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Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (d. 1867) was a French Neoclassical artist who painted historical scenes and portraits and was a prominent contributor to the nineteenth-century artistic movement known as Orientalism. One of his favorite artistic subjects was the odalisque, a female servant living in an Ottoman household. An odalisque served a wealthy man’s wives and concubines; she was of low social status, but she could improve her station by becoming a concubine herself. This painting dates to 1842; Ingres completed an earlier version of it in 1839, which lacks the landscape background. Its principal feature is the nude odalisque lounging on a bed while listening to music played by a eunuch. This image projects a popular nineteenth-century Western interpretation of Middle Eastern culture, and it arguably reveals more about the European imagination than it does about the social reality of a private Middle Eastern residence. Informed by a fascination with the private spaces accessible only to women, the body of the sequestered Middle Eastern woman becomes a site for exotic fantasy in European art and literature. Alongside the prurient curiosity reflected in Ingres’ painting is the still-prevalent Western discourse of moral indignation directed primarily at Muslim men for their sexual objectification of women and denial of women’s rights and autonomy.  

Pilgrims Going to Mecca

Name: Odalisque and Slave

Material: Oil on canvas

Size:
Height: 72 cm (28.4 in)
Width: 100 cm (39.4 in)

Date: 1839

Place of Origin: Rome

Location: Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Source and Registration#: Wikipedia. Link to resource (accessed June 24, 2010).

John Woods

Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago

Alexander Barna

Outreach Coordinator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago