Félicien Rops

The Belgian artist Felicien Rops built a career on images meant to unsettle respectable people. Working from the 1860s onward, mostly as a printmaker and illustrator, he specialised in a mix of eroticism, death and the diabolical that made him the favourite artist of writers drawn to the darker corners of the imagination.

He illustrated the poet Charles Baudelaire, designing the frontispiece for a banned edition of his verse, and worked for other authors of decadent and gothic tales. His own prints set naked women alongside skeletons and devils, mocking the piety and prudery of the age while frankly enjoying the shock.

Rops divided his life between his native Belgium and Paris and helped found a Brussels artists' society that pushed against academic taste. He kept etching his provocations until failing eyesight slowed him, and died near Paris in 1898.