Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) was an artist and caricaturist whose work poked fun at the mores, politics, and attitudes of Georgian England. Highly feted in his day, Rowlandson’s work, in particular his erotic etchings tickled the fancy of the Prince Regent—the heir to the throne or as he was later known King George IV. What kind of erotica Rowlandson supplied to dear old Georgie, we will never quite know as (sadly) the bulk of his porny prints were later destroyed by the prim Queen Victoria. Any saucy pix that do remain are (unfortunately) kept under lock and key at the present monarch’s (QEII) private collection at Windsor—though 962 of Rowlandson’s etchings and paintings held in the Royal Collection can be viewed online.

What little is known of Rowlandson comes mainly from his obituary as published at the time of his death and a few anecdotes about his early life recalled in memoirs by fellow artists and those who bought/liked/documented his work. Born in Old Jewry, in the City of London, Rowlandson was the son of a weaver. His father became a trader in the City, but he was soon bankrupted and took his family out of London to Yorkshire in the north of England. Rowlandson’s mother died when he was very young—not more than an infant—and his childhood may have been ruinous had not one relative (an uncle) died leaving funds for his education. The pattern of poverty and good fortune recurred in Rowlandson’s life and was more than apparent on the city streets where the working class and a world of crime and vice, drunkenness and licentiousness rubbed along with lords and ladies, soldiers and priests.

Rowlandson returned to London where he attended a school in Soho Square. He apparently showed considerable aptitude for drawing—his schoolbooks were filled with sketches and caricatures of school friends and teachers. Around 1772, or thereabouts, he attended the Royal Academy studying painting and drawing. He traveled to Paris where he lived for three years before returning to London where he exhibited his paintings. On the death of his aunt, he inherited a small fortune (£7,000 apparently) which was quickly squandered on women, drink, and gambling.

Once more in poverty, Rowlandson was encouraged by friends to seek a career as a caricaturist producing work for books (Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne), magazines, and private collectors. He worked in pen, ink, and watercolor. These pictures were then engraved to make etchings and hand-colored. During his lifetime, he produced over 10,000 etchings and illustrated some 70 books. He also wrote and illustrated his own books starting with Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque in 1812. His work proved highly successful and Rowlandson has been rightly described as “one of the most talented British draftsmen, unsurpassed in his expressive flowing sinuous lines, and tactical use of watercolor.”

The magnificence in his pen and ink work is easily seen in his drawings across the genres of his career. His contemporaries were William Blake, known for his poetry and mysticism, and William Hogarth, for his extensively detailed satirical drawings. Among them, Rowlandson is incomparable in his relaxed, playful creation of renderings and his genius graphic placement of color.

He met life head-on considering it an adventure to be gained:

He was deeply involved: an infamous gambler, a big drinker, ribald, loud, laughing—a big man in many ways. He came right up close against the world, and chose to stay there—all the better to feel it live and grow and change, and ultimately to die. That is what his art is all about: the world of England, especially the boisterous London of George III and the Regency from the late eighteenth century up until his death just ten years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne.

His work is filled with an “abounding and insatiable gusto of enjoyment”:

His gift was a “kind of running fountain, purveyor of laughter to the average man,” with a piquant taste for variety and an almost unboundable sense of energy for provoking both mockery and mirth. As W.H. Pyne wrote shortly after Rowlandson’s death in 1827, “He has covered with his never-flagging pencil enough of charta pura to placard the whole walls of China, and etched as much copper as would sheath the British Navy.”

Rowlandson produced a considerable amount of erotica for private collectors including royalty, most of which “is now hidden away in Windsor Castle, among what is known as the George IV collection.”

It is no secret that Thomas produced for the same royal patron a series of drawings “notoriously of free tendency as regards subject.” ...Rowly spent much of his play-time in the famous pleasure palaces of London, particularly the Vauxhall, and the unrestrained life in those centers gave him inspiration for many curious and effective erotic pictures.

Some (like fellow caricaturist George Cruikshank) felt Rowlandson squandered his talent and “had suffered himself to be led away from the exercise of his legitimate subjects, to produce works of a reprehensible tendency.” Whether true or not (too much of his work has been lost or is held in private collections to know for sure), Rowlandson’s erotic caricatures are some of the finest ever produced with their mix of a shared world of unspoken experience and a scathing sense of humor. Rowlandson understood human desire and its attendant frailties. But we can only guess as to what King George IV found so pleasurable about his work.
 

