Two Less Well Known Illustrators of Pierre Louys

Vertès, Blond Girl

Marcel Vertès (1895-1961) was a costume designer and illustrator of Hungarian-Jewish origins. He was born in Budapest and his first commercially successful works of art were sketches of corpses, criminals and prostitutes he made for a sensationalist magazine in Budapest (he subsequently published a portfolio of this work as Prostitution in 1925). Vertès later provided illustrations for many of the clandestinely printed publications opposed the continuation of the Hapsburg monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War.

After the Great War, Vertès moved first to Vienna and thence, in 1925, to Paris, where he became a student of fine art at the prestigious Academie Julian. He quickly established himself on the Paris art scene, concentrating on illustration, painting and printmaking, especially lithography. He became a close friend and disciple of fellow émigré Jules Pascin, with whom he shared many tastes and interests.

Amongst the work Vertès undertook were forgeries of Toulouse-Lautrec’s works, which helped him earn his art tuition fees. His illustration commissions included working on various erotic books, which included several works by Pierre Louys. Amongst the titles Vertès illustrated were La Semaine Secrete de Venus, 1926, which was written by Pierre Mac Orlan, a leading author of erotic and spanking fiction during the interwar period in Paris (and another friend of Pascin’s); also Collette’s Cheri in 1929 and the collection of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems, Ombre de mon Amour, in 1956. These may all have led to his commissions to work on several books by Louys, but it may also have helped that Vertès (like Toulouse Lautrec and Jules Pascin before him) seemed to have a good knowledge of the world of Parisian brothels, as demonstrated by his album of colour lithographs, Dancings (Dancing Halls) which he produced soon after his arrival in Paris in 1925. This showed gay as well as straight bars and clubs. It was followed up, in 1932, by a portfolio titled Dames seules (Women Alone), which comprised fifteen lithographs by Vertès illustrating aspects of lesbian life in the capital: couples together in their homes, women’s bars, women cruising for sex in the Bois de Boulogne and, in one case, a woman catching her girlfriend with some else.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1940

The artist first tackled Pierre Louys’ novel Trois Filles de leur mere in 1927. His seventeen dry-point prints were graphically faithful to the text; Vertès depicted all the perversities of the family at the heart of the novella. Next, Vertès illustrated Pybrac in 1928, unflinchingly recording the highly varied sex and sexuality that features in the hundreds of short poems that make up the collection. The artist also contributed plates to an edition of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole in 1932, which faithfully detailed the incidents of the story in thirty-eight pen and ink drawings. Six years later, he tackled Pierre Louys’ Poésies érotiques. Much like Rojan’s version of the previous year, Vertès provided thirty-two pencil and watercolour plates that fully portrayed all the lesbian and other incidents narrated in the verses.

Vertès, Three Girls

In 1935 Vertès made his first trip to New York in search of business contacts. Two years later he staged his first one-man exhibition in New York. That same year, in Paris, he provided the fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, with advertisements for her new perfume called Shocking, work that was considered rather suggestive and a little shocking by some in the industry, with their hints of dryads and discrete nakedness. Schiaparelli herself obviously liked the artist’s work, for the campaign ran for seven years.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1944

At the start of Second World War, Vertès returned to New York with his wife, escaping the Nazi invasion of France by just two days. Ten years later, he returned to live in Paris but still maintained his lucrative professional contacts in the USA. These led his work on the 1952 film Moulin Rouge about the life and times of artist Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, for which Vertès won two Academy Awards; in addition, he painted the murals in the Café Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel and in the Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  Furthermore, he designed the sets for Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1956, contributed illustrations to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and was a jury member at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. In France, his work was recognised when he was made an officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 1955, after designing sets for ballets at the Paris Opera. Vertès also published a number of books himself, including The Stronger Sex, Art & Fashion in collaboration with Bryan Holme, It’s All Mental, a satire on psychoanalysis, and Amandes Vert, an illustrated biography.

As his enormously eclectic output will indicate, Vertès was able to work in a variety of styles and media, turning his hand to almost any commission he received.  In this, he resembled many of the illustrators I have described in my postings: whilst they may have regard themselves as painters or engravers, earning an income demanded that they were constantly flexible over subject matter and materials.

Reynard the Fox

Kris de Roover (born 1946) was an artist from Antwerp, Belgium. He studied architecture before becoming an illustrator and, during his career, worked on illustrating a wide range of subjects, including erotica, with his designs being published across Europe and in the USA. De Roover employs revived the ligne claire style of comic art, which was pioneered in Belgium by Herge and other artists at Tintin magazine.

