French School, first quarter of the 19th century, Odalisques

French School, first quarter of the 19th century

Odalisques

Oil on panel, 25 x 30,5 cm

With frame, 36,5 x 42 cm

This painting depicts a bucolic and sensual scene immersed in a wooded landscape. In the center of the composition, several half-naked or lightly draped female figures rest in an atmosphere of idleness and abandon. A woman in the foreground, with a yellow and blue drape partially covering her legs, is lying on a blue cushion and holding a musical instrument similar to a lute or a guitar. Her gaze is turned towards the viewer, with a serene and slightly melancholic expression. Another female figure, lying on her back with a pink drape wrapped around her hips, has her arms raised and intertwined with garlands of flowers. Her pose is languid and sensual. A small putto is depicted in the lower left, adding a mythological or allegorical element to the scene. The background consists of lush vegetation, with leafy trees and a clear sky visible between the leaves. The light filtering through the trees creates a warm and golden atmosphere, accentuating the softness of the figures and the richness of the colors. The work, which shows echoes of the production of the great French masters of the late eighteenth century, first of all Boucher, but also of the visual culture of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, evokes a sense of pleasure, sensuality and harmony with nature, recurring themes in genre painting and in the representations of mythological or pastoral scenes.

The representation of odalisques has been a fascinating and nuanced theme in French painting since the second half of the eighteenth century. Their representation is a true mirror of the cultural, artistic and even colonial dynamics of the time. In the nineteenth century, with the Orientalist movement, odalisques made their appearance in the visual imagination of artists from beyond the Alps as exotic and sensual figures. Painters such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with his famous Grande Odalisque (1814) and Eugène Delacroix with The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) portrayed them in languid poses, often half-naked, immersed in luxurious and mysterious atmospheres that evoked the imagery of the Ottoman harem or within lush natural landscapes. These works, despite their formal beauty, reflected a European vision of the Orient, often idealized and full of stereotypes. The odalisque became a symbol of passive sensuality and of a world perceived as exotic and “other”.