In Victorian Britain, a naked body could hang on a public wall as long as it came with a story from myth, the Bible or a sermon. Painters lived off that bargain for most of the century. Some of the pictures below kept their cover for good. Others lost it, sometimes more than a century later, when someone stopped believing the story.
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Victorian erotic art begins with a contradiction. Britain passed its first obscenity statute in 1857, and in 1865 the British Museum locked its indecent objects away. Yet every spring, the walls of the Royal Academy in London filled with bare bodies.
The difference lay in the title. A woman undressing in a London bedroom was obscene. Give her the name of a nymph or a goddess, and she could hang in a public exhibition. A scene of sin passed too, as long as the picture preached against it.
The works here were painted or drawn in Britain between 1830 and the 1890s. Each one shows that bargain at work, in the story the painter chose and in what happened once people saw the picture.
12. Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image: The Soul Attains (1878)
In a sculptor's studio, a naked woman stands on the floor while the man who carved her kneels in front of her. Her feet rest flat on the boards beside a fallen pink flower, and that small detail carries the whole story: a moment earlier, she stood on a pedestal as marble.
The story is the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with his own statue until Venus brings the statue to life. For a Victorian painter, the myth was useful, because it allowed him to show a nude who had only just stopped being stone. Edward Burne-Jones painted this scene in 1878, as the fourth and last canvas of a second Pygmalion series begun in 1875.
Burne-Jones had a private reason to return to the myth. He had painted his first Pygmalion set between 1868 and 1870 for Euphrosyne Cassavetti, whose daughter Maria Zambaco, an artist of Greek and British descent, he had loved since 1866. A pencil study of the statue's head from 1870 carries Zambaco's features, which the finished paintings tone down.
That love nearly broke his marriage. In January 1869, Burne-Jones tried to leave his wife for Zambaco. The affair ended beside the canal at Little Venice, in London, where she asked him to take laudanum with her and the police were called. His wife, Georgiana, stayed with him, and when she later wrote his life, she left the episode out.
At a Glance
Artist: Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898)
Painted: 1878, the fourth and last canvas of his second Pygmalion series (1875 to 1878)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: About 99 × 76 cm (39 × 30 in)
Where to see it: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England
11. Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax (1893)
Her lips almost touching its mouth, a woman floats in midair and holds a severed head level with her own face, while blood drips into a pool below. Two years after he drew her, the young man who made this picture lost his job because of the writer who had imagined the scene.