De Roover illustrated a comic strip version of Marcel Russen’s retelling of the medieval tale of Rynaert de Vos (Reynard the Fox, 1999), Die verhalen uit het kasteel der lusten- het verboden boek (1984- which was translated later as ‘The Chateau of Delights,’ 1990) and Pierre Louys’ L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (1990). He also created the children’s comic De Tocht der Petieterkees (The Tour of the Petieterkees, 1989).

My interest here is de Roover’s work on Roi Gonzalve. His previous work on Het kasteel der lusten, had indicated a talent for erotica, but the uncompleted novel by Louys represented a challenge to his representational skills. The origins of the story itself are unclear; the king seems to be an invention of Louys, taking his name from the eleventh century king Gonsalvo of the counties of Sobrabe and Ribagorza in the Pyrenees (and, as such, being a neighbouring realm to the imaginary kingdom of Trypheme in Louys’ Les Aventures du Roi Pausole). The twelve princesses of the full title, and their unnatural relationship with their father, may be an echo of the twelve children that the god Uranus had with his sister Gaia in the Greek myth of the Titans. Moreover, one of these offspring, Cronus, had six children with his sister Rhea and two of these, Zeus and Hera, became husband and wife, although Zeus previously was married to his aunt, Themis, sister of Cronus and Rhea. Rather like cartoonist Georges Pichard in his earlier work illustrating Louys’ Trois filles de leur mere, it seems that the Spanish publisher of Roi Gonzalve considered that a graphic novel style would be the best way of tackling the adult content of the story, thereby creating some distance and unreality. De Roover accordingly seems to have depicted the king as a louche, Lothario-like figure in a dinner jacket with a large seventies moustache, a slightly dodgy looking monarch whose character was well suited to the plot of the unfinished text, such as it is. 

De Roover’s choice of style for the book involved emphasising elements in his previous work: his plates feature strong outlines and very brightly coloured designs, using blocks of colour for each figure or item and depicted in a very simple manner (a style that might be very suitable for a children’s book- although primary tones are distinctly stronger than those he used for Reynaert de Vos in 1999). De Roover surrounded these with a pen and ink border design of female nudes which closely resemble his delicate work in the Kasteel der lusten. These elements further help to reduce the challenging nature of the content and to lighten the mood, by making the novella seem more like an action comic. It’s notable too that de Roover, like Paul-Emile Becat before him, chose to depart from the text of the book and overall raised the ages of the princesses he drew, lessening some of the potentially controversial impact of Louys’ narrative, although his plates are still explicit and are clearly tied to the text with quotations of the passages depicted.

We may well wish to reflect upon the fact that the two most recent illustrators to work upon the posthumously published works of Pierre Louys felt that such a style was more suitable or acceptable. For more discussion of these issues, see my Pierre Louys bibliography. For more discussion of work of Vertes and de Roover and of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Emile Munier- girls & kittens

Girl with a basket of plums (1875)

Émile Munier, was born in Paris on June 2, 1840. He came from a working class family of cloth mill workers but was introduced to drawing and painting at an early age. He received training as a draughtsman under Abel Lucas at the Gobelins tapestry factory where his father worked. Later, he became a close friend of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, often visiting his studio, which led him to develop a strong identification with the academic style of art and a deep respect for the sorts of canvas produced by his mentor. The 1860s marked the beginning of his professional recognition, when Munier won three Beaux-Arts medals and exhibited his work at the prestigious Paris Salon. His affinity with Bouguereau is immediately visible in Munier’s paintings, which reflected the style and composition of his teacher’s masterpieces. Perhaps more so than the latter, Munier, a less accomplished artist, focussed upon winsome girls painted for the popular art market.

Sugar & Spice, 1879

Munier at first also worked in glass and tapestry design but from 1871 he devoted himself exclusively to painting. A very important early commission was the painting Angel Comforting His Grieving Mother, requested by Jane Stanford to immortalize her son, who died at an early age. Even more important, though, was Trois Amis/ Three Friends (1885), which depicts a little girl playing with her two kittens. When this was exhibited at the Paris Salon, it received rave reviews. Reproductions of the painting sold very well and Pears Soap even purchased the rights to use the image in its advertising.

