Great bed, eh? Maybe we should call it something like a temple of love. This is the bed of one of the great courtesans of 19th century Paris, Valtesse de la Bigne. Aside from her rich patrons, de la Bigne was the lover of several...
Here is another thing we will see on our Shady Ladies tour of Paris--one of our favorite images of a courtesan: Ernest-Ange Duez's "Splendeur," displayed at the Salon of 1874. It was originally part of a diptych, with "Misère" on the other side, showing the...
Izumo no Okuni did not find her fame in the elite pleasure houses of Kyoto, where women with elaborate artistic educations provided their clients with the most rarefied pleasures of fantasy-femininity and the most pragmatic pleasures of the flesh. Okuni was a miko, or shrine...