Harem Venuses: Before Punishment by Franz Eisenhut

Before Punishment (1890)

The harem was a very popular subject with Victorian period painters, offering, as it did, an opportunity to depict sensuously abandoned looking women but with an historical or ethnic justification.  Naked dancers, women bathing and women smoking were all lasciviously depicted by artists keen to feed the public fascination as to what really went on in those mysterious eastern harems.  This example, Before Punishment (sometimes known as Before the Verdict) includes two sinuously stretched out women with an added S&M element, as both are locked in wooden stocks around their ankles.  One is white and redheaded (the Victorians were fascinated by white slaves taken into harems) and the other dusky.  What have they been up to to be punished?  The stocks appear again in the same artist's picture, Captive in the Harem.

Captive in the harem

Both were painted by Austro-Hungarian (born in Novo Palanka, in what is now Serbia) artist Franz Eisenhut (1857-1903).  His father wanted him to become a merchant but a Hungarian painter spotted his drawing talent and prominent citizens of his home town collected money to fund his studies in Budapest and Munich. He travelled in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus and became an orientalist painter, principally.

Polish Venus: The Rest by Wojciech Gerson

Here is a totally sumptuous nude by the Polish painter Wojciech Gerson (1831-1901). Born in Warsaw he worked and studied there most of his life, except for a two year period of study in St Petersburg.  He enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of Warsaw at the age of just thirteen and graduated at the age of nineteen.

Festivities on Midsummer Night (1897)

Well known in Poland today, for his mountain landscapes and patriotic paintings, many of his works were stolen by the Germans in World War 2 and have disappeared.  Today, often only black and white photographs of them remain, for example, this one, a picture of which appeared in a catalogue put together by the Polish authorities in 1950, listing works taken by the Germans.

Twilight (1991)

Summer Rain

He painted a number of nudes but they tended to be 'justified' by symbolic titles, such as these ones, Twilight and Summer Rain. The Rest, however, is one of his flimsier excuses for a nude, dates from 1895 but survived the war and is now in the National Museum of Warsaw.  I've been to Warsaw a number of times but, sadly, have never had the time to visit the museum.

Nude Study 

Gerson became a professor at the School of Fine Arts and was a noted critic and author. The Rest is an unusually sensuous nude among his output and he makes the slightly twisted body of his model glow against the muted, almost monochromatic background.

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.

Aristocratic Venus by Sir Peter Lely

Lady Cullen as Venus

This seductive nude by Charles II's favourite portrait painter, Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), is most unusual for the time (especially in England) as it is a nude portrait, not an idealised mythological subject. The Lady boldly revealing all is Elizabeth Trentham, Viscountess Cullen (1640-1713), who was Lady of the Bedchamber to Charles' wife, Queen Catherine.

Nymphs by a fountain (C. 1652)

Lely was born Pieter van der Faes to Dutch parents in Westphalia but after studying in Haarlem came to London in 1641, where he painted mythological scenes and portraits. He rapidly built a reputation as a top portraitist and painted Charles I.  Despite the English Civil War and the subsequent execution of Charles I his talent was such that he continued to paint during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.  He painted Cromwell and his son and when Charles II was restored to the thrown in 1660 the King appointed him as principal painter.

Nell Gwyn and her son Charles

Lely became fabulously successful and became not so much a painter as a brand, establishing a large workshop where a team of assistants would work on completing the boring bits of his paintings and churning out copies of his most successful works.  It was not unusual for Lely just to paint the face of the subject of a portrait and his studio to finish the rest.   The only other nude portrait Lely did (and probably the only other one anyone did in the seventeenth century in England) was Charles II notorious mistress, the actress Nell Gwyn, who he depicted with her (and the King's) son, Charles.  By this time Charles had had seven children by five mistresses.  Gwyn, in turn, was had been the mistress to two other men called Charles, inmediuately before the King, so jokingly referred to him as Charles III.

Lady Cullen

Lely depicts Gwyn with at least a few swathes of fabric over her body but Lady Cullen is shown as defiantly, completely naked.  Lady Cullen was a woman of notoriety for her physical appearance, lack of morality and gambling.  An heiress in her own right she had an income of £6000 a year (nearly £600,000 at today's value) and managed to spend it all, so that her husband had to bail her out.  Lely also painted Lady Cullen clothed, but she has the same naughty glint in her eye as in the nude painting.  The nude picture may have been commissioned by her husband or even by Lady Cullen herself, some believe.   It is a bold, unique, portrayal of an English aristocrat (Gwyn, after all was a commoner) from the seventeenth century and the fact that she posed for it tells you everything you need to know about her.

If you really like it, it is goes on sale in London in about a week's time, having never been on public view since it was painted.

Sleeping Venus by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806)

I haven't featured many of the works of Fragonard on these pages, which is something I need to remedy as he is one of my favourite eighteenth century painters. Here is A Young Girl Sleeping or Une jeune Italienne à demi-nue, couchée volupteusement sur un lit de repos, où elle s'endormie as it was described when sold in 1776 for a thousand livres (the equivalent of about £10,000 based on the value of gold then). This was an early nude by Fragonard, painted when he was in his most Boucheresque phasem during his first trip to Italy from 1756 to 1761, so he would have been in his twenties at the time. In fact, it was the only nude he painted in this period but is a forerunner of the tastefully erotic work he would do later in life.

The picture disappeared from the record at the end of the eighteenth century and only reappeared in 2014 when it was put up for auction. Unsigned, due to a piece of luck it could be positively identified, as someone, at the original 1766 auction had made a quick sketch of the painting in their catalogue and this had been preserved in the Bibliothèque National. It was sold in 2014 for the comparatively bargain price pf $395.000.  Well worth the money!

Masturbating Venuses by Albert Marquet

These simple but sensual  line drawings are by the French artist Albert Marquet (1875-1947), so they entered the public domain yesterday.  Born in Bordeaux, he moved to Paris at the age of fifteen, to attend the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, where he was a roommate of Matisse, with whom he became a lifelong friend.   

Although usually called a Fauvist. his paintings were less violent in colour and more naturalistic.  Based in Paris, he travelled widely to North Africa, Italy and Northern Europe, painting his favourite subject; rivers and coastal scenes.

He also painted some nudes and produced a number of erotic sketches, such as these masturbating girls and the girl spreading her thighs.  We will look at his other erotic work on The Seduction of Venus another time.

In the top picture and the one immediately above, Marquet's lady is well into the throes of passion here, her delicate frigging causing her to cover her eyes in ecstasy.