The Morning Meal (1880)

With Trois Amis Munier definitively established himself as one of the leading painters of small children and their pets (dogs and caged birds were also included- the latter surely reminding us of much more charged pictures by Greuze, who often showed girls grieving over dead birds or hugging them to their bosoms). Numerous very similar pictures followed, often using his own daughters as models. These paintings include Her Best Friend, Feeding New Friends and Little Girl and Cat (1882), Playing with the Kitten (1893), Best Friends, A Special Moment, Girl with a Kitten and Puppy, Girl with a Basket of Kittens, etc etc etc . Until his death in 1895, Munier regularly painted a wide range of other subjects, including loving mothers and daughters, rural, mythological, religious and animal scenes, as well as landscapes and seascapes, but these images were always derivative. Just like Bouguereau, he often depicted cupids, buxom nymphs and very regularly showed country girls picking fruit or gathering herbage, feeding small animals like rabbits, doves or chicks, fetching water, tending sheep or goats or washing clothes. Nonetheless, kittens were what sold- especially if they were paired with pretty young girls, often looking equally cuddly and sweet in their night dresses.

Although there was commercial success and popularity to be found in such highly sentimental subjects, Munier would still include subtexts and academic references in his paintings. Hence, The Broken Vase below consciously invokes the Broken Pitcher by Greuze, an allegory for lost virginity. In his version, Munier replaces the young woman with a little girl and, whilst retaining the disordered dress that reveals the left side of the chest, in his case substitutes Greuze’s suggestion of sexual assault with a jokey and entirely innocent accident with a skipping rope. The child here is not a victim but is the naughty offender, dreading parental anger (and we, of course, are placed in the position of the annoyed adult).

Best Friends (1892)

Munier’s Best Friends (1892) is but one example of the entire contemporary genre of paintings that matched small girls with cuddly pets. Professor of Art History, Anne Higonnet, remarked how this sort of picture tends to “liken children to animals, making the child seem less human, less conscious, more at one with nature… Occasionally the pet is absurdly huge, cueing instead the viewer’s projection of his or her adult self as the child’s protector.” In the case of Best Friends, the large eyed girl is made more vulnerable and appealing by the fact that her straw hat is slightly damaged. It’s an almost subliminal message that she’s poor and may herself be in need of care. The small child cuddling small furry animals is the epitome of cuteness and of innocence; what’s more, the wholesome innocence of the ‘Romantic’ child is consciously opposed to the knowledge of adult. Yet, simultaneously, as Higonnet recognised, “the dubious overtones of paintings [of girls with kittens] let the innocence-knowledge seesaw tip back and forth… Do the imagined girls in [paintings like Best Friends] mimic adult flirtation a bit too well, providing viewers with the signs of sexual availability coyly grafted onto bodies coded with the signs of innocence? And what about that pussy in the little girl’s lap?” Higonnet argued that a very complex process of sexualising little girls and infantilising adult women may be involved here (see Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence- The History & Crisis of Ideal Childhood, 1998, 33-34 & 38). As I’ve observed before, these mixed messages are quite common in this period; the subliminal references to the work of Greuze would achieve the same effect for those familiar with his work.

The Broken Vase

Munier’s Sugar and Spice, famously detourned and parodied in a collage by the Surrealist Man Ray in the journal Minotaure (no.7, 1935, page 16) is another case in point. The girl sits, besides another borrowed image of a naked girl, between curtains in an enigmatic room. One is reminded of the pictures of bored brothel workers idly awaiting a client painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Pascin and others. The image is printed on the page in Minotaure next to a photo of two of Lotte Pritzel’s disturbing dolls and overleaf from a strange Cupid-like figure by Hans Bellmer, heightening the sense that these girls are arranged and manipulated by others for their own purposes. Doubtless, for the Surrealists, Munier was an excellent target for their co-option and subversion: his art represented everything that was superficial and sentimental. They sought out the unconscious and repressed through their work; he catered to a public demand for decorative, reassuring and ‘nice.’ The posture of the girl in Sugar and Spice also puts me in mind of Balthus‘ paintings of Therese Blanchard. In four she has one leg raised in the same manner; in two (Therese Dreaming (1938) and Girl with Cat (1937)) she also raises her hands to her head in the same way. These were but the first of numerous very similar pictures that the artist painted over his subsequent career, all fully exploiting the potency of the pose.

from Minotaure no.7

For all his mediocrity and want of depth, Munier’s work continues to be very popular. It may be ‘chocolate box’ but it is instantly accessible and attractive, evoking in adults an instinctive wish to provide care and nurture.

