Venus in Black Stockings 3: Prints by Manuel Robbe

This wonderfully erotic print of a masturbating girl is by French artist Manuel Robbe (1872-1936). Although he worked in pastels, oils and watercolour it is as a printmaker that he is best known. His technique of using a poupee (a cloth covered ball) to apply sugar and indian ink to his metal plates, then heating them as well as using the same plate for multiple colours produced the multi-tonal blacks and greys which are such a feature of this print. It also meant that each one was slightly different.  The girl's red hair provides the only flash of colour in this otherwise monochrome picture.  This is a potent image for Agent Triple P because, as a teenager, the first girl we ever saw playing with herself in reality was a redhead.  She wasn't wearing black stockings though, just a white towelling dressing gown.

Seated nude 1910

Robbe was born in Paris and studied at Lycées Condorcet and Louis-le-Grand then at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. .  He won a bronze medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition.  Many of his pictures focus on women and provide an excellent window into the world of the Belle Epoque.

Femme ajustant son bas

During the Great War Robbe enlisted as a pilot and won the Croix de Guerre for his combat bravery.

La Puce

Although many of his pictures were conventional there is certainly a number of overtly erotic works in his catalogue, such as this breast fondling young lady.   We have just posted a couple of these over on our Seduction of Venus blog.  Although puce means flea in French it also is a term used for a virgin girl.

Les bas noirs

Venus with Doves by François Boucher

Time for an actual Venus on Venus Observations today. This lovely study by Boucher uses, as was not uncommon, a classical title as an excuse for showing a contemporary naked girl.  The anatomical completeness of this shows that it was one of the many pictures he produced for "private collectors"; often using his wife as a model.  

Boucher puts her bald mound dead centre in the composition and ensures that her vulva and the surrounding parts of her body are more brightly lit than her upper body, face and lower legs.  It's quite clear what you are supposed to be thinking about!

Gorgeous!

French Venus: Clémence Poésy for Lui

A few years ago striking French actress Clémence Poésy lamented her decision, as an eighteen year old, to appear topless in a film.. She said the director shouldn't have asked her to do that.  As a result the actress had a clause put in her film contracts that any topless shots were not to be used for publicity purposes.

So, what do we find in next month's Lui but Mlle Poésy posing wearing (just about) upmarket clothes and flashing her bust and bottom.  She has continued to appear naked in films and TV (such as the adaption of Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong).  She said of this that: "It would have been very wrong if there hadn’t been any nudity in Birdsong, because the relationship between my character and Eddie’s was all about sex."  

Anyway, Mlle Poésy,has a new TV series to promote as she is the female lead in the new Anglo-French crime thriller The Tunnel which is a subterranean re-make of the Danish-Swedish production The Bridge.  Triple P confesses that he hasn't been swept up in this wave of Baltic thrillers showing on British TV and, in fact, doesn't really like crime dramas but we may give this one a go just because of the presence of the lovely Clémence.

So, as we can see this sort of publicity works.  Mlle Poésy appears in Lui's November issue.  Agent Triple P reads about her appearing in The Tunnel,  looks it up and finds that the first episode is on the television this week.  We would have watched it too except it is on Sky and we refuse to give any money to Rupert Murdoch if we can avoid it.  The French don't get the series until next month, according to Lui.

Clémence's pictorial is much the most interesting in this month's Lui which continues, visually, in much the same vein as the first issue.  That is women's magazine-style photographs of skinny fashion models. The headline pictorial, of Mick Jagger's daughter, Georgia May, is shot by Terry Richardson in his usual dull, flat style.  She also doesn't reveal anything more than you can see on the cover; certainly unlike her older sister Elizabeth when she posed for Playboy a couple of years ago.

Venus with a car 2: Renault 40CV

We haven't had any vintage Venuses for a while so here we have a young French lady with a vintage Renault.

Agent Triple P doesn't know much about French cars of the interwar period but we think this might be a Renault 40CV from the mid to late twenties (production ceased in 1928 but this is the mid-twenties version of the Renault badge).  We'd be interested to hear from any experts!

