Félicien Rops

Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain, Paris
Purchased from the above by the present owner in 2002

This condition report has been provided by Jane McAusland FIIC, Conservator and Restorer of Art on Paper, Nether Hall Barn, Old Newton, Nr Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14. Support This drawing on a sheet of prepared paper is laid down onto a thin card. The condition is good. Medium The medium is in a good condition. There is a small mount line running horizontally towards the foot. Note: This work was viewed outside studio conditions. JANE McAUSLAND
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Once characterized as a 'painter who paints phalluses the way others paint landscapes' (Félix Fénéon, Petit Bottin des Lettres et des Arts, 1886), the unconventional Rops liked to shock both through his oeuvre and his unconventional lifestyle. He was known on occasion to receive visitors in the nude, and at a time when women were supposed to be pure, docile and 'virtuous', and artists to 'renounce the flesh', Rops went against social conventions by separating from his wife and living happily for nearly thirty years in a ménage à trois with the sisters Léontine and Aurélie Duluc.

Rops felt profoundly stifled by the conservative mores of his time. His images subsequently often rebelled against what he perceived as the hypocrisy of the middle-classes and the social conventions of his time. Like many artists of the period, Rops believed in the importance of being of one's time and depicting 'modernity'. In March 1878, Rops wrote to his patron Edmond Picard, 'When I say that a painter must be of his time, I believe that he must paint above all else the character, the moral sentiment, the passions and the psychological impressions of the time'. This notion of modern life was for Rops crystallised and personified by la femme parisienne, a being that completely seduced him when he first moved to the French capital. 

Instead of taking a moralising stance in his works, Rops often expressed these ideas through a mischievous sense of humour. In the present work, the scene seems to depict two elegant art connaisseuses, admiring a sculpture, while in the background there appears the lyric depiction of a Puvis de Chavannes-like figure, a vision in white, the colour of her dress underlining her purity and innocence. Looking more closely, it becomes apparent that the two young ladies in the foreground are actually admiring the 'masculinity' of the sculpture they are holding, which they are scrutinising closely. The girl in the background, rather than wearing a white dress, is in a state of undress, having wrapped a sheet loosely around herself while doing her 'toilette'. Standing before a mirror she carefully applies make-up to her face, prior to getting dressed and revealing herself as a femme mondaine.