What’s new
Behind closed shutters
12th May 2023
We’re back, with lots of new artwork to share in the coming months! We start with Volets clos (Closed Shutters), a remarkable anonymous French portfolio of explicit etchings from 1933. You thought kink was a recent invention? Think again. See them all by clicking here.
A short intermission …
19th April 2023
Letting you know that Rosie and #honesterotica are taking a well-earned three week break, as we’re welcoming an old flame from the US of A to Britain for her very first visit to our lovely country (and she’s no spring chicken!). We’ll be back mid-May with some great new artists …
Missing pussy …
18th April 2023
What does a poet do when called up for war and madly missing his new lover? If it’s Guillaume Apollinaire, you write passionate sexy poems to the object of your obsession, and half a century later have them illustrated by a great artist who understands – see this new Vertès portfolio now by clicking here.
The pleasures of submission
16th April 2023
A new portfolio today from Fernand Dantan, disguised as ‘F. Dannat’, for Thérèse, a 1963 first-person submission narrative by the French libertine feminist novelist Régine Desforges, also under a pseudonym. Yes, (relatively) consensual BDSM was alive even then – see his drawings now by clicking here.
Love letters
14th April 2023
Today’s new artist is the Romanian Marcel Chirnoagă, with his powerful etchings ‘Erotic Mythology’. As he said of his work, art should be like a love letter, seductive and convincing. Judge for yourself by clicking here.
Bawdy stories
11th April 2023
Dino Attanasio is one of the great Italian-Belgian cartoonists, and today we bring you his only (and very successful) risqué work, an interpretation of seven of Boccaccio’s most bawdy tales from the Decameron. See and savour them now by clicking here.
Cocksure
9th April 2023
By chance – or fate – today’s new artist also specialised in tarot decks. We bring you Amerigo Folchi’s Gardens of Priapus cards, all 78 of them; amazing what you can do with wands and cups! See them all now by clicking here.
Fata symbolica
8th April 2023
Good morning tarot lovers – today we bring you René Marcel Rivière’s 2010 Erotic Tarot, full of metaphysical symbolism (and a little nudity). All on the cards now – click here to see them.
Calling all exhibitionists
7th April 2023
Diary time ... Erotic Arts London 2023 is happening, and if you're anywhere near London, September 7–10th, you need to be there. If you’re an artist, you need to be there even more! Honesterotica will be back with great presentations. Find more information, including how to enter your own artwork, by clicking here.
All the positions
6th April 2023
The Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez visited Europe several times in the late 1920s, where he came across Aretino’s ‘sex manual’ Sonetti Lussuriosi. Rather into sex himself, Enríquez produced his own set of drawings to accompany them, which you can see now by clicking here.
Important recent updates
✨ Illustrator and portfolio lists
One of the most common requests we get (and the responses to the recent questionnaire confirm this) is that it would be really useful to have complete listings of all the artists and portfolios on the website – as of May 2026 728 artists and 2,003 portfolios!
So we’ve listened and heard … and by following this link you will find files with these listings in alphabetical order (and where there are several portfolios with the same name their artists will be in order too). The lists are in PDF format, so you can download, save and search them. They duplicate what you can already find in the artist and portfolio listings on the website, but if you’re really into erotic art and illustration and would like a quick ready reference, you should find these invaluable. Enjoy!
✨ Helping you to find your way around
You asked for it, we’ve done it – all the artists on the site now have a set of ‘Similar artists’ links at the end of their biography, so whether it’s bookplate artists, spanking artists, gay artists, whatever, you can cruise easily from artist to similar artist. Have fun!
✨ Hans-Jürgen Döpp, 1940–2025
Few people have shared their wisdom, experience – and wonderful collection of erotic art – more than Hans-Jürgen Döpp, who sadly died last year at the age of 84. For more than half a century Hans-Jürgen devoted himself to the study and collection of erotic art, not as a marginal curiosity or a private indulgence, but as an essential part of human culture. Through his work as a scholar, teacher, curator, author and collector, he helped establish erotic art as a serious field of artistic and historical enquiry. He was an enthusiastic supporter of honesterotica, sharing more than 200 of his portfolios with us, helping to make the website a unique resource of erotic art that would otherwise have been lost to the world. Read our tribute to Hans-Jürgen here.
✨ The difficult mirror
Artists, childhood, and the challenge of looking
At a time of growing concern about online child safety, we are very aware of how we handle the sensitive subject of depictions of children in art, especially ‘erotic art’. We have added an important Themes and Topics article here, which helps explore how artists over time have depicted naked children, and why it is as important to think seriously about what art is for and how we look at and experience it as about what is actually being depicted. Read the piece and see what you think.