The French illustrator, cartoonist and art teacher Emmanuel Murzeau is best known for his ambitious graphic novel versions of classic erotic texts, though he has also illustrated other books and co-written original works including Northmen with Mathieu Gabella, and Mitreya with Holger Kersten.

Murzeau grew up in the town of Niort in western France, and studied art at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers and Nantes, graduating in 1994. As well as illustration, his main interest is in art education; he has been teaching young adults since 1995, and from 2007 onwards has lived and worked in Berlin, where he teaches at the Schule für Bildende Kunst und Gestaltung (School of Fine Arts and Design), the Hamburger Technische Kunstschule (Hamburg Technical Art College), and the Berlin Games Academy.

Adapting Andréa de Nerciat’s Les Aphrodites into four volumes was the culmination of a fifteen-year project, completed in 2014, and Murzeau immediately started work on another classic of the French erotic genre, Nicolas Chorier’s L’académie des dames.

Emmanuel Murzeau’s website, where you can see a range of his art and more about his teaching, is here, his Facebook page is here, and a blog with more of his work is here.

We are very grateful to our friend Gérard Coron for introducing us to the work of this artist.