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Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Grande Odalisque

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1814

painting

NudityRead the context

Look closer

Select a detail to locate it.

Ingres’s reclining figure turns her face back towards the viewer. Painted in 1814 for Caroline Murat, queen of Naples, she is presented as an odalisque, an imagined harem concubine. The setting belongs to a European painter’s construction of that subject.

Details

Follow the body’s turned pose towards the face. The knotted turban and peacock-feather fan introduce small accents beside the skin, while a blue curtain and rumpled sheets frame the reclining figure.

In its time

1814

Books from this period
Mansfield Park1814Pride and Prejudice1813Emma1815
Paintings from this period
The Third of May 1808, Francisco Goya1814L'Amour et Psyché, François-Édouard Picot1817The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault1819The Hay Wain, John Constable1821The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friedrich1823
Where it hangs

Musée du Louvre

Room 702

Artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Painted 1814 Collection Musée du Louvre, Paris Dimensions 91 x 162 cm

In context

An imagined harem

Ingres paints her as an odalisque, an imagined harem concubine. She reclines nude on a bed, seen from behind, her face turning back over her shoulder, wearing a turban and holding a fan of peacock feathers.

Fabrics around the body

A turban is knotted at her neck, and she holds a fan of peacock feathers. A blue curtain hangs beside the bed where she reclines.

Reception

Commissioned for a queen

Caroline Murat, Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples, commissioned the picture. Ingres completed it in 1814, in oil on canvas.

Into the Louvre

The painting belongs to the Louvre in Paris.

The story

  1. 1814. Ingres finishes the Grande Odalisque, painted for Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and queen of Naples.

  2. He paints her as an odalisque, an imagined harem concubine, reclining nude and seen from behind, with a turban and a fan of peacock feathers.

  3. It is an oil on canvas, ninety-one by a hundred and sixty-two centimetres.

  4. Today the picture hangs in the Louvre's department of paintings, in Paris.

A way of seeing

Odalisque

An odalisque was an imagined harem concubine, a stock figure in French painting rather than a real, named woman. Ingres gives her a turban and a fan of peacock feathers, paints her nude and reclining, and turns her away from the viewer even as she glances back over her shoulder.