The Tightrope

Leaving his birthplace of Prague to study art at Dresden under, G-B Casanova, Georg Opitz began his career by painting oils and miniatures. From 1807 he limited himself to popular scenes. Coming to Paris in the entourage of the Duchess of Conslande, Opitz then visited Heidelberg, Altenberg and settled at last in Leipzig where he died in 1841. Prolific in water-colour and gouache, Opitz's erotic scenes are subtle and imaginative variants of his pictures of Parisian life and the Leipzig Fair. Though he had a sharp eye for the absurd and self-important, the artist's spirit was generous; consequently his erotica achieves that rare combination of being sexually arousing at the same time as being really extremely funny.

The confidence and panache of Opitz's erotic oeuvre might suggest that he was prolific in this area: the reverse is probably true. Apart from an important group discovered in 1985, only one or two examples of the genre have come to light since.

The Tightrope is unique, not only in the audacity of the scheme, but also in its execution which is as robust as it is refined. The richly inventive groups and the degree of sexual sophistication portrayed in his erotic compositions suggest that, in some respects, the Europe of Opitz and Napoleon was not so different from that of our own time.