 

 
View a selection of Rowlandson’s erotic caricatures, after the jump…
 

 
Information on the charming set of matchbox covers featured in this post is hard to come by. I know they’re Japanese, any idiot can see that. And I know that their date of origin is almost certainly from before 1950. They stem from a collection of matchbox “labels” that is on Flickr and that has recently become one of my favorite places on the Internet. Vintage Japanese matchbox covers are incredible.

The person who runs that set of images, who uses the Flickr username maraid, explains that the collection had been the passion of the grandfather of a friend, and also that the images date from “1920s-1940s.”

All of the covers feature an image of an unaccompanied woman in a state of undress. There is more than one woman in the series. The images have a very consistent palette of a blue, red, green, and a cream color used mainly for the skin. Sometimes the model is outdoors, but mostly she is indoors. She is never shown doing anything particularly erotic, just hanging out or fooling around with her kitties, that’s was evidently erotic enough back in the day. Some of the images derive from an artist’s studio, as can be seen in the instances in which cans of paint brushes are included.

Before public health drives to reduce smoking, before the advent of vaping, before the advent of widely available lighters (not to mention those fancy windproof lighters), matchboxes were a widely familiar medium. I quit smoking five years ago, and I’ve scarcely lit a match since then, and I don’t carry matches with me anymore (even then I preferred lighters). You’d think that marijuana legalization would do wonders for the matchbox industry, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

These images are signed, which is unusual for matchbox covers from that era—surely an indication that the artist and maybe even the manufacturer recognized these as something special. Most matchbox labels are seen as “just advertising” so there’s seldom information about who did them. Even with the signed initials, I still have no idea who did these. Hats off, in any case.
 

 

 

 
Lots more after the jump…....

‘Salome.’
 
In 1898, when the artist Aubrey Beardsley was on his deathbed, he wrote to his publisher, pornographer Leonard Smithers, and demanded he “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings… by all that is holy all obscene drawings.” Smithers took no notice of the recent Catholic convert Beardsley’s crise de conscience and made a very tidy profit publishing the infamous artist’s work after he died.

Beardsley was a phenomenon. It is quite difficult to grasp just how revolutionary and how utterly shocking this slight young man’s deceptively simple ink drawings were to both the critics and the public of Victorian England. His work was described as the product of a sick mind and damned as “grotesque” and “obscene.” Yet, despite this froth and seething outrage, Beardsley became, for a very brief time, famous, or rather infamous, and his work inspired a legion of imitators who made profitable careers from copying his art.

Beardsley was born into a lower-middle-class family in Brighton on August 21st, 1872. His father was a spendthrift who squandered money on drink and pleasure. His mother had pretensions towards a more genteel existence and did her best to encourage her children into the cerebral pleasures of art and culture. As his father was unable or more likely unwilling to hold down a regular job, his mother frequently sought funds from her own father—a former military officer—to pay the bills. From an early age, Beardsley showed a talent for art and music. He gave piano recitals with his older sister Mabel and the pair devised their own theatrical productions which they performed for the amusement of their mother and her friends.

He was a frail child and became severely ill with tuberculosis, which plagued him throughout his life and was eventually the cause of his death at a mere twenty-five years of age. His mother described Beardsley as being as “fragile as a piece of Dresden china.” However, his consumption fired his frenzied periods of intense work where he spent hours drawing before collapsing from exhaustion.

At school, he developed his own “perverse” style of illustration—first in the borders of his exercise books, then in the pages of the school magazine. After his education, he found work at an architect’s office, but Beardsley was far more interested in life as an artist than starting an office career. He was encouraged by the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who told him he never liked to encourage young men to be artists, but in Beardsley’s case, there was never any other option. Burne-Jones told Beardsley to enroll in classes at the Westminster School of Art where he soon discovered he had a style of drawing that was “freakishly” his own. He claimed he had seven styles of drawing and was determined to develop more. Two important influences on Beardsley came during a trip to Paris when he saw work by Toulouse-Lautrec and an exhibition of Japanese prints. These inspired him to finesse his own style into something new and highly original, something he liked to describe as “grotesque.”

Beardsley sent his latest illustrations off to various magazines. These were rejected. His work was considered too weird and too dangerous for the suburban readers of popular magazines. However, some work he had sent on spec to the publisher J. M. Dent, which brought Beardsley his first commission. He was hired to illustrate Thomas Malory’s tale Le Morte d’Arthur for £200. The work was long and hard and demanded considerable concentration, determined willpower, and strong, confident execution. Beardsley alternated between using pen and brush to create his pictures. Over the course of producing this monumental work, Beardsley changed and developed his style of drawing from the overly elaborate to a clan and austere simplicity. This was the start of his meteoric rise into London’s fashionable art and literary world.

