Mainly concentrating on the occult and erotic, his works can be hard to read, but never disappoint in originality or execution.
symbolism
A close friend of Charles Baudelaire during his final years, Rops was an early adopter of mixed media and always original.
After 1900, most of his paintings were portraits of young women. Some seem to have been made in search of a suitable husband.
Friend of Georges Seurat, his paintings were overtly Symbolist in the late 19th century, featuring St Genevieve, Hesiod and a muse.
He was a friend of the Divisionist Georges Seurat, but in the late 1880s became a strict Symbolist. A small but fine selection of his paintings.
After Symbolism, he turned to Impressionism, with a wide range of motifs from mountain peaks to smoky steelworks.
A pupil of Hans Gude, he stopped painting for over 10 years. When he resumed, he painted unusual landscapes, peaking in a Symbolist masterpiece of the apocalypse.
He became an ‘Artist of the Soul’, continuing to paint Symbolist motifs, including some drawn from Les Fleurs du Mal, but little after 1908.
He started his career designing Art Nouveau wallpaper, then progressed to book illustration, including Baudelaire’s notorious
poems.
A relatively common motif, it started with the peculiar association of death and the erotic, then changed in the late 19th century.
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