A Woman Embracing Damnation

How we are finding our way in this impossible paradox

Have you ever seen Nicolas Francois Octave Tassaert’s painting La Femme Damnée (The Damned/Cursed Woman)? If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat.

It features a woman (presumably the damned one) who is being…um…attended to by a trio of otherworldly beings. And by “attended to,” I mean one appears to be performing oral sex on her, one appears to be orally attending to her breasts, and one is kissing her lips. (Her northern lips.)

If you have seen it, you’ve probably also seen the joking captions, like: “If this is damnation, bring it on!”

(Yeah, I’ll take it, too.)

But I’ve always found this painting to be a bit of a mystery. I’ve tried many times to find the story behind it. Why did Tassaert paint it? What exactly was the meaning behind it — and its name?

Interestingly, however, I have failed to find any information about it except that it was painted in 1859. And apparently, its exhibition ended his career.

If that’s accurate, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure even now in 2022, many would find this image objectionable. In fact, during my many internet searches into this painting, I had to put up with Google’s warnings about “explicit sexual content.” You can see any manner of gore and violence on the internet without any content warning, at all, but this painting, featured in art history books, is apparently just old-fashioned, high-brow porn.

Maybe that’s why she’s damned?

Or is it meant to be an ironic title, as if Tassaert could imagine the memes that this painting would one day inspire. “Yeah, sign me up, Satan!”

Or perhaps I’m not giving him enough credit. His paintings, did, after all, reflect a lot about the social injustices of those living in poverty in Paris at the time.

Perhaps he simply meant that because she is a woman, she is damned. Perhaps the two words cannot be disentangled.

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