Obscenia: lettre à la présidente; poésies érotiques is a fascinating portfolio of van Mäele prints illustrating a selection of poems from Théophile Gautier’s Lettres à la présidente, compiled in the 1850s during a visit to Rome, during which he spent time with Josephine-Aglaé Sabatier, better known as Appolonie or ‘La présidente’. The illegitimate daughter of a viscount and his laundress, Josephine-Aglaé became the lover of affluent Belgian businessman Alfred Mosselman in 1838, and in the 1840s and 50s hosted one of Paris’s most coveted Sunday salons. For a short while lover to the poet Baudelaire, she quickly gathered a circle around her of many of the best-known writers, musicians and artists of the day. Always her own woman, she never married or had children; in her fifties she became the lover of Sir Richard Wallace, heir to the wealthy art collector Richard Seymour-Conway, who gave her an annuity of £50,000 a year to continue in the style to which she had accustomed herself.

Gautier’s descriptions of courtesans and their establishments amused both Appolonie and her admirers; circulating for many years in manuscript, the letters were first published in book form after she died in 1890.

This selection of poems, together with van Mäele’s powerful plates (here using his pseudonym van Troizem), was produced in a high quality limited edition by the bookseller Jules Chevrel, heir to the collection of the publisher and collector Auguste Poulet-Malassis. The edition, which appears to have been limited to fifty copies with hand-coloured plates and 150 copies with plain plates (the few remaining copies vary in their exact contents), gives the place of publication as Brussels, though it was in fact produced entirely in Paris.