The E on the number plate indicates a Parisian registered car (France was the first country with a national system of number plate registration) from about the same period.

The lady's clothes also put her in about this time as well.  The shorter dresses of the twenties had led to the need for longer stockings and suspenders, rather than garters, to hold them up.

From a series of postcards, we would imagine. Honk! Honk!

Venus with a dog 1: By Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Young woman playing with dog (La Gimblette) (1765-1772)

We have had a few pictures featuring ladies with dogs before.  There is one in our post on Mario Tauzin and another in our post on Chéri Hérouard. Artists have quite often included dogs in erotic art, not necessarily because of any desire to depict women in intimate congress with them but more, we would suggest, to imply something of the smell of a woman; particularly their nether regions, as we will see in the future.

Here we have two definitely erotic, but also delicate, works by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806).  Fragonard was born in the world capital of perfume, Grasse.  Originally destined to be a notary his artistic talent was spotted, as an eighteen year old, by François Boucher and his progress was so rapid that he won the Prix de Rome even before he enrolled in the Academy.  After studying in Rome he became a favourite of the court of Louis XIV, producing a number of erotic works for private consumption.  The French Revolution deprived him of his wealthy patrons and he himself felt it sensible to leave Paris for the country where he continued to paint, contributing to his total of over 550 completed paintings. However, by the time he returned to Paris, a few years before his death, he had been totally forgotten and remained so for many decades.  Now he has been rehabilitated as one of the great masters of French painting and a precursor of the Impressionists.

Girl with Dog (1768)

Fragonard's approach to this small but distinct genre includes these two paintings which rely for their erotic effect on conveying a strong tactile sense as well as similar poses revealing the backs of the subjects' thighs.

The one above, Girl with Dog,  is on display in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.  The contact between the dog's fluffy tail and the girl's inner thighs are, no doubt, the cause of her sweet smile although it is painted in such a way to (just) allow for a more innocent explanation.

The same can be said of the top painting, Young Woman Playing with Dog.  The dog is in the shadow whereas the light in the painting is focussed on that shadowed area between her thighs.  Sometimes known as La Gimblette (a sort of pastry) Fragonard produced several versions, some now lost, where the girl is depicted as offering a pastry to the dog.  Considered very risque at the time, engravings of it were marked "not for display".

Claude Michele Clodion (1738-1814) produced a number of sculptures inspired by these pictures.

Vintage Venus as Wallpaper!

Not the sort that you put on your computer screen but real wallpaper!  Triple P was in a wine bar in the city and observed this diverting wall paper in the cellar.  

The lady we were with was most intrigued!  From their hairstyles we would guess that it is French from the twenties.  It's The Door in Cornhill, if you are ever in the neighbourhood.

Christmas Venus

A Happy Christmas (or whatever your equivalent may be) to all our readers.  We really appreciate those who come by and, especially, those who take the time to comment.  Your comments and, indeed, requests are always welcome!  When we started this blog a little over four years ago we never dreamed that it would approach the five million visits we are close to now!

Our Christmas girl is by French illustrator Aslan of whose work we will be presenting more in the New Year!

Bond Girl Venus 2: Bérénice Marlohe -Skyfall

Bérénice Marlohe in Skyfall

Triple P went to see Skyfall on Sunday which is a truly tremendous film if not, perhaps, a traditional James Bond film.  In feel it is closer to the literary Bond, oddly, perhaps, that of John Gardner rather than Ian Fleming, but does at last achieve the "grittiness" that the producers have continued to strive for (unsuccessfully) since the days of Roger Moore.  Above all it's a proper film by a proper director made with proper actors. It has more character development than all of Roger Moore's films put together.

