was
clearly hoping for but somehow revealing
nonetheless. Even if Egan’s apparent
penchant for the decadent and sensual is
not to one’s taste, one can’t help but admire
the quality of the drawings and paintings
themselves - the self-evident mastery of
line and material.

Most artists follow fashion and become

seen eventually as products of their time;
the singular oddity that was Beresford Egan
– actor, novelist and playwright as well as
artist – lived by his own set of peculiar
standards. Living in quietly Bohemian
seclusion in Chelsea, he spun a sub-cultural
web of his own weird devising with its own
rules, moral and artistic and his work is –
as a result - almost impossible either to
define or date. So what was the wellspring
for these strange and original creations, so
skilfully wrought into existence?

The story is told entertainingly in

Adrian Woodhouse’s lavishly illustrated
monograph ‘Beresford Egan’ Tartarus Press
2005. Woodhouse knew the artist well at
the end of his life and the material has a
feeling of autobiography about it.

When the young Beresford first arrived

The Adultress CAT. 4
in London on a boat from South Africa in 1905), he was already a self consciously
the 1920s (his parents, both Londoners, Dandyish figure: half Wilde, half Saki
had moved there shortly after his birth in hero. His ‘decadent’ black and white “a Dandyish figure, half Wilde, half
Saki hero”
4 5
 Hall’s banned lesbian novel: ‘The Well of
1972 Loneliness’, which he illustrated and helped 1937
to write, with his wife and collaborator,
Caterina (Catherine Bower Alcock) called
‘The Sink of Solitude’, which managed to
pillory not only the author herself but also
the Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, while
at the same time titillating prospective
readers with some studiedly erotic
illustrations. The Tate even included Egan
in their recent ‘Queer Art’ exhibition, even
though the artist was heterosexual, indeed
polyamorously so.

Years later, during the war, Egan began to

introduce colour into his work, producing

The Way You Should Go CAT. 5 New Face for Mrs Grundy (inc Self Portrait) CAT. 7

drawings reminded arty people with

1976 1939
long memories of Aubrey Beardsley in
the 1890s (he denied having seen any of
Beardsley’s drawings until much later).
There are superficial similarities between
Beresford’s black and white drawings and
Beardsley’s: the androgyny of the figures,
the tiny grotesques, the feeling of a jazz riff
or doodle about the long flowing lines but
there is a satirical bite to Egan’s drawings
that is absent from Beardsley’s work
and there is also the merest hint of Deco
moderne.

Egan’s most famous ‘satire of decadence’

was a high profile spoof of Radclyffe
You are not Forgotten CAT. 6 Flirtation with Wars CAT. 8

6 7
 lurid, highly sexualised fantasies and 1945
withering satires for his own delectation
in his Chelsea eyrie (he had been invalided
out of the army). They could have been
designed for Biba or ‘That Was the Week
that Was’, so out of kilter are they with the
time in which they were produced – a grey
world of bomb devastation, rationing and
propagandist films.

Some of his work in the 1940s seems to

prefigure much later artistic phenomena
such as psychedelia. Others are so bizarre
that they would have been near impossible
to exhibit at the time they were made. In
one particularly surreal and disturbing
oil, a statuesque nude who could have
been created by Russ Meyer - possibly The New Woman CAT. 9 1926

in collaboration with the creators of

Thunderbirds - a puppet-like figure floats The Advance of Man CAT. 12
in a kind of psychedelic, multi-coloured 1947

bubbling ether, her forearms replaced with

prosthetic limbs, one of which graps a 1927 1949

hook. It was painted, almost unbelievably,

in 1945.

1967

Diplomatic Relations CAT. 10 Contract at the Opera CAT. 11 Dinner with Trimalchio CAT. 13 Mardi Gras CAT. 14

8 9
 1947 The artist himself was vehement in his 1940
denial that such images were decadent,
deviant or demonic.

“You think some of my drawings inspire

lust?” he told a young journalist, Paul
Allen, who, in the mid 1960s, wrote the first
monograph on Egan’s work. “No, no, no –
they show people the sort of things they
get up to without seeing themselves from a
position of detachment.

