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Overview
Félicien Rops (1833-1898) was one of the most infamous artists of the mid to late nineteenth century. A major figure in the Belgian avant-garde, his decadent, often erotic vision took Paris by storm when he moved there in the 1860s. Charles Baudelaire was among his early admirers, and Rops adopted his idea ‘that woman is the incarnation of evil and the corrupter of man, although he was by nature inclined to take a less severe view of the female sex’. (Edith Hoffmann, Grove Art Online)
Rops was as interested in experimenting in printmaking techniques as he was in femme fatale imagery, and moved from lithographs, often caricatures and illustrations to mezzotints, etching/drypoint combinations, and ‘hand photogravure’ as here, which involved the photographic transfer of the image to a copper plate, prepared with aquatint to give it tone, into which the design was etched. The plate was then hand-inked and printed from in the same way as an ordinary one.
This work reflects Rops's nightmarish vision, a depiction of the subconscious before Sigmund Freud, minus the exploitation, in a powerful and pictorially rich way. The stunted devil’s messenger is whispering temptations into the ear of the reclining female nude in an atmosphere of blackness. ‘Whether [the devil] is depicted as her master or a lascivious observer and subaltern assistant frequently remains ambiguous… While the devil is clearly present as a figure of mastery in some of Rops’s works, he more often lurks on the sidelines in the manner of a procurer or spectator. Though imposing and occasionally majestic in his richness, he can also be fat, misshapen or jester-like, and physically… grotesque’. Clearly Claudia Royal in her essay ‘Asceticism’s desire: Felicien Rops and the demonised woman’ (1990) was thinking of precisely such an image as this. Nearer Rops’s own time, the major Polish symbolist/decadent writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski claimed ‘his intaglio prints are a mighty philosophical system’, and linked them with Schopenhauer and Strindberg.
Rops exerted a massive influence on younger generation artists (much like his absolute contemporary in England, Edward Burne-Jones), including Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, James Ensor and Aubrey Beardsley. Print collectors have always regarded his work highly but his art historical reputation waned in the first half of the 20th century for being too literary; it has risen considerably since the 1960s following challenges to the modernist canon.
See:
Claudia Royal, 'Asceticism's Desire: Félicien Rops and the Demonized Woman', in Keith Busby (ed.), Correspondances: Studies in Literature, History and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 191-202.
Wikipedia, 'Félicien Rops', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018