What’s new
Young love. Ah!
27th May 2021
Today’s new artist is the Secessionist Croatian painter Robert Auer, and his touchingly innocent scenes of young love, set in comfortable 1900s Zagreb interiors. See them here. Enjoy!
Open-air sex with added horns!
26th May 2021
Louis Icart is a perennial favourite on the site, and today we have added his rarest, indeed unique, portfolio, Les amusements du faune from 1925. Enjoy faun, woman and friend having enormous fun by clicking here. Summer is coming …
Is an erotic lie justified if it’s beautiful?
25th May 2021
‘Painting is the most beautiful of lies’ wrote the Fauve artist Kees van Dongen – see what he meant with his Casanova and Arabian Nights portfolios, new to the website today. They’re here. Enjoy …
Graphic graphics for graphic texts
22nd May 2021
Something a bit different today – using graphic elements and typography to add to his compositions, Johannes Vennekamp comments on cultural, social and political issues in a way both artistic and thought-provoking. See his Genet and Sade portfolios here.
The ultimate 1950s gay fantasy
21st May 2021
Today’s enchanting handmade portfolio from Germany in the mid-1950s represents almost every gay man of the period’s fantasies, one-on-ones, orgies, multicoloured, you name it and it’s here. See the whole Männerliebe portfolio here, and enjoy its period innocence.
Art Nouveau erotic dreams
20th May 2021
We have two brilliant portfolios on the website from today’s new artist, from the Hungarian Attila Sassy. Have you ever wanted to try opium, or be a powerfully-muscled satyr? Let your imagination fly with these wonderful images! See them all here.
Outrageous, or what?
18th May 2021
If a 1930s artist had made a list of all the most outrageous, guaranteed offensive, tut-provoking sexual scenarios imaginable, and then committed them to paper, then an anonymous portfolio like Interdit (Forbidden) would have been the result. See it here; what do you think?
Childish, dirty, or brilliant?
17th May 2021
Enfant terrible, agent provocateur? That’s today’s new artist, Jean Dubuffet, with his deliberately challenging 1950 Art Brut drawings for the strangely-title La bonfam abeber. What do you make of them? See them all here.
A brilliant new Rojan portfolio
14th May 2021
A really important new portfolio today from one of the most-visited artists on the honesterotica website, the incomparable Rojan. It’s his hilariously erotic 1935 illustrations to Apuleius’s second-century classic The Golden Ass. See them all now here!
Sex isn’t always fun …
13th May 2021
If you thought you knew all about Székely, think again – today’s new artist is the other Székely, André, who was actually a better artist than Alex. His 1934 Love without Joy etchings are both exquisite and poignant: see them 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.