“I want to show them the ugliness of what

they are doing and so crush their foolish
idealising. I show show the real visual and
moral ugliness of the prostitute and the
hypocrite. Can you really believe that I am
the sort of man to draw prostitutes for the
Regency Grotesquerie pleasure of it?”
CAT. 15
Stardust CAT. 18

1939 1941 1949 Despite his vehement denials, Egan clearly

enjoyed flirting with his reputation for
decadence – illustrating his wife’s book on
De Sade (her pen name was Brian de Shane),
Baudelaire’s Fleurs Du Mal and even,
abortively, embarking on a project with the
sinister occultist, Alestair Crowley (who
took an instant dislike to the flamboyant
young artist). The publisher of he and his
wife’s de Sade book – the Fortune Press –
was actually convicted of obscenity at Bow
Street Magistrates Court in 1933. One of
Beresford’s plates, ironically entitled ‘The
Moralist’, was declared obscene and had to

Land Girl CAT. 16 Night Sorrow CAT. 17 Devil in the Rag Trade CAT. 19

10 11
 be replaced. It duly was, with an image of 1943
1943
John Bull flaying a naked, prostrate figure 1946
of a woman – and somehow the book was
allowed to go back on sale.

During the war, Beresford’s carefully

cultivated air of Bohemian elegance
resulted in him being scouted by the film
director, Vernon Sewell, who cast him in
a memorable cameo role as a Nazi Officer
called Krampf in ‘The Silver Fleet’, a
powerful propaganda film about the Dutch
resistance, starring Ralph Richardson and
produced by Powell & Pressburger. Egan
went on to act in two more Powell &
The Thing He Loves CAT. 23 The Confessor CAT. 24
Pressburger films, ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and
Love’s Jester CAT. 21
‘The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp’. The
highlight of his film acting career came in 1943 1943
1946, when he starred opposite the husky-
1960

1928
Unleash the Dogs CAT. 25 Digging His Own Grave CAT. 26

Explaining Themselves CAT. 20 Family CAT. 22

12 13
 1972 1940

Books about Beresford Egan

Beresford Egan – an Introduction to his work
Paul Allen, Scorpion Press 1966
Beresford Egan
Adrian Woodhouse, Tartarus Press 2005

Books by Beresford Egan

Pollen, A Novel
But the Sinners Triumph
No Sense in Form
The Sink of Solitude
Policeman of the Lord
Epitaph

Illustrated Works
De Sade
The Adventures of King Pausole
Cyprian Masques
Fleurs Du Mal

Filmography
The Silver Fleet
A Canterbury Tale
Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
Latin Quarter/Frenzy
The Ghosts of Berkeley Square
Actor and designer of costumes
Escape Dangerous
The Fun Sane CAT. 27 Actor and associate producer

voiced seductress, Joan Greenwood in glamour and artistic credibility of the prewar
Vernon Sewell’s ‘Latin Quarter’ – where he ‘Lilliput’. Exotic Innocence CAT. 28

played a murderous sculptor called Minetti,

By the 1970s, when Glam Rock brought
a character closest to his assumed real life
Bowie’s Aladdin Sane onto television screens
persona as a ‘notorious’ artist.
and the Kings Road, it was as if Egan’s wild Design & Artwork Contact:
Egan’s picaresque life also included writing imaginings had finally come to some sort Ant Graphics Design Services Andrew & Diane Sim
Email: simfineart@btinternet.com
plays, acting in Music Halls, writing of strange, albeit temporary and tawdrily Photography
Phone: 07919 356150
Matthew Hollow
novels, all of which he combined with a fashionable, life. In fact, while everything else
steadily bubbling career as an illustrator had changed, Beresford Egan had remained With thanks to:
Oriol Bath
for a variety of magazines and publications, essentially the same wry, bohemian outsider Adrian Woodhouse
including the ‘Courier’ – a lavish 1950s he had always been.
production which attempted to recreate the Andrew Sim

14 15
Land Girl CAT. 16

www.simfineart.com 07919 356150