Sergius Hruby was an Austrian artist who specialised in that fin de siècle staple, the malevolent or sinister woman. Or so it would seem from these examples which, since I’ve chosen the more assertively Decadent fare, may be doing him a disservice. The style is very similar to another Austrian artist, Franz von Bayros, albeit without the overt pornography that’s a feature of Bayros’s drawings. What’s surprising about the Hruby pictures below is that they’re all from the pages of Die Muskete for 1933, a Viennese periodical which ran humorous articles, cartoons, and “glamour” pictures of a type which would have been far too risqué for a British magazine of the same period. Hruby’s work wouldn’t have seemed out of place in 1903 but in 1933 it looks somewhat old-fashioned. Another artist requiring further research, especially if there are more vampire sphinxes lurking somewhere. (And another tip via Beautiful Century.)
