In his 1945 monograph about three important nineteenth century Barcelona artists, Padró, Planas, Pellicer: Tres Maestros del Lápiz de la Barcelona Ochocentista (Padró, Planas, Pellicer: Three Pencil Masters from Nineteenth-Century Barcelona), Salvador Bori (a pseudonym of Jaume Passarell) write ‘One of the collections of Planas’s erotic drawings, which ended up in Paris after his death, was acquired there for 150,000 francs. This collection, which we will call the Álbum de Francia, is made up of a large number of drawings of naked women, scenes of sexual relations of all kinds from masturbation with vegetables to orgies and scenes of zoophilia. This album stands out above all for its quality of drawing and diversity of scenes, worthy of any European illustrator of the period.’

Over the decades since then, a considerable number of erotic drawings and paintings have appeared in public and private collections, most of them directly attributed to Planas and some specifically mentioning the Paris album; we have included here as many as we have found. We cannot guarantee that they are all by Planas, as once the post-inquisition padlock of Spanish censorship had been fully opened in the mid-1850s there were many Planas imitators ready to tap a rapidly-growing market.

In the new openness of 1870s Barcelona almost every opportunity was taken to illustrate ‘scenes of a sexual nature’, from purported anthropological surveys of native peoples, through historical reconstructions and revealing life studies, to gynaecological textbooks.