Skyfall does, however, have more humour than Daniel Craig's previous efforts and is the first time we have actually liked him as Bond.  Fortunately, he has indicated that he is happy to keep playing Bond. We will not comment on the plot of the film other than to say it is going to be a deserved hit.  The cinema, however, was full of children under ten and it is certainly not suitable for them, not least because it is quite dialogue heavy.  I suspect it's down to parents who remember the Roger Moore Bonds which were more like children's films and haven't registered that they have evolved.

Anyway, decorating Skyfall as principal Bond Girl was French actress Bérénice Marlohe who has leaped from relative obscurity as a bit part actress on French TV to stardom in one impressive leap.

Bérénice went after the role personally, rather than through her agent, by finding the name of the casting director and e-mailing them direct.

Half French with a Cambodian/Chinese father she was finding it difficult to get roles in France as she "wasn't French enough".  Now she has appeared in a hit film she seems to have no intention of working in France again.  Quite right too.  Your loss, our little froggy chums!

Some people have observed that she looks a little like Monica Belucci.  Well, she does in some photographs.  Whatever, she is an extraordinarily beautiful woman and, interestingly, in some pictures she looks completely western and in some quite oriental.  A neat trick!

She is a comparatively elderly 33 and spent ten years of that at the Paris Conservatoire studying classical piano.

If we have any criticism of her in Skyfall it's that she is plastered in far too much make-up but her beauty and elegance shines through, fortunately.

As a previous Bond might have observed: "shplendid!"

4 million page views!

At some point in the last few days we passed 4 million page views which means that the last half a million took just two months and ten days or so to clock up.  

These milestones always give us an excuse to post a one-off picture which we have been sitting on.  This one is an image from, we suspect, the early thirties (or possibly the late twenties).  Unusually for these sorts of French photographs it contains the name of the photographer Hilde Meyer Kupfer (we have seen it written as Kupfer-Meyer in a book on German naturism).  It is not, as some sites will have it, the name of the lovely model and the photographer's name may well be a pseudonym so that she may or may not be a woman.  If she was a woman that would have been quite unusual in this period.  The AN on the bottom left of the picture stands for the Alfred Noyer studio in Paris which published many nude postcards as well as conventional subjects.

Here is another picture with the same inscription and it looks very much like the same girl.  

Erotic film Venuses 1: Eighties films part 1

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about our first encounter with a young lady, S, dressed only in a vest, shortly after seeing the film Betty Blue (1986).  At the time we couldn't remember the exact date of this enjoyable experience but since then we have discovered a little window back to the eighties that has enabled us to date it exactly.

Some of the booklets from Triple P's Filofax from the late eighties

Before the days of iPads, iPhones and what have you, the information organisation system for most people (particularly in the City where Triple P worked) was the Filofax: A small, ring-bound binder originally created by the Lefax company of Philadelphia and first imported into Britain in 1921.  For many years the only people who used them in the UK were vicars and army officers but in the early eighties they became de rigeur in the Square Mile and amongst creative types.  All sorts of accessories and booklets appeared for them.  Agent Triple P found his old Filiofax over the weekend and his contained such items as restaurant, sports and shopping guides to London; maps of London, Vancouver, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Milan; an Italian dictionary (we were spending a lot of time in Rome and Milan) addresses and diaries and other sections we had created ourselves.  There was even a supplement covering Wimbledon, where Triple P was living at the time.  Today you can get basic sheets for Filofax but nothing like the depth of content from the eighties.

The National Film Theatre tucked under Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank of the Thames

Anyway, one of the sections we had created was a list of films we had seen, covering the period 1986-1989.  It was interesting to see just how many times we went to the cinema in the late eighties compared with now.  These days we tend to wait until a film comes out on DVD and don't bother with putting up with all the other noisy, food munching people in a cinema.  Food really should be banned in cinemas and that is one of the reasons that we liked the National Film Theatre, which we were a member of at this time, as food was absolutely banned from their theatres.  The NFT was conveniently located close to Waterloo station from which it was easy to get back home.  

