These Morisot/de Sauteval illustrations include images which, in the overused phrase beloved of broadcasters, ‘some viewers may find disturbing’; if you have found your way here, however, you will probably be as amused and intelligently provoked by them as the illustrator intended. They include sexual violence and many are undoubtedly also racist, as was so much art of the time, so if you choose not to explore further press the ‘back’ button now. You have been warned!

This, the second of Jean Morisot’s portfolios of erotic images, is much darker than the Douze images of twenty years earlier. Sexual threat and menace are the main themes, with no sign of consent and apparently no sense of the issues arising from racial stereotyping. Yet Morisot’s artistic and technical skills – these are colour heliographs, not an easy process to master – are as clear here as in any of his work, and maybe these images should be seen from the point of view of his inner world, and maybe his regrets, made as they were around the time of the heart attack in his fiftieth year which severely limited his social life.

Each print is signed ‘S’, for ‘de Sauteval’.

Priapées was privately published in an untitled folder, in a limited numbered edition of 50 copies.