Looking wistfully back to the years of the ancien regime, the nineteenth-century Parisian authors Jules and Edmond de Goncourt felt moved to celebrate an era which – with its risque novels, fondness for dangerous liasons, and unashamedly erotic art – they saw as a golden age of licentiousness: “Sensuality! It is the very essence of the eighteenth century; its secret, its charm and its soul. The eighteenth century lives and breathes sensuality. Sensuality is the air upon which it feeds and which brings it to life. It is its character and its breath; its force, its inspiration, its life and its spirit.”
The Goncourts’ breathless enthusiasm was shared by many of their European contemporaries – including, it now turns out, no less a figure than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Researchers working on the French eighteenth-century collections of the State Hermitage Museum recently came across a group of previously unknown erotic engravings collected by the Tsar in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It amounts to an erotomane’s hoard, one worthy of comparison with similar collections stored in the British Library’s so-called “Private Case” and the Louvre’s more colourfully entitled “Collection d’Enfer” (“Hell’s Collection”). Most of the images are quaintly erotic rather than hard-core pornographic, although the Tsar’s evident liking for certain subjects – notably depictions of aristocratic Frenchwomen being given enemas by their maidservants – means that the line is occasionally crossed. A selection of around 40 of these images forms the nucleus of a new exhibition at the Russian museum’s London outpost, the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House. Displayed alongside paintings, sculpture and numerous objects of decorative art, also drawn from the Hermitage’s collections, they have been arranged to form a cornucopia of French rococo eroticana.
“The Triumph of Eros”...
