Felicien Rops

Felicien Victor Joseph Rops was a Belgian artist associated with Symbolism and the Parisian Fin-de Siecle. He was a painter, illustrator, caricaturist and a prolific and innovative print maker, particularly in intaglio. Rops was greatly respected by his peers and actively pursued and celebrated as an illustrator by the publishers, authors, and poets of his time and provided frontispieces and illustrations for Jules Barbey, Charles Baudelaire, Charles De Coster, Theophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stephane Mallarme, Josephin Peladan, Paul Verlaine, Voltaire, and many others.

Art historians do not consider Rops a seminal figure of late 19th century art, even among the symbolists, and yet no credible review of symbolism could ignore him either. Some of his critics dismiss him as a novel, 19th-century illustrator/pornographer, but others look beyond the erotica and write of him respectfully and favorably.

Jean-Luc Daval spoke of "the amazing upsurge of Symbolism that in the wake of Felicien Rops and under the influence of Gustave Moreau, characterised Belgian painting at the turn of the century."