In this short novella, the illustrator Beardsley sketches Venus's poetic palace and gardens, where the beauty's wild retinue indulges in exuberant revelry. Lyrical and visually colorful backdrops suggest that the author is a skilled draftsman who can not only be straightforwardly specific, but also work with a sensitive hint in the text - which is why Venus' shameless bacchanalia is an exciting erotic and intellectual imagination.
Aubrey Beardsley began work on the erotic novel Venus and Tannhäuser, probably inspired by Wagner's opera Tannhäuser and the Duel bards at the Wartburg, in 1894. The first three incomplete chapters were published two years later in the first issue of The Savoy under the title Under the Hill. All in all, this work, which the author did not manage to finish in his short life and which was supposed to contain 24 full-page illustrations, was not published for the first time until 1907, nine years after his death.