Tom of Finland
Videos
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
In gay magazines, Laaksonen's drawings were often cropped to be less explicit, as in this 1968 edition of Physique Pictorial. The caption notes that reproductions of the complete "natural (nude) Tom drawings" are for sale by mail order.
Tom of Finland's room at the Tom of Finland Foundation's house in Los Angeles, 2002; photographed by Henning von Berg.
A Tom of Finland drawing on the cover of a 1963 issue of Physique Pictorial.
Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration is the only public arts organisation in the UK dedicated to illustration. It was founded by Quentin Blake in 2002 and is based in London, England. From 2014 to 2020, it was located at 2 Granary Square in the London Borough of Camden and called House of Illustration.
The Engine House and Coal Stores at New River Head, the site for the future Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration
Quentin Blake: Inside Stories exhibition at House of Illustration, 2014