For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.

The Rescue 1894

Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre- painter & illustrator of Pierre Louys

The Secret

Louis Berthommé Saint-André was born in Barbary in Brittany on February 4th, 1905,  but spent his early childhood in Saintes, a commune near Angouleme in the southwest of France. Initially a student of architecture, Berthommé Saint-André changed to studying fine art when he entered the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1921.

Self Portrait, 1925

Fillette republicaine

The artist is particularly known for his portraits, boudoir scenes, nudes, studies of ballet dancers and landscapes, which are painted in a vibrant, expressive style. His work shows the influence of both Cezanne and Eugène Delacroix, and, like many French painters of the period, he was influenced by his travels in North Africa, where he stayed for some time, developing his ‘Orientalist‘ interests. He exhibited widely from 1924 and received considerable professional acknowledgment in terms of awards, prizes and distinctions. He also designed attractive modernist ceramics later in his career.

Villa Abd-el-tif, 1926

Danseuse au maillot

As well as being prolific painter, Berthommé Saint-André created erotic illustrations for works by Baudelaire, Diderot and Voltaire and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Oeuvres Erotiques completes (1934), he illustrated the notorious Gamiani (or Two Nights of Excess), which published anonymously by Alfred de Musset in 1833, the lesbian heroine being a portrait of his lover Georges Sand. These may be seen as a natural progression from his voluptuous female nudes, which often show women lying on beds, dressing and undressing, arranging their hair or make up before mirrors, or posing, partially dressed, in their underwear. One critic has summarised this aspect of his work in these terms: “His lively and colourful paintings in their sparkling sensuality, in a deliberately old-fashioned style, are essentially centred on the theme of seductive young girls- pleasantly provocative, half-naked in their boudoir.” The artist’s personal preferences are manifest: he pretty evidently had a preference for buxom, well-built young women.

Dans la loge

Marie

Given the outrageously obscene material provided by Pierre Louys, any accompanying book plates needed to be daring.  Berthommé Saint-André, in his illustrations, was notably explicit.  He was faithful to the texts- and didn’t hold back in his illustrations to a 1931 edition of Trois filles de leur mere; for Pibrac: Quatrains Erotiques (1933), Berthommé drew further lesbian and group sex scenes.  His plates for Louys’ Poesies Erotiques (1946) are comparably faithful to the text; they include brothel scenes and orgies. His quite regular pictures of dancers, and images such as 1937’s ‘Two Girls on a Sofa,’ suggest that the painter may, in any case, have been rather familiar with the seamier or more Bohemian sections of Parisian society. The pose of the two girls, underwear exposed, is certainly highly reminiscent of images of sex workers relaxing painted by Pascin, Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists of the previous generation.

Two Girls on a Sofa

Needless to say, Berthommé’s illustrations to Marcel Seheur’s 1932 edition in French of ‘My Secret Life’ (Ma Vie Secrete) by the English writer calling himself ‘Walter‘ are just as unbridled as those just described. The book is a detailed account of the writer’s numerous sexual exploits from early adulthood and, like Saint-Andre’s responses to Louys, the illustrations are marked by their frank eroticism. Some very similar scenes were illustrated by Berthommé Saint-Andre for an edition of Apollinaire’s Oeuvres erotiques complètes of 1934. Once again, we see sex in a variety of age and gender combinations- plus many macabre and bizarre scenarios as well.  Because he worked in loose pen work and water colour, though, Saint-Andre’s book plates often managed to mitigate the potential obscenity of the material he was illustrating.

The various books illustrated by Louis Berthommé Saint-Andre are now highly collectable. They are regularly advertised through specialist art booksellers and auction houses, commanding high prices for volumes, whilst there is an active market for his bright and attractive landscapes and nudes.

Collected poems, 1949

For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. More information on all the poetry and prose written by Pierre Louys can be found on the bibliography page for the author. For a more discussion of the work of Saint-Andre and of illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Paris- city of pleasure

In 2019, the French author Alexandre Dupouy published City of Pleasure: Paris Between the Wars, a study of the diverse and liberated culture of the French capital in the inter-war period. He explains how, after the austerity and horror of First World War, the French longed for a care-free existence, sensuous indulgence- and sexual freedom. Men and newly-emancipated women alike rejected pre-war social values and moral restraints and instead enthusiastically embraced new lifestyles, discovering a lust for extravagance, pleasure and erotic experimentation that led to the next two decades being labelled the ‘mad years’ and Paris gaining a reptation as the ‘City of Pleasure.’

