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Vintage erotic art is enjoying a new vogue. It started a few years ago with Bettie Page and the Vargas pinups, and since we rediscovered them, our bleary voyeur's eyes have been wandering ever further back into history. Now those delightful 1920s French postcards are the thing to ogle.

But before Paul Vargas or Julian Mandel, even before the Daguerreotype, some surprisingly sexy stuff was done with only a wanton imagination and a pen.

Although the Victorian age is synonymous with sexual repression, and the Edwardian with courtly innocence in matters of the flesh, each produced an abundance of pornography, some which would make Al Goldstein blush. Georgian England was no exception: Eighteenth-century libertines may have lacked the convenience of the camera, but they made do very well.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), a social satirist and caricaturist, drew the age's most enduring dirty pictures. He was a celebrity in his day, illustrating the works of authors such as Jonathan Swift and producing several volumes of his own. Today, his tamer work is enshrined in the British Museum, the Met, and many other museums the world over.

Naughty is the only word for his other drawings: Their rank sensuality is sweetened with humor in such proportion that we're at once amused and bothered about the loins. Rowlandson's pictures are far more enjoyable to look at than most 18th-century erotic art--the French, too precious, and the Japanese, too beautiful. That's to say nothing of what often passes for erotica today--a catalog of fetishes modeled by bodies that seem too hard to harbor any real lust.

Rowlandson's pictures, however, gloss over some of the more unpleasant aspects of sexuality in the 18th century. For example, one could be hanged for sodomy--as often happened when raids on gay clubs, or "Molly houses" in London took place.

In the aristocratic circles Rowlandson traveled, prostitution was given a nod and a wink, and the fancier fallen ladies lived well. In fact, their trade was respectable enough for a number of guidebooks to be printed, such as Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies: Or Man of Pleasure's Kalender for the Year 1793, Containing the Histories and Some Curious Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Ladies Now on the Town:

Miss B--lford, Titchfield-street.

This child of love looks very well when drest. She is rather subject to fits, alias counterfits, very partial to a Pantomime Player at Covent Garden Theatre. She may be about nineteen, very genteel, with a beautiful neck and chest, and most elegantly moulded breasts, her eyes are wonderfully piercing and expressive. She is always lively, merry, and cheerful, and in bed, will give you such convincing proofs of her attachment to love's game, that if you leave one guinea behind, you will certainly be tempted to renew your visits.

Meanwhile, on Drury Lane, a knee-trembler with a common whore could be had for a shilling, or as is often said, a bottle of port wine. Unmarried or widowed women had a choice between being shop girls, which meant long, tedious hours for less than a living wage, or they could turn to thievery or prostitution. Often they did both. If pinched, they faced the gallows or at least a beating and confinement to disease-ridden Bridewell prison. Some were shipped to the New World and married to settlers upon landing. Even if the girls managed to escape prosecution, they were likely to succumb to syphilis or gonorrhea. The Times of London reported in 1785 that each year 5,000 streetwalkers died in the city.

But what of romantic dalliances and the pleasures of the marriage bed? While the C of E railed against the corrupting influence of sexual desire, even in wedlock, some argue that by the end of the century, pleasure began to be viewed as a virtue unto itself, and much energy was expended in chasing it. Certainly, not all 18th-century affairs were illicit, and we have as many love stories from the time as tales of degradation.

Many of the drawings presented here come from Rowlandson's Pretty Little Games for Young Ladies & Gentlemen with Pictures of Good English Sports & Pastimes (a deliberately misleading title), a posthumous private edition printed in 1845. Some others come from The Comforts of Bath, a 1789 collection of Rowlandson's drawings. All of them come courtesy of WorldArtErotica.com.

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