Félicien Rops

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Félicien Rops (ca.1898)
Pornocrats (1896)
The Temptation of St Anthony (1878)
Appeal to the masses! (1878)

Félicien Joseph Victor Rops (* July 7, 1833 in Namur , † August 23, 1898 in Essonnes, today Corbeil-Essonnes ) was an important Belgian graphic artist and illustrator of symbolism .

Life

Rops was the son of Nicolas Rops, a textile manufacturer specializing in printed cotton and calico , and his Hungarian wife, Sophie Maubile. He was brought up first by private tutors and then attended the Collège Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, Jesuit college in Namur, where he, already a talented draftsman, made caricatures of his teachers.

After his father died in 1849, he was placed under the guardianship of his uncle Alphonse, who did not understand him and treated him badly, so that when he died in 1870 he wrote the following angry lines:

I had hoped to put him in a cell out of gratitude for all his concern in my youth, but he preferred a stroke. Let's hope I was somehow involved with this disaster. I'm sorry to revile the dead, but what else did I have to take from my guardian?

In the same year 1849 he was expelled from the Jesuit college. He then moved to the Royal Athenaeum in Namur, continued to caricature teachers and also enrolled against the will of the new guardian at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Namur, where he took courses in life drawing. In 1853 he enrolled at the University of Brussels and also studied in the free Atelier Saint-Luc. He became a member of the Club des Crocodiles , a student club, and drew for the resulting magazine Le Crocodile .

In 1856, together with Charles de Coster, he founded the magazine Uylenspiegel , journal des ébats littéraires et artistiques , which was published until 1863. Rops contributed illustrations, mostly accurate and biting caricatures, which he also sold as offprints and thus gained notoriety. However, he had to severely reduce his work in 1857 and ended it in 1860, so that the magazine slowly died. On June 28, 1857, he had married Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, the daughter of the court president of Namur, with whom he had been friends for several years, and on November 17, he had become the father of a son (Paul). A daughter born in 1859 died of meningitis at the age of six months .

Rops and his family lived alternately in Namur and at Thozée Castle near Mettet , which belonged to an uncle of his wife's, from whom she inherited it after his wife's death. This beloved family summer retreat was visited by numerous artist friends of Rops', including Charles Baudelaire , Louis Dubois , Alfred Delvau , Albert Glatigny , Louis Artan (1837–1890) and Edmond Lambrichs (1830–1887).

In 1868 he was involved in founding the “Société des Beaux Arts”, an artists' association that was to be of great importance for Belgian realism , but in the long run Rops found the Belgian environment cramped. Like many others, he was drawn to Paris:

I think I should definitely spend three months of the year in Paris ... I consider these three months to be necessary to study the masters' drawings there ... but especially to be within reach of the publishers to know which ones Books are in preparation, which drawings you need and for which publications you can get orders.
Paul Mathey, Félicien Rops in his studio (ca.1888), Palace of Versailles .

As a result, Rops commuted between Paris, Brussels, Namur and Thozée Castle. In Paris he discovered the etching technique for himself, which he refined and continuously developed for himself in the following years. In his last years he and his friend Armand Rassenfosse developed a special form of soft ground etching , which he called Ropsenfosse . His attempt to spread the new graphic techniques in Belgium, including by founding a Société International des Aquafortistes in Brussels, was ultimately unsuccessful.

But Rops' career as an illustrator was all the more successful. First he provided illustrations for works by his friend de Coster: he illustrated the Legéndes flamandes as early as 1858 , followed by Les contes brabançons in 1861 and Coster's main work La Légende de Uylenspiegel in 1867 . Through the mediation of Alfred Delvau, Rops got to know the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis, for whom he illustrated 34 works between 1864 and 1871, including poems by Baudelaire, whose friend he became.

Rops became one of the best-paid illustrators in Paris and found himself among a group of authors such as Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly , Stéphane Mallarmé , Paul Verlaine and Joséphin Péladan , whose works helped develop his expression of an “erotic fin de siècle Satanism “Corresponded, whereby text and image fertilized each other, in that some authors wrote texts on works by Rops (according to Péladan and Octave Uzanne ).

In 1869 Rops met the sisters Léontine and Aurélie Duluc, two young fashion designers, with whom he fell madly in love. From 1874 he lived with the two of them in Paris. Léontine gave him a daughter, Claire, who became the wife of the Belgian writer Eugène Demolder in 1895, and Aurélie had a son who, however, died soon after birth. A divorce sought by him was refused by his wife. During these years, Rops enjoyed life in Paris to the full, was a regular guest at the cafés and took part in the cultural life of the French capital.

