There are many ways of keeping warm during a cold Parisian winter, and this series of ten postcards, Joie d’hiver (The Pleasure of Winter), published some time around 1900, illustrates some of the more intimate ones. Postcard sets like this, together with similarly risqué perpetual calendars, prints, and photograph sets carefully wrapped in brown paper envelopes, were a favourite reminder for foreign (especially English) travellers of the joys of Paris.

These are some of the earliest erotic work by Avril, and it may have been a result of these images that he was commissioned by Charles Hirsch to illustrate a new edition of Aretino’s Sonnets.