In 1971, the author Paul Morand, looked back at the era in his travel book Venises and explained: “Everything that had happened in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the revolution in morals that had begun in 1917. A generation was returning from the war, sickened by yesterday, curious about tomorrow, about those who would know how to explain it to them and reveal to them this new world…” The mood had changed and there was an acute hunger to live- as so many no longer did.

Dupouy’s book offers an uncensored photographic record of the period, revealing the daring erotic life of the capital, its fetish scene, its licensed brothels and gay nightclubs, the first sex shop chains, erotic photography, pornography, and much more. Paris became, perhaps, the world’s most decadent city.

In many respects, though, none of this was new. The ‘Gay Paris’ of the fin-de-siecle is renowned, with the can-can dancers of the Moulin Rouge and the many artists who documented the period- such as Jules Pascin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Other capital cities, too, reacted to the end of the Great War in similar ways: the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret is an obvious example; nonetheless, Paris seemed to take matters further.

Paris already had an well-established ‘alternative’ scene: lesbian culture in the city was well-developed before 1914 and daring artists and writers were associated with a bohemian and progressive lifestyle. Nevertheless, the post-war reaction seems to have accentuated these existing trends, which were further fuelled by artistic movements such as Surrealism (who, by the way, championed the work of the Marquis de Sade, an early promoter of alternative sexualities) .

I have often written about Pierre Louys. His late nineteenth century books, Aphrodite and Chansons de Bilitis, had depicted lesbian relationships in an entirely accepting and very open manner. He carried on writing into the next century, but ceased to publish after about 1906. When Louys died in 1925, a wealth of daringly, scandalously erotic books were uncovered in manuscript, titles such as poetry collections Pybrac and Cydalise and the outrageous novella Trois filles de leur mere, and their publication in the following years is symbolic of the fact that France- and especially Paris- was a centre for an active erotic book trade. A flood of titles appeared, dealing with lesbian sex, spanking and leather fetishism (often all in the same story), materially enhancing the reputation of Paris as the city where absolutely anything could be experienced.

This was not a hidden nor a shameful trade. Notable Impressionist artists such as Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre illustrated works by Louys, as did costume designer Marcel Vertes and art deco jeweller Georges Barbier. The painter Leo Fontan both wrote and illustrated spanking erotica, as did the Expressionist Nicolas Sternberg and the Belgian Luc Lafnet, whose BDSM illustrations were a source of additional income to (believe it or not) his main work painting religious murals in monasteries and churches.

Interwar Paris is a fascinating place, a melting pot of radical art, philosophy, politics and new approaches to sexuality. There will be much more to say about the city. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page.

Leo Fontan

The Broken Pitcher- some sexual subtexts in art since the 18th century

Mike Cockrill, The Broken Pitcher

The first line of the verse on Mike Cockrill‘s picture seems to come from an English ballad, ‘The Politick Maid of Suffolk,’ which tells of her seduction by the lawyer for whom she worked as a house maid.

“He kissed and pressed her, o’er and o’er/ As I to you may tell,/ Until her apron grew too short before/ Alas! Poor Nell.”

from A Suffolk Garland, 1818

The shortness of her apron is, of course, a metaphor for her pregnancy- her swelling bulge lifting up the garment- although I think to our forebears aprons generally had a sexual connotations. This may be seen in the sixteenth century euphemism ‘to lead her by her apron strings’ which again implied a girl being led away by her lover for illicit sex. We still retain these sexual overtones in the phrase ‘tied to his mother’s apron strings,’ denoting, of course, emasculation rather than rampant expressions of masculinity.

Anyway, to return to Cockrill’s painting, all is not what it seems. The nursery rhyme and the background of children’s games may suggest a relatively innocent scene, but there is a subtext. Young Nell, looking winsome in her faux-eighteenth century dress with its laced bodice, apron and straw hat, is not at all as young and naive as her playmates. Her dress has slipped to reveal a bare shoulder and a hint of juvenile bosom; the angle of her head and her expression imply a more knowing and come-hither attitude than the puzzlement of her friends by the well. All of this is compounded and confirmed by the knowledge that Cockrill’s title, The Broken Pitcher, is merely a translation of the title of a rather more famous painting by French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805).

