Women with a Puppet

The Belgian Symbolist painter Felicien Rops explored the age-old theme of the Power of Women in six or seven drawings and watercolors from the 1870s depicting Woman with a Puppet. For Rops, an artist whose works frequently crossed the line from erotic to pornographic, women’s domination over men came from their sexual cunning. In this version he represents a bare-breasted woman holding a fan in one hand and a feeble ragdoll high above her head in the other; she presents the puppet at a kind of pagan altar like a lamb to the slaughter. The Latin inscriptions, “Where is the woman?” [UBI MULIER?] and “Here is the man” [ECCE HOMO] spell out the symbolism of the scene. Rops’s other versions of the subject show the woman disemboweling the puppet with a bloodied knife or shaking coins out of his slashed body. Rops’s various renditions of Woman with a Puppet proved so popular, a number of reproductive prints were made, including a color etching and aquatint by Albert Bertrand, and three different heliogravures, two in color, one of which appeared in Octave Uzanne’s book Son Altesse la femme (1885). In 1877 the artist, in a letter to Maurice Bonvoisin, an illustrator, friend, and collector of his work, is recorded refusing to make another version of the Woman with a Puppet to be reproduced in print. Responding to Bonvoisin’s request Rops wrote, “I do not care at all, not at all, my dear Maurice, to make you reproductions of work already published.” He called out Lady with a Puppet four times in the long missive, ending with a postscript, “Note that I will not repeat the Lady with a Puppet (La Dame au Pantin) because twice. . . I think it’s enough.” After Rops died, the Librairie Floury in Paris published a number of new prints after Felicien Rops, including a La femme au pantin engraved in black by Albert Bertrand, and priced at 50 francs in 1905. The Minneapolis print might be this work, although the flatness of the ink on the page suggests it was made through a lithographic process rather than an intaglio one. By 1928, Bertrand’s print edition reproducing Rops’s Woman with a Puppet sketch was reported to have been abandoned, which might explain its rarity.