According to his friend, the writer Max Beerbohm, no one ever saw Beardsley work at his pictures which he claimed he produced by candlelight in a darkened room. Beardsley was more likely to seen immaculately dressed hosting tea parties at his mother’s house or socializing with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Beerbohm at the Cafe Royale. He became friends with Wilde and drew the illustrations for his play Salome. These illustrations became more famous than Wilde’s so-so drama, in particular, the image of Salome kissing the freshly decapitated head of John the Baptist with his blood spilling down, giving sustenance to a lily. Beardsley was then hired as art director for the legendary and controversial Yellow Book which provided a home to many great writers and artists and was, unfortunately, to be the unlikely cause of his undoing.

When Wilde was arrested on the charge of sodomy, he was described as carrying a “yellow book.” This quickly became confused with the Yellow Book magazine for which Beardsley has supplied his “grotesque” illustrations. This unfortunate association was too much for the magazine’s publisher who immediately sacked Beardsley. Virtually overnight, the young artist’s celebrated career was snuffed out. Thereafter, he eked out a small living by drawing erotica for privately published books and magazines.

Beardsley’s reputation was as controversial as his art. He was considered effete and a homosexual, but was more likely asexual. He was rumored to have been involved in an incestuous relationship with his sister, which supposedly led to either a miscarriage or a stillborn child. He once wrote to his publisher Dent that he planned to dress up as a woman and have tea in drag at the Savoy. These are all most likely nothing more than rumors and schoolboy pranks. Beardsley relished notoriety and never evolved from a juvenile sense of fun. His drawings were filled with breasts and phallic symbols. The aftermath of Wilde’s arrest and trial led Beardsley to reevaluate his life. He became a Catholic (at the encouragement of his sister) and denounced his most scurrilous and offensive work. This included his comic and highly explicit illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the bawdy Greek drama of one woman’s attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by denying men sex.

Sadly, Beardsley succumbed to tuberculosis and died in France on March 16th, 1898.
 
From Oscar Wilde’s ‘Salome’ (1894).
 

 

 
More ‘obscene’ beauty from Aubrey Beardsley, after the jump…
 

An illustration from 1935 by Italian-born artist Carlo Farneti for a posthumous edition of Charles Baudelaire’s book of poetry ‘Les Fleurs du Mal.’
 

“That heart which flutters like a fledgling bird,
I shall tear, bleeding, from his breast, to pitch
It blandly in the dust without a word
To slake the hunger of my favorite bitch.”

—a passage from Charles Baudelaire’s poetry book, Les Fleurs du Mal.

When French poet Charles Baudelaire first published his poetry book Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857 it caused quite the scandal. Baudelaire, his publisher Poulet Malassis and the book’s printer were all prosecuted for creating “an insult to public decency.” Baudelaire would eventually be convicted on two charges—obscenity and blasphemy. He was also forced to remove several poems from the book when it was republished in 1861. Below is a portion from Les Fleurs du Mal “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”) in which Baudelaire beautifully romanticizes a decomposing corpse:

“The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.

Then tell the vermin as it takes its pleasance
And feasts with kisses on that face of yours,
I’ve kept intact in form and godlike essence
Our decomposed amours!”

 
The controversy over Les Fleurs du Mal would eventually lead to the demise of Baudelaire’s career as a poet. Heartbreakingly, Baudelaire would pass away in 1867—ten years after the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal, addicted to opium, penniless and in a state of perpetual paralysis. Les Fleurs de Mal was published yet again in 1868 to include previously unpublished poems written by the poet. This publication would reignite interest in his work which would continue to grow in the years following his death. In 1935 Italian artist Carlo Farneti created a series of evocative illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal for Parisian bookstore Gibert Jeune. Farneti had relocated to France in 1926 and quickly became a sought-after artist creating illustrations for books by renowned French novelist Émile Zola and Edgar Allen Poe (who Baudelaire referred to as his “twin soul.”) Twelve of Farneti’s exquisite illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal follow—some are gorgeously NSFW.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

‘Les Aphrodites.’
 
We’re in Paris of the 1920s: a world of cheap hotels, low-rent dives, darkened rooms, the hiss of gas lamps, the smell of cigarettes and sex, eau de cologne, grubby bedsheets, prostitutes, lovers, women, men, alcohol, opium, and unfettered hedonism. This is the world Frans de Geetere depicted in his erotic etchings for a variety of scandalous books published during the decade. One such volume was Jean de Gourmont’s romantic novel La toison d’or (The Golden Fleece), a tale of two young lovers’ difficult and torturous relationship. De Gourmont described de Geetere’s illustrations as:

‘...displaying a rare erotic talent, [that] show miraculously and without insulting precision the aura of sensual mysticism I too had sought in which to bathe my ideas and my dreams’.

