Rops was born in Namur in 1833, and was educated at the University of Brussels. Rops's forte was drawing more than painting in oils; he first won fame as a caricaturist. He met Charles Baudelaire towards the end of Baudelaire's life in 1864, and Baudelaire left an impression upon him that lasted until the end of his days. Rops created the frontispiece for Baudelaire's Les Epaves, a selection of poems from Les fleurs du mal that had been censored in France, and which therefore were published in Belgium.
Rops's association with Baudelaire and with the art he represented won his work the admiration of many other writers, including Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Joséphin Peladan. He was closely associated with the literary movement of Symbolism and Decadence. Like the works of the authors whose poetry he illustrated, his work tends to mingle sex, death, and Satanic images.
Rops's eyesight began to fail in 1892. He kept up his literary associations until his death.
Rops was born in Namur, Belgium in 1833, and was educated at the University of Brussels.
ROPS, FELICIEN (1833-1898), Belgian painter, designer and engraver, was born at Namur, in Belgium, on the 7th of July 1833; he spent his childhood in that town, and afterwards in Brussels, where he composed in 1856, for his friends at the university, the Almanach Crocodilien, his first piece of work.
The poet regarded Rops as the only artist alive in Belgium worthy of that name, and it was in his company that, in 1866, while visiting a church, he suffered a paralyzing attack from which he would never recover.
Huysmans stated that Rops "celebrated that spiritualism of Luxury that is Satanism, and painted, in pages that cannot be perfected, the supernaturalism of perversity, the otherworld of Evil."
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