In between he went on trips, enjoyed water sports on the romantic Meuse and the North Sea, traveled to Scandinavia , Hungary (1879) and Spain (1880) and with the Duluc sisters twice to the United States (1885 and 1887) and to North Africa (1888).

In 1888 he was honored with the French Legion of Honor . However, three days later, some of his books were confiscated for "violation of morals." During this time, Eugène Rodrigues also tried to bring order and overview to the now very extensive oeuvre of Rops by publishing several catalogs of works (which appeared under the pseudonym Erastène Ramiro ).

In his last years he increasingly sought peace. At the age of 51 he had bought La Demi-Lune , an estate near Corbeil, about 30 kilometers south of Paris. There he grew roses and continued to work despite a stroke in 1890. In 1892 he suffered serious eye damage in an accident involving caustic chemicals, but this did not lead to blindness, but rather improved after a few weeks. Until his death, Rops was looked after by his two lovers, Léontine and Aurélie. He died on August 28, 1898 in the presence of his lover and his daughter Claire.

A museum is dedicated to Félicien Rops in his hometown of Namur and the youth hostel there is housed in his villa.

The Belgian Obediences website names him a well-known Freemason .

literature

  • Charles Brison: Felicien Rops. A monograph. Gala Verlag, Hamburg 1971. German edition of: Pornocrates. An Introduction to the Life and Work of Félicien Rops (1833-1998). London 1970
  • Georg Brühl (ed.): Félicien Rops: The messenger of the devil. Graphics. Eulenspiegel Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-359-00254-7 .
  • Maurice Exsteens: L'œuvre gravé et lithographié de Félicien Rops. Pellet, Paris 1928. Relevant catalog of works. Numbers of the form E… refer to this catalog.
  • Robert Delevoy, Gilbert Lascault, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, Guy Cuvelier: Félicien Rops. Bibliothèque des Arts, coll. "Cosmos monographies", Lausanne / Paris 1985.
  • Joseph Hanse: Naissance d'une littérature. Ed. Labor, Brussels 1992. Therein chapter: Charles de Coster et Félicien Rops , pp. 105–116
  • Friederike Hassauer , Peter Roos : Félicien Rops: The female body, the male gaze . Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-251-00063-2
  • Joris-Karl Huysmans : Beyond Evil. The erotic work of Félicien Rops. Ahriman, Freiburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89484-900-9
  • Gustave Kahn : Félicien Rops. Marquardt, Berlin 1912.
  • Pierre Mac-Orlan , Jean-Dubray : Félicien Rops. Authorized translation into German by Charlotte Wolf. Marcel Seheur publisher, Paris / Leipzig 1930.
  • O. Mascha: F. Rops and his work. Munich 1910.
  • Hans Joachim Neyer (Ed.): Felicien Rops. 1833-1898. Catalog of the exhibition in the Wilhelm Busch Museum Hanover January 17 to March 21, 1999. Hatje, Ostfildern 1999, ISBN 3-7757-0821-9
  • Erastène Ramiro: Catalog descriptif et analytique de l'œuvre gravé de Félicien Rops. Paris 1887
  • Erastène Ramiro: L'œuvre lithographie de Félicien Rops. Paris 1894
  • Erastène Ramiro: Supplément au Catalog de l'œuvre gravé de Félicien Rops. Paris 1895
  • Thierry Zéno : Les Muses sataniques - Félicien Rops, œuvre graphique et lettres choisies. Jacques Antoine, Brussels 1985, ISBN 2-87132-010-1

Web links

Commons : Félicien Rops  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Félicien Rops  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Letter from Rops to Edmond Lambriches. In: Neyer: Felicien Rops. 1999, p. 11
  2. ↑ Hélène Védrine: Rops ou la politique de l'entre-deux , in :: Jean-Pierre Bertrand (ed.): Histoire de la littérature belge francophone 1830-2000 . Paris: Fayard 2003, pp. 85-93
  3. ↑ Friederike Hassauer, Peter Roos: Félicien Rops: The female body, the male look , 1984, p. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-251-00063-2
  4. ^ Letter from Rops to Eugène Demolder dated October 31, 1893. In: Neyer: Felicien Rops. 1999, p. 15
  5. ^ Brison: Felicien Rops. Hamburg 1971, p. 29
  6. ↑ http://www.mason.be/en/celeb.htm ( Memento from July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Rops, Félicien
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rops, Félicien Joseph Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian graphic artist and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Namur
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 1898
Place of death Essonnes (now Corbeil-Essonnes )