De Gourmont’s book is long forgotten, but de Geetere’s etchings continue to resonate with succeeding generations who find his work “sombre and disquieting, infused with a miasma of conflicted sexuality and existential dread.”

Frans de Geetere was born François de Geetere in Oudergem, a suburb of Brussels, in 1895. He studied art at the Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He hated his tutors’ insistence on classical representations in art and quit college in 1915. His friend, the rich, debauched libertine Harry Crosby later described this act of rebellion as being “whipped into a flame of hatred by the frescoes his father compelled him to paint in the neighboring churches.” He took a job whitewashing houses. He was nineteen, no longer at college, and eligible for conscription into the Belgian army to fight in World War One. He fled to the Netherlands, which was neutral during the conflict, and worked as a porter at the William Arntz psychiatric hospital in Utrecht. He found this work dispiriting and at times deeply disturbing. However, this together with the daily newspaper reports of fighting across Belgium and France, focussed his ambition to succeed as an artist. He changed his style from naive colorful depictions of fantasy and imagination to dark, brooding, portraits of the patients at the psychiatric clinic. During this time that de Geetere also met the woman who became his life partner, artist May den Engelsen.

The couple lived on a two-masted houseboat called the Marie-Jeanne. After the war, they decided to steer their boat along the canals to Paris. It was a slow leisurely journey during which the couple drew and painted and used a small printing press to publish their work. They arrived in Paris in the early 1920s berthing their boat at the Quai de Conti near the Pont Neuf, in the very heart of the city. They were to live here for the next five decades.

In Paris de Geertere and den Engelsen fell in with a group of rich hedonistic bohemians. It was a world of parties, sex, drugs, and orgies. The Marie-Jeanne became a “symbol of free-floating morals”:

...conveniently moored at the heart of the world’s cultural capital, the Marie-Jeanne became a hippy sanctuary long before hippies were invented. Avant garde artists Tamara de Lempicka and Kees van Dongen were regular visitors, as were American emigré millionaire and publisher Harry Crosby and his beautiful and inventive wife Caresse. During the late 1920s and early 30s Harry and Caresse became intimate with Frans and May, sharing art, poetry, partners, beds and experiences with drugs

Crosby was a notorious millionaire spendthrift who was as famous for publishing works by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, as he was notorious for his life of sex and drugs. He eventually died in a murder-suicide pact after losing all his money in the Wall Street Crash.

De Geertere played hard and worked harder. He supplied illustrations for books of cult literature and erotica like La toison d’or (1925), Les Aphrodites (1925), Arthur Rimbaud’s Les stupra (1925), Les Chants de Maldoror (1927), La légende des sexes (1930), and his self-published volume Spasmes (1930) which he described as depicting love-making, sex and the orgasm as filled with:

...anxiety, violence and spasm, for this is undoubtedly true poetry. I do not care to please people who imagine love as sexual kindness, and its representation as the sign of genteel rendezvous.

De Geertere’s work has lasted because it was created through a synthesis of great technical talent and considerable personal experience. These are not pictures of imaginary figures but real women and men engaged in carnal acts in small darkened rooms where the gas light flickers and there’s a dank smell of sex and sweat. By the early fifties, De Geertere’s work fell out of favor as erotica was replaced by glossy pornography. He returned to painting bright colorful pictures as he had done in his youth and spent his freetime flying kites.
 

‘A Prostitute and Her Client.’
 

‘Marthe.’
 
See more erotic etchings, after the jump…

 
The question is often asked by our dear readers as to why some images are pixelated on social media? “We all got nipples,” they might comment on a post or “I’ve seen nudies before” they might add. Well, yes, of course. But social media is not really that open or user-friendly and never has been. We all might be grown-up about things that may shock or trigger others, but it only takes one turd in the pool for swimming to be canceled or one Mrs. Carmody for an account to get shut down.

Artist provocateur Giulia aka @scientwehst knows this only too well as she has had her artworks pulled and her accounts shut down after some busybody was offended by her erotic collage. I believe being offended is good for the soul. If you are offended then you’re learning something new and increasing your intellectual scope rather than narrowing it down to a rather grotty clogged artery that is on the verge of causing fatal cardiac arrest.

Giulia thinks “Social-media society is not a public, democratic space,” and we should stop treating it as such.

