Félicien Rops

Biography

In 1858 Rops published the caricature “The Waterloo Medal”: a decrepit, peg-legged Napoleon on a medal, guarded by his devotees while skeletons rise around them. The drawing outraged readers in France and Belgium. By one account, the son of an officer of the Empire even challenged the artist to a duel. Rops’s notoriety only grew.

He was born on 7 July 1833 in Namur, the only child of Nicolas Rops, a textile manufacturer, and Sophie Maubille. For his first years he was taught at home, then by the Jesuits; it was there that he began to draw, and his teachers complained about his caricatures of themselves. His father died in February 1849 and an uncle became his guardian. Rops moved to the Royal Athénée in Namur and at the same time attended the local Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1851 he went to Brussels and enrolled at the university in the preparatory course for law, but he never sought a degree. By 1853 he was drawing from live models at the Académie de Saint-Luc, where he met Louis Artan, Constantin Meunier and Charles de Groux. His caricatures were published in the student magazine Le Crocodile. In 1856, with the writer Charles De Coster and other friends, Rops founded the weekly satirical review Uylenspiegel, to which he contributed more than 180 lithographs. The magazine ran until 1862 or 1863; sources differ.

In June 1857 Rops married Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, the daughter of a Namur judge, and settled in her castle at Thozée, near Mettet. A son, Paul, was born in 1858, and a daughter, Juliette, in 1859; she lived to be five. He took up botany, and in 1862 helped found a rowing club on the Sambre and Meuse. For De Coster’s books, among them “Légendes flamandes” and “La Légende d’Uylenspiegel” (1867), he drew frontispieces and illustrations. In 1868 he joined the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (the Free Society of Fine Arts) and for several years served as its vice-president.

With every year he spent more time in Paris. In 1862 he studied etching there with Félix Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart. Later, with Armand Rassenfosse, he developed a soft-ground varnish method that they called “Ropsenfosse”. By 1865 he had given up lithography and made etching his principal medium. The publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis, an exile in Brussels, commissioned book illustrations from him: between 1864 and 1870 thirty-four frontispieces appeared, mostly for licentious books, and the reputation of an artist of “indecent” prints stayed with him for a long time. He founded the International Society of Etchers (1869–1871), which he kept going only briefly.

Rops met Baudelaire between 1864 and 1866, when the poet was living in Belgium. He made the frontispiece for “Les Épaves”, and later recalled how he had served as Baudelaire’s secretary and never once saw him consult a dictionary. In a letter to Manet, Baudelaire called Rops the only true artist he had found in Belgium.

By the middle of the 1870s Rops had finally parted from his wife, although they never divorced, and he stayed in Paris. From 1876 he lived with the sisters Léontine and Aurélie Duluc, who ran a fashion house; he designed advertising for it. In 1884 he bought the estate of La Demi-Lune at Essonnes, where he pursued botany and bred new varieties of roses. He travelled to Sweden, Hungary, Spain and Algeria, and in 1887 visited New York.

His best-known works date from the same years. The drawing “Pornocrates” (1878–1879) shows a naked woman in black gloves and shoes, blindfolded, led along a marble frieze by a pig with a golden tail. The series “Les Sataniques” (around 1882) remained unfinished; five heliogravures were issued, among them “Satan Sowing Tares”. He made the illustrations for Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Les Diaboliques” in the 1880s and 1890s. I would not read these prints as a confession of Satanism: they show rather a Catholic obsessed with sin, and Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote of him in much the same way. From 1885 he belonged to Les XX (Les Vingt), the group of avant-garde artists in Brussels, and in 1889 he received the Legion of Honour. In 1896 a retrospective of his work was held in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot, and the review La Plume issued a number devoted entirely to him.

In April 1892, while he was working on an engraving, potassium bichromate got into his eye; his sight was saved thanks to the doctor Georges Camuset.

Rops died on 22 or 23 August 1898 at Essonnes, with the Duluc sisters and his daughter Claire beside him. He was buried there; in 1906 his son Paul moved his remains to Namur, and later to Mettet, into the Polet de Faveaux family vault.