Venus of consequence from 1934

This tasteful, anonymous photograph of a young lady holding an ornate vase had enormous consequences for the men's magazine market into the nineteen sixties.  It appeared in the January 1934 issue of the pulp magazine Pep Stories which was published, like many other pulp magazines of the time, by Romanian born Harry Donenfeld.  A number of his magazines included topless, artistic nudes among the stories but this one went further, as the model's pubic hair was visible. As a result, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice charged Donenfeld with  producing obscene periodicals.

Donenfeld narrowly avoided jail but only because one of his Romanian employees took the rap and said that his boss didn't know that he had inserted the picture into the magazine.  He was jailed instead of Donenfeld.  A grateful Donenfeld gave the man a job for life with no requirement to actually do anything, when he emerged from prison.

It was this case that so terrified the lawyers at Playboy and Penthouse in the nineteen sixties, who didn't want to see their publishers being jailed for showing fur flashing photos.  

Bathtime Venus: Jeune femme au bain by Fernand Lematte (1850-1929)

Here we have a lady climbing into a, particularly luxurious looking, transparent bath by French painter Fernand Lematte.  Lematte studied at the l'école des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in 1870 won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to live and work in Rome from 1871 until 1874.

A Dryad (1871)

In an artistically and commercially successful career he painted historical and classical subjects as well as portraits and religious paintings. 

Odalisque with a monkey

He also did some orientalist works, both in the travelogue style and in the more fantasy harem type, as here.

A bather

From later in his life we have this more impressionist style al fresco bather.  He is a painter who is little known these days, despite his prize winning career but he produced some delightful paintings.