Image · Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
La Grande Odalisque
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1814
About this masterpiece
A reclining concubine turns languidly to gaze over her bare shoulder, her impossibly elongated back rendered with cool, enamel-like smoothness. The exotic accessories — a turban, a peacock fan, a hookah — transport the classical odalisque into Ingres’s imagined Orient. The anatomical liberties (an extra vertebra or two, an oddly placed elbow) only heighten the sensuous abstraction.
Historical significance
Commissioned by Caroline Murat, sister of Napoleon and Queen of Naples, the painting scandalized critics at the 1819 Salon for what they perceived as anatomical distortions. Today it is celebrated as a daring synthesis of Neoclassical line and Romantic exoticism, a pivot between two eras.
