The Parisian artist Edith Thiercelin came late to erotic art, but when she did she used all her artistic training and her vivid imagination to burst on the scene with her powerful no-holds-barred sexually-charged images. Edith started her career as a designer, having trained at the École Professionnelle de Dessin Industriel, then in the early 1970s started to paint in oils, mostly large carefully-composed symbolic-figurative canvases.

Through the 1980s and 90s her paintings were regularly exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indepéndentes and Comparaisons. Then in the late 1990s it seems that something major shifted in her emphasis, which may have been to do with her personal life but was certainly assisted by new commercial opportunities. In 1997 sex came to the city in the form of the Musée de l’Érotisme, and her work had a new showcase.

The Museum of Eroticism, based on the erotic art collections of antique dealer Alain Plumey and French teacher Jo Khalifa, opened at 72 Boulevard de Clichy in the Pigalle district of Paris. The Museum’s owners were on the lookout for new erotic art talent, and one of the artists they found was Edith. The works of hers they displayed included the ‘Femme rousse’ (Redhead) series, which sadly formed part of the sale of all of the museum’s contents when it closed its doors in November 2016, the victim of rent rises and falling visitor numbers.