Martin van Maële

Maurice Martin van Miële (12 October 1863, Boulogne-Billancourt — 5 September 1926, Varennes-Jarcy), professionally known as Martin van Maële, was a French illustrator, particularly notable for his explicit and exacerbated drawings for erotic literature. He extensively collaborated with Charles Carrington in Paris, a leading erotica publisher, illustrating books by Anatole France, Paul Verlaine's La Trilogie érotique, and Apulée's L'Âne d'or. Maële created art for other antique and Renaissance authors, like Ovid, François Beroalde De Verville, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and Denis Diderot, and his contemporaries, including Pierre Mac-Orlan under the "Sadinet" pseudonym, Charles Baudelaire's pioneering French translations of Edgar Allan Poe, or Aventures Extraordinaires by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since many of Martin van Maële's works depict minors, partially or fully naked and engaged in frivolous activities, his name regularly comes up in contemporary discussions about the legal and moral status of virtual depictions of nude minors, particularly historically or artistically significant images. In April 2010, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, Larry Sanger, published his letter to the FBI, accusing Wikimedia Commons of hosting "child pornography;" he specifically chose a selection of Maële's graphics and "Lolicon" category as two glaring examples.