Looking at the list of films today it is amazing how many we don't remember ever seeing and, indeed, their titles spark no recollection whatsoever: Tenue de soirée, The Morning After, Broadcast News...  Some of the others we had completely forgotten about:  La Letrice, No Way Out, Something Wild...  The fact that there are a number of French titles is not a surprise as the NFT specialised in obscure foreign films.  These were particularly popular with our then girlfriend, S, because, as we mentioned in our piece about her, she liked films with lots of sex in.  We had a girlfriend at University, C, who only liked books if they had sex in them.  She made Triple P read out the more purple passages to her and used to get herself into a fine old self-caressing froth over them; always an enjoyable way to spend a rainy afternoon at college.  S, of course, couldn't diddle herself in the cinema (although she did have the habit of fondling Triple P's trousers to see if he was enjoying the sex scenes as much as her) but this had the extra benefit of her getting worked up into a nicely simmering level which could only be released later in the evening.

Anyway, we can now look at the "racy" (as S used to call them) films we went to see in this period as an excuse to show some pictures of actresses from the eighties.

Isabelle Adjani in Subway

Oddly, the first film we went to with S was Fantasia in July 1986.  The following month we saw Luc Besson's incredibly hip Subway (1985) at the NFT which did not have any sex scenes in it but did feature an impossibly beautiful Isabelle Adjani.

Valentina Vargas

 Christian Slater licks his lips in anticipation.  As well he might

Vargas and Slater in The Name of the Rose

At this stage Triple P's relationship with S was as a friend rather than anything physical.  Nonetheless S, who always chose the films we attended, started to select some increasingly racy ones.  Not really racy but containing one very good sex scene was The Name of the Rose (1986) which we saw in February 1987 with S, HMS and Agent DVD.  The girl getting it on with a very young Christain Slater was Chilean born but French-based actress Valentina Vargas.  Valentina happily disrobed in many of her films but nothing, perhaps, matched the passion she infused into her scene with Slater in The Name of the Rose.  Apparently director Jean-Jaques Annaud had briefed Vargas but didn't tell Slater what was going to happen resulting in a scene that genuinely conveyed sexual excitement; a rare thing in mainstream cinema.  S liked the fact that it was the girl initiating the encounter and the fact that, at least initially, she was on top. 

The next film we went to with S which had a sex scene in it was Jonathan Demme's rather odd Something Wild  (1986) featuring Melanie Griffith before she really hit it big in Working Girl (1988).  A be-stockinged Griffith, in a black wig, ties Jeff Daniels to the bed and does distracting things to him whilst he tries to make a phone call.  This was ten years after a teenage Griffith had appeared in Playboy with boyfriend Don Johnson.

Melanie in Playboy, October 1976

Again, S liked the fact that Griffith was the initiator and was on top.  This, we later found out, turned out to be by far her favourite position.  She also liked Griffith's hold-up stockings in this scene as black hold-ups  were her hosiery of choice.

Sigourney Weaver flashes in Half Moon Street

More stockings on view in our next cinematic outing with S which featured Sigourney Weaver as an unlikely prostitute in Half Moon Street (1986).  Weaver took her clothes of several times in this one but we both decided that, in fact, it would have been better if she hadn't.  A scene of a topless Weaver on an exercise bike just gave us the giggles.  Most unfortunate, as HMS would have said.

Emmanuelle appears to be playing that really annoying tune by Verdi which became even more annoying when inserted into French beer commercials

No sex in the double bill of Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon Des Sources (1986) but a brief scene of a naked 20 year old  Emmanuelle Béart which set S to musing on the desirabilty of renting a villa in Provence so that she could wander around naked, drinking pink wine (her favourite) and eating Salad  Niçoise.  Sadly, despite several attempts we never managed to organise this holiday.

Our final film of 1987 was the aformentioned Betty Blue (1986) whose sex scenes had a significant effect on pitching S and Triple P into a full blown relationship.  S was a very oral sort of girl and found these particular scenes between  Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade especially exciting as she hadn't seen anything like them in any other film.

Next time we'll look at the racy films we saw with S in 1988.