L'album du diable : Les tentations de Félicien Rops

Exhibition at the Musée Félicien Rops, Namur, 19 October 2024 - 9 March 2025

Between 1878 and 1882, Félicien Rops (1833-1898) worked on drawings that today count among his masterpieces. During this period, he created an album of 114 drawings entitled Les Cent légers croquis sans prétention pour réjouir les honnêtes gens, in which he depicted with humour his vision of the amorous mores of the society of his time.

At the same time, Rops designed a diabolical album illustrating the power of the femme fatale. In 1881, he announced that he had produced sixty-five drawings for this Album du Diable, which never saw the light of day. Most of these works remain unknown. In 1878, Rops wrote: ‘I am finishing a very curious Temptation of St Anthony. The devil has taken Christ off the cross to offend St Anthony and has stuck a naked woman on it. St Anthony, prey to libidinous desires, rushes to his prie-Dieu and recoils in horror. The pig is stunned’.

Based on the unfinished Album du Diable and La Tentation de saint Antoine, this exhibition catalogue aims to (re)discover the satanic aspect of this controversial artistic production. Works from the Royal Library of Belgium, the Musée Marmottan-Monet and prestigious private collections support the various themes of Rossian art: the presence of the Devil, animality, the book as an object of perversion, the cross as the subject of many ‘diversions’, etc. The book also enables us to retrace the lines of development of the artist's work.