These white-tech bros dictate in their swivel chairs what we can share and how we can manage our platforms. They create a facade of openness, while exploiting us and profiting from our data and content. We are not protected because social-media has been privatized. Social media companies serve as an arm to our government’s agendas… Our government is also inherently sexist… Sexism still thrives in social media society… Let’s all connect the dots.

Giulia is a 27-year-old artist from Florida, who currently resides in Brooklyn. Growing up she felt uncomfortable about her body image. She wanted to be tall and skinny coz that’s what magazines and TV and movies and adverts sold as the perfect female form. This anxiety carried on into her twenties until one day, “about 2–3 years ago, [..] I started to say, ‘fuck this shit! I will never have this type of body, and I’m going to embrace the softness that is me’.” Her view now is “fuck a beauty standard: just be you.”

Out of this rethinking, Giulia started making collages in which she placed architectural pictures of various buildings, churches, and interiors over images lifted from porn and glamour mags. The results were provocative, some might say shocking yet certainly powerful and erotically charged. Sex it seems is everywhere but especially in our minds.

Follow Giulia on @scientwehst.
 

 

 
More of artist provocateur Giulia’s pin-ups, after the jump…
 

 
It may seem a bit early for Halloween but if Selfridges think it wise to open their Christmas department in August then I see no reason why not to share some amusingly ghoulish pictures as prep for our favorite time of year—Allhallows Eve.

So, here for our enjoyment and possible edification are some intriguing pictures of women and skeletons. “What’s going on here?” you may ask. Well, quite a lot actually. These vintage photographs and postcards of women dancing and flirting with skeletons are more than mere momento mori or snapshots of ladies at carnivals having a jolly wheeze in the face of death—they are in some respects quite transgressive.

Some of these pictures were intended as, well, shall we say, “educational erotica” giving the viewer a frisson of arousal while at the same time battering them on the head with the salutary warning that the wrong kind of boner could lead to disease and death. Something those Decadent artists used to bang (ahem) on about in their paintings.

The association of sex and death was something that would not have gone amiss with most women, for although the percentage of mothers dying during childbirth fell dramatically in the 19th-century, there was still a staggering number of perinatal fatalities—500 to 1,000 per 100,000 births.

Then again, a few of these pictures seem to show happy young thanatophiles reveling in the thrill of cavorting with their skeleton chums. Lucky old them!

The last selection comes from a series of photographs taken by Joseph Hall of a vaudeville production called Death and the Lady from 1906, which was loosely based on a 17th-century English ballad.

What I take from all these rather fantastic pictures is that Death comes for us all, so it’s never too early to get your costume ready for Halloween…
 

 

 

 
More of this skeleton crew, after the jump…
 

 
Take a pencil and a piece of paper. Sit in front of a mirror and look at your face. Now draw your own portrait in one continuous line. Pencil on the paper, eyes solely on your reflection. This will give you an idea of the technique used by multi-media artist Katie Dunkle to “blindly” draw images taken from pornography. 

In her series of “blind contour” line drawings titled Girls, Dunkle re-creates pornographic pictures in ink, pencil, chalk, and watercolor without looking at her canvas. The finished drawings are recognizable yet disturbing representations of erotica from which the viewer can step back and “reconsider what it means to pose nude for the visual stimulation of others.”

In her artist’s statement for Girls, Dunkle wrote:

The digital adult industry allows females to be groped in the darkness by a disconnected set of hands, transforming a real person into a two-dimensional cluster of flesh-tone pixels. In this respect the artist chooses to literally be blind to her artwork’s unfolding creation to honor these unknown women all the while asking and wondering, who are these women?

Katie draws attention to the countless women who are showcased for pleasure and then hastily discarded. Her priority as a female artist is to give these women a new pedestal for a different audience, whilst honoring the female body in all its glory. Her artwork gives these women a new soul and through the use of mixed media on paper allows the creations to radiate emergent emotional content, which takes the viewer on an intuitive journey through everything from anguish, seduction, pleasure and mystery.

Dunkle’s inspiration for Girls is “the insatiable urge of humanities demand for sexual stimulation.” Dunkle’s intention is to open debate about the nature of pornography and to “breathe life back into” these women making them more than just naked sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure. See more Katie Dunkle’s work here.
 

‘Stephany.’
 

‘Roxanne.’
 

 
See more of Katie Dunkle’s ‘blind contour’ drawings, after the jump…

 
We’re leaving Beardsley country. Taking the old dirt road off Harry Clarke county, on thru the inky backwoods and the old lost village long grown green and rotten with tree and weed, towards a place called Vania Zouravliov. The sky’s dark, and there’s movement among the trees that grow too close together to give any idea what that movement might be other than it’s something watching, something waiting. And you know pretty soon you’re going be meeting this something one way or another and the thought of it sends a cold ripple of excitement through your backbone as you push on ahead wanting to get there faster.

