What’s new
Illustrator and Portfolio Lists, May 2026
3rd May 2026
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… read more
Sweet love …
3rd May 2026
Today’s new artist is Maurice Guy-Loë, and his charming 1925 suite of etchings to accompany Verlaine’s love poems: ‘They tell me that you are blonde/And that every blonde is treacherous/But your eyes are the loveliest in the world/And your breast is what I desire.’ See them now by clicking here.
2,000 portfolios (and a favour)
2nd May 2026
Honesterotica has just reached 2,000 portfolios! This represents many years of patient work – identifying artists, tracing editions, and cataloguing illustrators whose work has often been treated as marginal or simply overlooked. It also represents a community of readers – yes, you! – who have followed the project, contributed corrections and suggestions, and helped shape what the site has become.
To mark this milestone, we'd like to hear from you. We've put together a short feedback questionnaire – twenty-one questions, around five to ten minutes – covering how you use the site, what you find valuable, and what you'd like to see more of. All responses are anonymous, and thoughtful answers will count for far more than quick ones.
Your input will help guide the next phase of the site, including expanded illustrator coverage, deeper bibliographic content – and more honest erotica!
The link to the questionnaire is here.
Thank you all so much for being part of this pioneering project.
All and everyone
1st May 2026
Created in 1936, before Paul-Émile Bécat became better known and started to tone down the explicit content of his illustrations, he illustrated Colette, an outrageous novel about sexual experimentation. You can see all the illustrations for Colette now by clicking here.
Sun, sea … and sin?
29th April 2026
Today’s new artist is the Spanish legend Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, best known for painting naked bodies which – interestingly – have managed never to become labelled as erotic or problematic. Would such paintings have the same response today? You can judge for yourself by clicking here.
Naked and tasteful?
26th April 2026
Something a little different today, a 1913 French album with more than fifty reproductions of salon paintings of ‘female beauty’, or how to tread the fine line between taste and titillation. Fascinating social and moral history – see them all now by clicking here.
If music be the food of love …
24th April 2026
Towards the end of his artistic career, in 1960 André Collot produced a series of sixteen large drypoints entitled Symphonies Amoureuses, highly original ‘storyboards’ each showing all the stages of an erotic encounter. Considered the pinnacle of his work, and now extremely rare, you can see them by clicking here.
Classical lesbianism
22nd April 2026
Sylvain Sauvage’s 1927 portfolio for Pierre Louÿs lesbian poem cycle Les Chansons de Bilitis is considered by many to be the pinnacle of art deco erotic illustration, and complete versions are hard to find. But we have succeeded, and you can see it 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.