Blog — Félicien Rops

Félicien Rops is one of those artists who seems to have wandered into the nineteenth century carrying news from a much stranger time. Born in Namur, Belgium, in 1833, he began conventionally enough: school, art lessons, university in Brussels, caricatures, marriage, respectable connections. But respectability never really suited the Artist. As a young man he helped found the satirical journal Uylenspiegel, drawing political and social cartoons, and by the 1860s he was spending more and more time in Paris learning printmaking and drifting toward the literary underground. By 1875 he had settled there permanently. Paris gave Rops exactly what he needed: writers, publishers, prostitutes, dandies, skeptics, nightlife, collectors, cafés, bad reputations, and an audience that could still be scandalized.