Untitled [Male Study]

Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin opened a photographic studio in Paris in 1851, listing himself as a “specialist in académies.” Académies, or artist’s studies, was the polite term for nude studies that often bordered on the pornographic and were presumably intended for artists to use as substitutes for live models. The same year that he opened his studio, Moulin was arrested for the possession and sale of “obscene objects” and sentenced to a month in prison, but he continued to sell académies to artists and other consumers after he was released.