And indeed, it is perhaps not entirely inappropriate that with this multi-layered painting the eye alone won't do: one must get up close and personal and use one's hands.
This wonderfully unique object, from the collection of Henry Wellcome, stands perhaps as something of an embodiment itself of the nineteenth century's complex attitudes to sex - at first glance exuding nothing but chasteness (cue images of covered-up piano legs, lewd ankles, etc.), but upon closer inspection revealing a much saucier substratum.