That’s kinda like the feeling I get when I look at the artwork of Vania Zouravliov.

Zouravliov is a Russian graphic artist based in London who draws sensuous, intricate pictures of beauty, death, sex, and decay. Born into an artistic family (his mother was an art teacher), Zouravliov was a child prodigy whose earliest works gained him considerable praise and some notoriety—“famous communist artists, godfathers of social realism, told him that his work was from the Devil.” He was drawing “evil hammerhead people” at the age of four, which he has said proves that “Contrary to what most adults would like to believe, a child’s mind can be a very strange and disturbing place.”

By thirteen, Zouravliov was exhibiting his work in Moscow in 1994 and then internationally. He began to travel and later attended art college in Edinburgh where he started his career in earnest producing work for the Scotsman newspaper and then for magazines and comics. He moved to London where he is currently based.

In an interview with Awk Online Gallery, Zouravilov said he found his inspiration everywhere:

[F]rom popular culture to classical art.I get inspired by fashion magazines, books, films, old photographs, music, various cultures, and religions. I think my overall melancholic view on life is represented in my work.

When I was a child I used to draw animals and birds all the time and now I draw women. I can’t think of anything more interesting or beautiful at this point in my life. I use female characters in my work to say or explain things about myself.

He cites his favorite artists as Ingres, Gustav Dore, Grunewald, Von Bayros, Bakst, Utamar, and Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff—whose paintings have an “other-worldly feel to them.”

That other-worldly feel is also there in Zouravliov’s work which is rich, beautiful, and utterly personal. There’s a quote from Zouravliov that’s been bandied about the Internet for a long time which gives his answer to the question “What’s the one thing that gives you the inspiration to keep making art?”

A strong belief that creativity is the only relative freedom we have in this world.

It’s a good answer which I hope is true. See more of Vania Zouravliov’s work here and here.
 

 

 
See more of Vania Zouravliov’s art, after the jump…
 

 
From what I can gather, the earliest erotic pocket watches date back to the 17th-century when they were intended as prized erotica for a small but wealthy market. Some of these early designs were made as saucy keepsakes for loved ones, while others were specifically manufactured for the Chinese market, in particular the Emperor and his entourage, where many of these naughty timepieces were given as gifts to cement trade and diplomatic agreements.

By the 18th-century, erotic automaton pocket watches—that is timepieces with painted dials and movable parts depicting explicit scenes of sexual congress—were popular with royalty and the upper class. These watches usually featured a brightly painted erect penis that swayed back and forth in time with the second hand. One such watch, the Henry Capt, Musique d’Amour sold for $216,880 in 2011. Of course, back in the day, being caught with a porny timepiece could lead to its confiscation and public censure. Today we’ve got the Internet…

These pocket watches weren’t just cheap knock-offs, they made by some of the finest and most famous clockmakers in the world like Cortébert, Breguet et Fils, and Doxa. In the 20th-century, companies like Omega and Smiths-Ingersoll continued the tradition producing a limited but highly collectible selection of erotic watches—including one in which Snow White entertained the Seven Dwarves.

The following selection ranges from Breguet et Fils “Cavalcade” (1820), which depicts a couple on on horseback, to the mid-20th-century Swiss designs of randy gentlefolk enjoying some outdoor sports.
 

 

 
More titillating timepieces, after the jump…
 

 
Denis Diderot might sound like the name of some superstar French soccer player but it is in fact the name of a famous Enlightenment writer, philosopher, and playwright, who might do you good getting to know.

Diderot (1713-84) had the smarts. Apart from all his fancy writing, Diderot was also co-founder, editor and contributor of Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts), or the Encyclopedia. His intention was to make information and knowledge available to all—well, at least to all those who could read that is. Diderot and his buddies wanted to break the superstitious rule of religion over their fellow citizens. To this end, he was always asking difficult questions of religious believers, gently poking fun, and writing controversial philosophical tracts on the question of God, belief, design, and all that.

Take, for example, his book The Skeptic’s Walk which featured a deist, a pantheist, and an atheist out on convivial perambulation together where each offered up their thoughts on God, the universe, and so forth. Due to its content, the book was not published in Diderot’s lifetime. It was long believed the only copy of Diderot’s original handwritten text had been confiscated by the police not long after its completion in 1752. Thankfully, it turned out that Diderot had another copy (told you he was smart) which was eventually published in 1830.

