The Study Of Geography

This is one of the rare images I publish where provenance makes it more problematic. I think it stands on its own as erotic art, and so I was tempted to just drop it here and leave it as such:

That remains pretty much my plan. In the context where I found it — a 19th-century European geography of the Americas — publishing this nude portrait was, I deem, gratuitous, racist, and colonialist in varying degrees. None of those things is inherent in the artwork, but the more details of provenance I share, the more emphatically that polluted context contaminates what I consider to be a perfectly beautiful engraving. So, in a reversal of my usual practice, I’ve stripped the context and presented just the artwork.