Greuze, La cruche cassée

La cruche cassée (The broken jug) was painted around 1771-73. At first glance, it is just an image of a pretty girl in a white dress carrying some flowers, but a closer study reveals that the flowers came from the jug, which is now broken and is carried over her arm. She appears to have gone to a well to fill the jug with water for the blooms, but something untoward happened there- and it may not be only the jug that has been broken. Her dress is disarranged and the bodice has been pulled down to give a glimpse of breast and nipple. As with Poor Nell (both of them) , sex and loss of innocence seem to be the real subjects.

Listening Girl

Greuze was a court and society painter at Versailles under Louis XV. He specialised in sexualised images of noble ladies and suggestive pictures of young girls. Very often his juvenile subjects are overwhelmed by some strong emotion (most often the death of a beloved pet bird) and, in the grip of this, they expose a bare bosom unawares. Sex and allure are what Greuze’s art was all about- and this reputation has survived into modern times. Cockrill understood this as his subtle reference demonstrates; so too, for example, did Mary Wesley in her novel The Camomile Lawn (1984). Wesley’s character Max Erstweiler, a serial philanderer, tells one of his lovers, Helena, who is standing before him in her nightdress, that she “looks like a Greuze.” He is admiring her, “pink, amply rounded, blonde,” when he speaks. This comparison with Greuze is made more apposite, though, by the fact that Max later seduces Sophy, Helena’s niece, when she is only fourteen or fifteen. Moreover, shortly before she loses her virginity with Max, Sophy also unwittingly inflicts great frustration upon another family friend, Tony, when he sees her wearing one of Helena’s transparent silk night dresses. Admiring her maturing figure through the thin fabric, he realises she’s no longer a child but an attractive girl and that he desires her powerfully, even though she’s underage.

Girl with Flower

Girl with a letter

Greuze’s speciality was the unconsciously alluring young female. His juvenile subjects seldom engage with the viewer, or seem aware of their exposure, although an exception to this is the embarrassed looking Girl with a Rose. Greuze’s adult subjects are consistently very different- as we see in the White Hat, a portrait of a young woman who is very aware of her attractiveness and power. Still, Greuze was by no means alone amongst artists of the time in presenting young females as sexually attractive. Amongst other painters and sculptors of the period who worked in the same galant style are Charles-Andre van Loo, Jean-Honore Fragonard, the sculptor Claude Michel, known as Clodion, and Francois Boucher. They all produced titillating works featuring ‘nymphets,’ but I shall focus here on the latter artist.

Girl in Red Dress

Young Girl with a Rose

The White Hat

Boucher (1703-70), is perhaps the most celebrated French artist of his time.  His most notorious painting is his nude portrait study of Marie-Louise O’Murphy (1752).  The painter’s subject was thirteen at the time and she is shown stretched out luxuriously on a chaise-longue.  The image was, reportedly, commissioned by Casanova, who found her living in poverty in Paris. He described her as a “slovenly girl” who, however, when she had removed her dirty and tattered clothes, was revealed to be a perfect beauty. Sadly, she was utterly filthy, so on their first night together he had to wash her with his own hands before doing “all he pleased” with her- except that she refused intercourse, pricing her virginity at twenty-five crowns, a substantial sum that he was unwilling to pay.  Nonetheless, he “found in her a talent which had attained great perfection, in spite of her precocity.” Casanova spent some time with the girl, although he never raised the money to deflower her.  Before they parted, he determined to obtain a memento: 

“I took a fancy to possess a painting of that beautiful body, and a German artist painted it for me splendidly for six louis. The position in which he painted it was delightful. She was lying on her stomach, her arms and her bosom leaning on a pillow, and holding her head sideways as if she were partly on the back. The clever and tasteful artist had painted her nether parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, “O-Morphi,” not a Homeric word, but a Greek one after all, and meaning beautiful.”

This picture, with all its voluptuous promise, was seen by King Louis XV, who determined to see the model.  He “found her even better than the painting” in the flesh and she became his mistress in 1753, when he would have been forty-three years old, three times her age.  The relationship lasted two years and she became pregnant with his child, which she later lost.

Marie-Louise O’Murphy

Gilles Demarteau’s print of Boucher’s painting (c.1761) is interesting for the fact that it adds a Cupid to make the image rather more classically acceptable, whilst at the same time arguably heightening the sexual frisson by having the small boy use her buttock and thigh as a pillow.