Anyway, you’re not here to read about Enlightenment philosophy, you’re here to see naughty nuns, and we’ll get to that shortly, well, unless of course you’ve already scrolled past all of this and are getting an eyeful below. Good luck with that. That’s kinda like people who “Like” things on Facebook but never click the fucking link. But let’s get back to Diderot.

You see, Diderot was also a bit of a scallywag and a wit. He had a propensity for pranking his buddies which on one occasion led to his infamous work of literature, La Religieuse or The Nun.

The Nun all started when Diderot was miffed over the loss of one of his drinking buddies who had moved out of Paris and back to some big fancy country estate in Normandy. To draw him back to Paris, Diderot started writing his pal (Marquis de Croismare) a series of letters purportedly from a nun called Suzanne Simonin. This young lady had been forcibly sent to a nunnery by her greedy and ungrateful family—a common occurrence at the time—where she found herself preyed upon by sadistic lesbian Abbess of Ste-Eutrope.

The Marquis on receiving these missives from such an unfortunate young woman, wrote back offering his help. Diderot continued the ruse until the Marquis demanded to meet with the young lady to get her free from her imprisonment in the convent, at which point Diderot wrote a final letter from another fictional character claiming the young girl was dead. Later, when all was revealed, the Marquis found the whole prank “hilarious,” as he had acted honorably throughout. (I’m guessing that this was expressed with more of a nervous titter than an outright LOL-style guffaw.)

The correspondence started an idea in Diderot’s head to write a book based on his letters and this became La Religieuse. Published twelve years after his death in 1796, The Nun became a scandalous hit. Obviously tame by today’s standards, the book’s notoriety continued right up to the 1960s when filmmaker Jacques Rivette made a movie of The Nun which was banned by French authorities after the Catholic Church ran a letter-writing campaign to have the film stopped. Rivette’s rather dull movie went on to be nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

I’ve never quite got the whole nuns as sex objects thing—maybe the attraction for some is the frisson of deflowering someone who is supposedly betrothed to the Son of God. Or simply a manifestation of “hot for teacher” for lapsed Catholics? Many nuns were forced into convents against their will (like the character in Diderot’s book), and many (even today ) had the sexual attentions of priests and bishops forced upon them against their will. When Aldous Huxley pointed out that the grounds of some convents were littered with the skeletons of dead babies it is as if he is landing the blame solely with the women. This kind of selective blindness never equates male desire and sex with the consequences of pregnancy or disease.

In 1947, Paul-Émile Bécat produced a series of illustrations for Diderot’s The Nun. DM’s featured Bécat’s work before, and he had a highly respected reputation as an artist and for illustrating some of the most infamous and famous books of French literarture—see more here. This small selection mainly features on the nuns Bécat drew for Diderot’s book and some other works.
 

 

 
More sacrilegious nun action, after the jump…

An image of a restored illustration from Eugène Modeste Edmond Le Poitevin ‘Les Diables de Lithographies.’
 
You might think that I’ve finally gone crazy after reading the title of this post, but you’d be wrong. I’ve been slightly crazy for quite a while—mostly due to the occupational hazards of my “job” here at Dangerous Minds which occasionally expose my eyes to such things as illustrations depicting disembodied flying vaginas. But I’m okay with that, especially since we can all write off this experience as “educational” due to the historical relevance of the vintage illustrations in this post.

In 1832, French painter and Lithographer Eugène Modeste Edmond Le Poitevin published Les Diables de Lithographies—a collection of 80 illustrations on twelve different lithograph plates. A short time later that same year Le Poitevin would put out fourteen more lithograph plates containing 115 additional illustrations for Les Diables de Lithographies. The images are as diabolical as they come and would bring Le Poitevin his greatest success as an artist. His illustrations of Satan showing off his huge penis, or perhaps carting it around in a wheel barrel was quite the departure for the artist who was known for his paintings comprised primarily of landscapes, marine life, sailors, and fishermen.

At the time of Les Diableries de Lithographies’ publication, the city of Paris was in upheaval. In June of 1832, an event referred to as the “June Rebellion” (aka the “Paris Uprising” which writer Victor Hugo in part based his 1862 novel Les Misérables on) was initiated by rebels opposing the liberal-minded monarchy of Louis Philippe I. Philippe I came to power in 1830 after Charles X was forced to abdicate his position as King. French Republicans were pissed. But that was nothing compared to other dire issues in Paris such as the horrific eruption of cholera that killed over eighteen thousand residents of the city (primarily poor people, of course) and another hundred thousand who resided outside the city. Word on the street was that the government was poisoning the water wells.

