Tom Poulton - Tom Poulton - 2012

Tom Poulton

The secret art of an English gentleman. Thomas Leycester Poulton was an English magazine and medical book illustrator, born in 1897. Upon his death in 1963, it was discovered that he was also a prolific and imaginative erotic artist who produced hundreds of sketches and finished drawings of women proudly and exuberantly displaying themselves in ways that shocked conservative post-war Britain. Once one gets past the shock value, it becomes clear that Poulton's greatest talent was in portraying the human body in the sexual act, and since he did so with such rare insight, many have argued he must have actually witnessed the orgies he depicted on paper. His ties to certain figures involved in the 1963 Profumo scandal, which broke at the time of his death, suggest that he may, in fact, have been the in-house artist at the parties that shook British Parliament. Poulton's archive remained hidden from public view until the late '90s, when it was discovered among the artifacts of an aging professional yachtsman who was dispersing his vast collection of erotica. Although Tom Poulton's work reveals much about English society between 1948 and 1963, there is a universal quality to these images of joyous, uninhibited sexuality that transcends time and place.