Boucher was evidently attracted by the girlish nude, as can be seen from the nymph in the sea in the foreground of his Rape of Europa. She has the same juvenile rounded face as O’Murphy- as, indeed, have several of the other nymphs and handmaids in the scene. The ample display of plump pink flesh typifies the style of the period.

Boucher, The Rape of Europa

Boucher’s style of art and his subject matter were very much of their time, a reflection of the court life and morality of the Ancien Regime. Changing artistic tastes and a changing political and social scene, brought about by the French Revolution, made artists like Greuze and Clodion outdated figures in the later decades of their lives. They were swept away and rendered irrelevant by the classicism of David and others.

Themes of sexuality and gender did not, however, vanish forever from French art, they simply went into abeyance for a period of time. From the emergence of Symbolism in the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a preparedness to write about- and to paint or illustrate- the full spectrum of sexual interests re-emerged, as I have already mentioned in posts on Gerda Wegener, Cheri Herouard and on the prose and poetry of Pierre Louys. Doubtless, there will be more to say…

… and a lot of that is now said in my newly republished study, A Voyage to the Isle of Venus- Greuze, de Sade & Libertinism in Enlightenment Art, which sets eighteenth century art in the context of the libertine literature of the period (de Sade, de Parny, Casanova and others), before tracing the impact of this ‘gallant painting’ on later styles of art. See my books page for further details.

Sexualities in Art 2: Pascin & Lautrec

Jules Pascin, The Siesta

It’s often alleged that same sex activity between females was never criminalised in England because no-one could convince Queen Victoria that such relationships existed. This may be apocryphal, or else the queen was very sheltered and unobservant. It seems highly likely that she will have met numerous women from a wealthy background who had attended boarding schools and had same-sex experiences whilst there; inevitably, she must have met some for whom this was more than a ‘passing phase.’ Lesbian brothels had existed in eighteenth century London and, in the Victorian capital, there were still discreet ‘houses of assignation’ for women to visit. Lesbian houses with an international reputation certainly existed in Paris during the later nineteenth century, focused around the district of the Madeleine and the Chaussee D’Antin quarter (8th & 9th arrondisements).

Lesbian relationships were often only openly acknowledged between between prostitutes. Both Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Pascin have left us a record of the tender partnerships between women living and working in Parisian brothels. Writing in the 1900s in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Havelock Ellis stated that lesbian relationships appeared to be common between actresses and ballet dancers and also between prostitutes. He cited statistics that estimated that 25% of the prostitutes in Berlin were lesbian, that 75% of those in Paris were and that, in Germany overall, the figure was something like 60%. French army physician, Dr Jacobus X (Louis Jacolliot) recorded that couples were well-known amongst the sex workers in Paris. They often dressed alike and were known as inseparables or petites soeurs (‘little sisters’) in the cafes and bars. Both Jacolliot and Havelock Ellis ascribed the women’s sexuality to the their circumstances: to primarily female company and exposure to the worst aspects of masculinity. Other than in these instances, same sex female relationships were quite well concealed in Victorian times, other than as sources of titillation for men in paintings and prints.

Pascin, Trois Nus, 1931

Straddling the gap between porn and authentic reportage is the book, My Secret Life, published in 1888 by a man calling himself ‘Walter.’ It is an explicit account of a lifetime’s sexual experiences and it is very open about the full range of sexual practices, including gay and lesbian sex, as well as quite a few fetishes.

In the rest of this post, I quote passages from Walter’s book. They are unexpurgated and direct, if not coarse, in their language and what they describe (although I have censored his vocabulary slightly). If you might be shocked by his descriptions, it’s best not to read on!

Pascin, Two Girls on the Ground

Pascin, Deux Jeunes Filles

Courbet, Sommeil, 1886

In volume 10, chapter 4, Walter describes how his current girlfriend Helen also liked to seduce her female maids:

“Soon after, Helen had a little servant barely fourteen years old, a ragged-headed but not bad-looking lass, short for her age. She’d lightish brown hair and a bawdy expression of eye. I did not take notice of her at first, she was such a slovenly, dirty, ragged-headed little bitch, was impudent, disobedient, and chuckled at whatever was said to her as if it were a good joke- Helen had the greatest difficulty to make her clean: she bathed her herself and boxed her ears to make her allow her to do so. “She hasn’t a bit of hair on her c**t, yet is a randy little devil, and often goes into the water-closet and I know it’s to frig herself,” said H. “She looks like it when she comes out.” I thought that perhaps Helen and her [other male] lover had played enough pranks before her to make the girl’s q**m tingle, she being just of an age when sexual heat was getting into her little c**t, and f**king occupied her mind.”

