EROTIC ART –

First Edition. Numbered Limited Edition. Signed by Author. Scarce Hardcover.

pp.160 illusts #061025 (Erotic Print Society Certificate of Limitation on fpd.)

• This was the first publication to feature the secret erotic art of Poulton, better known as a mainstream illustrator for the likes of The Radio Times in the 1940s and 50s. Includes many illustrations and a couple of erotic novellas from the time for context.

  This compelling book of the artist’s most beautiful and explicit drawings invites readers into the clandestine world of the 1950s and 60s. The first in the series, it contains some of the most graphic and unusual depictions of sex ever published by the EPS. With over 160 b/w drawings and sketches, this is Poulton at his orgiastic best. Two period novellas complement the images perfectly.

  Poulton was an English magazine and medical book illustrator, born in 1897. Upon his death in 1963 it was discovered he was also a prolific and imaginative erotic artist who produced hundreds of sketches and finished drawings of women proudly and exuberantly displaying themselves in ways shocking to conservative post-war Britain. Once one gets past the shock value it becomes clear that Poulton’s greatest talent was in portraying the human body in the sexual act, and since he did it with such rare insight many have argued he must have actually witnessed the orgies he put on paper. His ties to certain players in the 1963 Profumo scandal, breaking at the time of his death, hint that he may, in fact, have been the in-house artist at the parties that rocked the British Parliament. Poulton’s archive remained hidden from public view until the late 90s, when it turned up among the artifacts of an ageing professional yachtsman who was dispersing his vast collection of erotica. Though Tom Poulton’s work tells us much about English society between 1948 and 1963, there is a universal quality to these images of joyous, uninhibited sexuality that transcends time and place.