It may have been under 2in (5cm) high, but a tiny ink drawing by Aubrey Beardsley sold for a sizeable $10,000 (£8000) in a sale of Illustration Art held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in New York on March 21.
Originally catalogued as ‘Dancing Satyr’ but in the online version of the catalogue called ‘Squatting Devil Fishing’, it was used as a vignette on the title of the Sheridan section of an 1893 Dent publication called The Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Beardsley scholar Linda Zatlin, whose catalogue raisonné of Beardsley’s work was published by Yale in 2016, notes “this miniature devil with a fishing rod arises from Beardsley’s study of the flourishes of 17th century calligraphers” and that the devil as seen here is “more joyfully abandoned than those in Le Morte d’Arthur”.