Walter then proceeds to try to seduce the girl, called Nell, in front of his lover- and he even exposes Helen naked to the maid to try to get her excited: “Then I made her feel her mistress’ c**t, and she seemed more delighted with that than feeling my prick… [she] put [her hand] on to her mistress’ motte, looking at the c**t in silent admiration. ‘Hasn’t she a handsome c**t?’ ‘Ho, yeas, hain’t it?’ the girl breathed out in a whisper.” He touches her: “I wiped the little vulva, and then with her permission gamahuched it, but could not make her spend, I think. Then I gamahuched Helen again, and when I had done, telling the lass to do the same, to the astonishment I think of Helen she knelt down at once, and eagerly licked her mistress’ q**m, licked as if she had been used to it- perhaps she had. ” A threesome follows soon after “Then the girl licked Helen’s c**t… and so we rung the changes till I f**ked Helen with her bum towards me, the lass standing naked by us, lost in delight and wonderment… “

Another time “I licked the beautiful little q**m, gamahuched Helen- the girl gamahuched her afterwards- we looked at bawdy pictures which I’d taken, we drank champagne… the lass had her fingers on Helen’s q**m whilst my finger was up it. ” Not long after this, though, Nell left Helen’s employment.

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Sofa

Later, in chapter 8 of the same volume Walter describes:

“I found there one day a little servant about fourteen years old, fairly pretty, sprightly and pleasing, and thought I should like to investigate her privates as soon as I set eyes on her… Helen had found out that this girl frigged herself- I suppose all girls of fourteen do- and wanted to be f**ked, knew all about it, had said so. H. and she had already looked at each other’s c**ts- women like doing that- and she had frigged the girl…” Another threesome follows: “Then the girl after a little persuasion felt Helen’s c**t. We had wine, I gamahuched H., the girl got tight with the drink and also gamahuched her…” Next visit, Helen told me that since my absence, she had been gamahuched by the lass who loved doing it, and she’d again frigged the lass who was longing to be f**ked.” Another threesome followed with the girl in bed with Helen and her other lover.

Walter mentions plenty of other lesbian activity. He is told by one woman that her first sexual experience was with her ‘ayah,’ or nanny, in India, who licked her before she had even reached fourteen (Book 11, c.1). He picks up two pairs of very young street prostitutes, a couple aged 14 and 15, who tell him they masturbate together from time to time, and two sisters, aged 13 and 19, who also sleep in the same bed and sometimes have sex together, to keep warm (Book 9, c.8 & Book 11, c.9). Walter also several times pays women to perform ‘the flats’ for him, experiences he describes at some length (see Book 8, c.8, Book 9, cc.7 & 12 and Book 10, cc.3 & 15). The women seem all to be prostitutes and to regularly have sex together, some preferring female to male partners. As one couple asked him perfectly reasonably: “We like it, so why shouldn’t we?” As a popular song of the time said:

“Men hire our persons for the night

Keep us awake and kiss and tease

But ah, how different the delight

I have in cuddling dear Elise.”

Toulouse-Lautrec, Deux amies

Because of its coarse style and explicit content, Walter’s Secret Life is very little known, but it offers to us a picture of Victorian England in the decades before 1888 very much at odds with our usual image of a staid and repressed society. A variety of sexualities and sexual practices were common place (Walter himself had gay experiences and indulged in play with dildoes several times). Walter’s intention may very much have been to produce pornography (eleven volumes in total) but he also recorded facets of real life (primarily that of the working classes) that could otherwise have been lost. It’s evident that- within certain limits- same sex attraction could be expressed and same sex partnerships openly conducted- with a reasonable degree of toleration and acceptance. Same sex experiences (especially amongst servants required to share cramped sleeping conditions) were fairly common. All of this would be hidden from us if we just relied on Dickens, Thackeray and the like.

Lastly, the French doctor mentioned earlier, Louis Jacolliot, also recorded the prevalence in Paris of pretty girls aged from only ten to fifteen who sold flowers on the city’s streets and in the bars and dance halls as a cover for offering sexual services to women. These self-possessed and precociously assured girls were, we are told, “well known for the Sapphic manoeuvres they perform, for a more or less high price.” The gap between then and now suddenly seems much narrower and reminds us that people have not changed very much at all over many centuries.

For more information, see my recommended reading page.

Notes & Sketch by Heinrich Zille