Odalisque with Slave

Odalisque with Slave from 1842 at the Walters Art Museum is one of Ingres's most celebrated Orientalist fantasies, depicting a reclining odalisque attended by a female musician in a setting of Eastern luxury that was entirely the product of imagination rather than observation. Ingres never visited the Middle East but created from literary descriptions, engravings, and the accounts of travelers a vision of the harem that satisfied European desires for an exotic femininity safely removed from Western social constraints. The subject permitted the extended display of the female nude within a setting that normalized voyeurism through cultural distance. The painting established the template for decades of French Orientalist painting, influencing Gérôme, Delacroix, and countless academic painters who followed Ingres's lead in combining classical technical mastery with Eastern fantasy. The Walters Art Museum holds this as one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century Orientalism, a genre that has been extensively reexamined in recent decades for its political and gendered assumptions.

The sinuous line of the reclining figure demonstrates Ingres's supreme control of contour. The smooth, porcelain-like flesh and the rich colors of the fabrics and setting create a scene of sensuous refinement.