1864: Charles Baudelaire meets Félicien Rops for the first time in Brussels.
Baudelaire and Rops first met through the editor Auguste Poulet-Malassis.
In a letter written to Edouard Manet, May 11 1865, the poet said:
"Rops is the one true artist - what I and perhaps I alone mean by artist - that I have found in Belgium!"
Rops for his part said:
"I was, I believe, not merely a friend, but the most faithful and respectful companion to Baudelaire, I "lightened his sadness in Belgium", as he describes it in a dedication which is very dear to me....".
He was a lover of the fantastic and the supernatural, and his themes are frequently Symbolist in kind. The devil, skeletons, the prostitute, and death are the Baudelairian accessories of his art. In fact, despite Péladan's appeals, Rops was not very interested in the Rose+Croix artists, and much more so in the mores of his time, in the singularities of the modern mind as it appeared in the spectacle of Parisian life. His libertine life and scandalous and erotic subjects made him infamous in his own lifetime.
