This very nice “attention to the staff” is being paid in a bit of artwork by the prolific erotic artist Peter Fendi, and it dates from about the 1830s:

Why does the world need another blogload of vintage sex pictures?

Blame Eros Blog. I’ve been inspired to blog by the periodic vintage porn pictures Bacchus posts, like this one:

Fully explicit, raunchy as hell, sixty or seventy or eighty years old, and what’s that look on her face? The happiest smile you can imagine.

And that’s the point.

We tend to imagine the past as a sexless place, full of repression and stolidity and boring family portraits of stiff people posed in their best Sunday finery. Recreational sex is hard to picture. American Gothic or Victorian prude, it’s hard to imagine our ancestors with dicks and clits in hand and big smiles on their faces.

Photography has been around for more than 150 years. Representational art, rather longer. My goal with this blog is to collect old examples of lust, sex, raunch, “dirty pictures”, smut, porn, all of it. You know, fucking.

Naked beauty, too — there are a lot of vintage nudes on my hard drive — but not so much of the “artistic” composed salon nudity. Not unless something — a gleam in the model’s eye, a playful gesture, something — suggests lust. Or, perhaps, invites it.

And what is to be the point of all this? First, simple enjoyment. Second, to undermine the ancient, constant forces of repression. Third, to celebrate the vital, irrepressible, implacable power of human recreational sex.

Stick around, it will be fun!