Decadents: writers, poets, painters who rejected a current trend towards realism, favouring instead the more Romantic association of irrationalism. Sister movements contemporary with the Decadents were the Symbolists and the Aesthetes. Stripping away arty jargon, the Decadents were something akin to the Punks in more recent times - anti-establishment, pro- individual freedom an' all that, with an added "Goth" element of satanic darkness. Associated with the Decadents, possibly more familiar than Rops' name were: Charles Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley (and here); Guy de Maupassant, Edvard Munch, Gustave Moreau, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde (archived posts, where available, are linked to the names). The Decadent Movement came to an end during the first decade of the 20th century, with some Art Nouveau carrying forward a few lingering traces of it.
In art, the art of Félicien Rops for example, Decadence equals serious eroticism, sex with satanic elements, dark surrealism. His association with Baudelaire brought Rops further into the public spotlight than might otherwise have been the case - though as a fine artist, illustrator and print maker he was no slouch.
Many of Rops’s etchings are erotic or pornographic in tone and depict an imaginary underworld or subjects of social decadence. Despite his peculiarities, Rops was a printmaker of brilliant technique and original content whose handling of dry point (etching directly on the plate) marks him as one of the masters of the medium. He was also one of the first modern etchers to revive the neglected medium of soft-ground etching, in which the etching ground is melted into and mixed with tallow, producing the effect of lines drawn with a soft pencil or chalk.
See Britannica.com - here.
".....Rops drew priapic devils, horny priests, and an obscenely self-pleasuring St. Thérèse, but the center of his cosmos was taken up by repetitions of the femme fatale: fleshy, imperious, invariably nude, a dominating subject radiating perversity or a dominated object broken down, often on or at the foot of the cross. Unsurprisingly, the Decadent author J.K. Huysmans was a Rops fan, writing that he “celebrated the spirituality of lust which is Satanism...............
........Banished from the canon of Symbolist art for his unredeemable cheese, Rops remains potent because of illustrative craft, a flair for the cartoon line of evocative caricature that looks, from this far distance, rather charming, if not innocent..." See HERE
ASTROLOGY
Félicien Rops was born in Namur, Belgium on 7 July 1833, died in 1898. He spent most of his life in Paris, France. Astro.com gives his time of birth as 8:30 AM with an excellent "AA" rating.
Cancer, the sign, does have the basic "soil" where decadence might grow, I guess - the emotional pull from its Watery element and its ruler, the Moon. Without some augmented input from other planets and signs, and/or environmental impact, that soil would remain...well, just soil. Rops' natal Moon in Pisces augmented the Watery emotional pull of his Cancer Sun. Venus, planet of the arts, at 00 Gemini almost on the midheaven cusp reflects his pull to the world of art. For added decadence I guess Pluto or Scorpio input might be expected. No Scorpio planets, but Pluto in Aries challenges his Cancer Sun via a square aspect, maybe that antagonising square converts the otherwise soft and sentimental Cancer into a darker emotional mode? Overall, though, I'm seeing "the time in which he lived" as having major influence on his choice of art style.
I looked at an astrological ephemeris for a year in the midst of his life span - around 1870. At that point the slow-moving outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were transiting in the middle degrees of Cancer, Aries and Taurus respectively, forming square and semi-sextile angles to each other. Interestingly, Uranus in Cancer would have conjoined Rops' Cancer Sun at points around that time, adding some unexpectedly novel ideas to his arty mix. Pluto (usual culprit for input of eroticism and/or darkness) around the same time, during Rops' mid 30s, formed a semi-sextile from Taurus to his Cancer Sun. Those could be points in time which could well have either initiated or solidified his choice of subject matter. Rapidly germinating seeds delivered into Rops' moist Cancer/Pisces-led soil?
