an English adaptation of the 'grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed' of presenting illustration in the Salome (1893) and The Yellow Book (1894–1897), particularly his 'Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith' (1893) illustrations. He was known to have received a copy of shunga by the artist Utamaro from William Rothenstein which heavily influenced Beardsley's own erotic imagery, being first introduced to Japanese woodblock prints during his lunch hours working in Frederick Evan's Holborn bookstore circa 1889. Beardsley was drawn to the Japanese sensibility of depicting the nude human body by being open to nudity and depicting this humorously, rejecting Victorian notions of how the body should be depicted in art. As well as the 'asymmetrical distribution of masses, ... absence of compactness, space, or light and shadow' amongst the 'curved lines' of the Peacock skirt. Charles Ricketts also showcased the influence of Japanese line art in Wilde's 1891 House of Pomegranates which used Peacock and crocus blooms which 'appear in uniform rows like a repeated wallpaper pattern' (such as in the aesthetical merit of Voysey) and the 'asymmetrical construction of the page [, bookcover and illustration]' design; drawing also from nature; and in his proportions for the 1894 Wilde publication of the Sphinx which also predated the early form of English-Japanese influences of the Modern Style. The forms of waves in House of Pomegranates is also heavily reminiscent of Hokusai's woodblock prints. 1900–1925: Modernism and Bilateral Exchange In 1902, with the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan gained great power status in the eyes of British foreign policy-makers and along with 'progressive' industrialisation, Japanese influence became more pronounced, particularly with regard to the ship building industry in Glasgow. As such, British society began to exchange further with this fellow industrialised nation, exchanging ideas on Art, Aesthetics (particularly compositional) and academic bilateral exchange so that by the end of the 1910s, with this industrial, educational and academically driven shift, bilateral cultural exchange replaced the one-way Anglo-Japanese Style by way of greater cultural understanding of Japanese Art and its history, certainly among academics and publicly available national museums, and notable Japanese art figures, scholars and critics. Liberty's and the Modern Style; 1900–1915 By 1901, Liberty Style began to flourish in Italy. This derived from a number of Japanese, Greek, Celtic and Renaissance themes, 'with those Japanese elements appealing to English sensibilities: asymmetry, simplicity, sensitivity to medium, and ... modest materials', which 'attained international