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The Grande Odalisque is a nude painted for a French queen’s collection, and it is famous for being anatomically impossible. Ingres painted it in 1814 for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples and Napoleon’s sister, as a pendant to his Valpincon Bather. The subject is a harem woman - an odalisque - reclining on a divan, turned away from the viewer, holding a peacock-feather fan.
The scandal of the painting, when it was shown at the Salon of 1819, was its anatomy. Ingres gave the figure three extra vertebrae, a rubbery spine and a left leg that attaches to the body at an impossible angle. Critics attacked it as a "Turkish" distortion; later generations recognised it as a deliberate choice. Ingres was not interested in the body as it is but in the line it can make, and the result is a figure of extraordinary elegance and almost no weight.
The painting is also a document of French Orientalism, made in the years when the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt had made the Middle East a subject of European fantasy. It entered the Louvre in 1899 and is one of the museum’s most reproduced works.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) was the great defender of classical drawing against the colour of Delacroix. He trained with David, won the Prix de Rome in 1801, and spent nearly twenty years in Italy, where he studied Raphael and the Florentine primitives. He was a superb portraitist and a painter of nudes whose distortions influenced Picasso and Matisse.
The Grande Odalisque was painted in Rome in 1814, when Ingres was working for the Murat court and when French taste was turning from the severity of David toward the exotic and the sensual. Its reception at the Salon of 1819 was hostile, and Ingres left France for Italy again shortly afterwards. Its rehabilitation in the later nineteenth century made it a founding work of modern painting.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Salle Daru (Room 702)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
