An artist who was once fired from his job because of his connections to Oscar Wilde is set to get a blue plaque outside the house where he lived.

Aubrey Beardsley, the illustrator, born in Buckingham Road, Brighton, in 1872, courted controversy with his erotic line drawings.

He went to Brighton Grammar School in 1884 and his first work, The Valiant, and his first line drawings were published in the school magazine a year later.

In 1889, he was sent to London to become a clerk in an insurance office but launched his artistic career after meeting painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones and later Oscar Wilde, the famous playwright.

Wilde asked him to illustrate his scandalous play Salome but the friendship was to prove Beardsley's downfall.

He was fired from his job as arts editor on The Yellow Book when Wilde was arrested.

There is already a blue plaque to Beardsley at Cambridge Road, in Westminster, where he lived until his death, aged just 25, of tuberculosis.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has told councils it wants them to join forces with English Heritage to broaden the scheme to attract attention to regional celebrities and Aubrey Beardsley has been proposed for Brighton.

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove Council said, while they had some blue plaques up, more could only be good for the area.

Beardsley was a prodigy from an early age as he could read books and play Chopin before he was five years old.

When he was ten, he earned £30 in six weeks by sketching little figures on menus and guest cards for a fashionable wedding. He progressed to illustrate Mallory's Morte D'Arthur and rumours flew that his links with Wilde, who called him a "brilliant and wonderful artist", were not purely platonic.