Despite the all the dead bodies and rumors of poison water, Le Poitevin’s Les Diables de Lithographies was incredibly popular which led to a demand for more from his adoring fans. The artist would respond with several other fiendish publications such as Les diableries érotiques, Petits sujets des diableries, Bizarreries diaboliques, and Encore des Diableries. I’ve included images from both Les Diables de Lithographies and Les diableries érotiques by Le Poitevin below which are without question, very NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Amidst the slaughter of the First World War, 23-year-old Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky (1891-1970) decided he wanted to be an illustrator of children’s books. Rojankovsky was an officer with the Imperial Russian Army, serving in Poland. When the Russian Revolution came, he moved to the Ukraine, where he started his career as an illustrator of fairy tales and children’s books. But this first taste of his future career was short lived as Rojankovsky was conscripted into the White Army—a rag tag confederation of anti-Communists—and sent to fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Rojankovsky was on the losing side and ended up behind barbed wire as a prisoner of war. On his release, he escaped to France, where he began his career as an illustrator in earnest.

Rojankovsky later claimed two things inspired his career as an artist. A childhood trip to the zoo to see “the most marvelous creatures on earth: bears, tigers, monkeys and reindeer,” and the present of a set of color crayons. The animals inspired his imagination, with the crayons he could bring his imagination to life.

In France, he adopted the name “Rojan,” an abbreviation of his surname. As an artist, Rojankovsky had a great facility for producing work in various different styles. This made him very popular with publishers who hired him to illustrate hundreds of children’s books and many works of classic and erotic works of literature by the likes of Paul Verlaine and Raymond Radiguet among others.

In 1941, when France capitulated to the invading German armies during the Second World War, Rojankovsky fled to America, where he established himself as a preeminent and award-winning illustrator of kids’ books. His work was so popular that for several generations of young Americans, Rojankovsky’s paintings and drawings were their first introduction to art and illustration. Classic books like Frog Went A-Courtin’, Rapunzel, Snow White, and The Three Bears.

As he established himself as a children’s artist, Rojankovsky also managed to maintain a highly successful career as an illustrator of some pretty hardcore erotica. It was as if that moment of self awareness long, long ago on a battlefield presciently reflected his future double life as an artist of high ideals and far more baser instincts.
 

Snow White: One of Rojan’s many children’s illustrations.
 

From ‘The Big Elephant Played His Horn” (1949).
 

 

 
More of Rojan’s erotic artwork, after the jump…

An antique erotic Meerschaum pipe.
 
Many of the sensual pipes in this post are made of Meerschaum—or as it is known in the world of geology, sepiolite. The material is found in many locations including the Black Sea, Turkey, Tanzania, and Africa and became quickly coveted by smokers in the early 1700s due to its porous nature. Meerschaum is still used to make pipes, and there are many resources online that sell hand-carved pipes of every description. For this post, I’ve assembled some rather choice erotic Meerschaum pipes and a few others that fall into the “titillating” category of implements you can use to light up your favorite smokable materials.

If you have visited Dangerous Minds’ Facebook page, you may recall that there is an image of a man taking a drag from a pipe in the shape of a woman’s leg. And I’m happy to share with you that I was able to track a few additional leggy-pipes out there on the Internet which I’ve posted below.

I’ve also included a photo of a Meerschaum pipe that is alleged to have once been the possession of occultist Aleister Crowley. The pipe is now part of a large, private collection owned by Meerschaum pipe enthusiast, Roy Ricketts. Everything that follows is NSFW.
 

 

 
More erotic Meerschaum pipes, after the jump…

 
Before the First World War, postcards were the Twitter of the day. They were used to share personal news, arrange appointments, or pass on messages of love—though thankfully, there was very little of the trolling we all have to endure today. There was also a small but highly profitable cottage industry for erotic postcards which increased dramatically during the War years. This was one way by which governments and generals thought they could keep the boys on the frontline happy by giving them some reason for fighting—saving the sexy young maidens of France from the hairy, uncouth hands of the Hun, and so forth. Millions of such cards were produced by the French during the War, which led to the moniker “French postcards” being applied to all erotic postcards whether they were made in France or not.

After the War, these naughty French postcard were still popular. This popularity offered some young women some independence and an easy way to make a quick franc or three. There is a genuine innocence about these photographs of young women flashing a white thigh above stocking top, or posing nude like a Greek goddesses, or playacting as a saucy French maid, which make them far more erotic than the bare-all, gynecological pictures of today’s cynical world of porn.
 

 

 

 
More dirty French postcards, after the jump…