Beating The Chambermaid, 1787

Little fragments of this engraving are easy to find on the BDSM internet, but a good full image of it in decent resolution proves to be much harder to find. It’s sufficiently old and interesting that I finally got frustrated/curious enough to chase it down:

1780s chamber maid being beaten with a stick on her back

This scan is from Le paysan ét la paysane pervertis; ou Les dangérs de la ville (1787) by Restif de La Bretonne, via the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The full scan bears captions that may identify the artist, but though they are legible I’m not certain of their meaning:

caption-one

caption-two

  1. Jamie commented on January 13th, 2017:

    No luck identifying illustrator yet. Full text with illustrations here: https://archive.org/stream/lapaysanepervert04rest#page/n31/mode/2up

  2. Jamie commented on January 13th, 2017:

    Designed by Louis Binet, wngraver Berthet. More discussion here: http://brynmawrcollections.org/home/exhibits/show/beyondthetext/restif

  3. SpankBoss commented on January 13th, 2017:

    Ooh, Jamie, good work!

    I wonder if this plate doesn’t have a different engraver than the one at your link, though. The Binet caption is the same but the “sculp” line is not the clear Berthet of the plate at your link; instead this one looks more like “Le Sung” or “Le Sunj”.

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