Starting with Issue 11 of The Erotic Review in 1997, Sylvie Jones regularly produced cover illustrations based on well-known paintings. As she writes in her Sex Diary, ‘This was a fun but challenging exercise, as more often than not no one in editorial ever had a clue as to what the cover theme should be. All I knew is that it should be famous paintings revisited, with an erotic – and if possible topical – slant.’

As issue followed issue the reworkings became ever more inventive, and the pastiches of the original artists’ styles ever more accurate. Her re-interpretations of Waterhouse, Hopper, Matisse, Magritte, Tissot and Egg are particularly noteworthy. Sadly the sequence ended with the July/August issue of The Erotic Review, to be replaced by more mundane, and frankly rather boring, photographs.

Here, for those who enjoy the comparison of reworking with the original, are the artists and their works on which Sylvie Jones’ paintings are based:
     Édouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe
     Nicolas Poussin, A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term
     John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters
     Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch
     Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow
     Kitagawa Utamaro, Amorous Couple
     Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews
     Raoul Dufy, Royal Ascot
     John William Waterhouse, Hylas
     William Nicholson, A Sporting Almanac
     Edward Hopper, Nighthawks
     William Hogarth, Marriage à la Mode
     Agnolo Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid
     Michelangelo, The Dying Slave
     Édouard Manet, Olympia
     Henri Matisse, La danse
     Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights
     Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus
     Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Sabine Women
     François Boucher, Portrait of Marie-Louis O’Murphy (Nude on a Sofa)
     René Magritte, The Empire of Light
     James Tissot, Croquet
     Edgar Degas, Dans un café
     Augustus Leopold Egg, Travelling Companions
     Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
     Henry Wallis, Death of Chatterton
     William Hogarth, Chairing the Member (The Humours of an Election)
     Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath
     Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Seasons