Accidental Blogger

I Have Egg on My Face!

by Norman Costa

No joke! I misread the text of an article which contained an image of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' painting, L'Odalisque à l'esclave. The article referred to a gift made to John Kenneth Galbraith by the country of India. The generous gift was bestowed upon Galbraith, father of James K. Galbraith, after his service as U.S. Ambassador to India. 

The gift was a collection of 18th century minatures.  I assumed, mistakenly, that the gift included L'Odalisque à l'esclave.

I am sorry for the mistake and diverting your mental energies to solving an unsolvable puzzle. In small recompense, I am including a link to a very good quality high resolution image of the painting. The image is in the public domain, so click HERE to call up the Hi-Res file and save it to your computer.

See more information on Ingres' fascination with the Odalisque throughout many years of his career, below.

Odalisque and Slave

This drawing represents the artist's return to his famous Odalisque and Slave canvas of 1839 and to an 1842 work with a landscape background. The choice of subject points up Ingres's interest in Orientalism, already visible in his Grande Odalisque and at its apogee in the famous Turkish Bath of 1862, now in the Louvre.
       
Exoticism and a taste for detail

Here Ingres portrays a languorous odalisque in a harem, listening to the music of a slave girl. The young woman complacently adopts one of the languid poses familiar in Ingres's work, her body undulating in a near-musical way, as if she were dancing in a reclining position. The details – crown, fan, nargileh – are treated with a quasi-hyperrealist precision. The enclosed space gives rise to an ambiguous relationship between the two women, and the presence of the black eunuch in the background heightens the claustrophobic atmosphere.

Many years later

As he so often did, Ingres returns in this drawing to an earlier painting: an odalisque commissioned by his friend Charles Marcotte (1773-1864) – Marcotte d'Argenteuil, as he was known – and now in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The painting dates from 1839, when Ingres was director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome. In 1842 he painted a second version, with a background of a garden and an Oriental niche (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). The woman's pose, however, comes from the much earlier Sleeping Woman, painted in 1814 and now lost.

The triumph of Orientalism

Artists' growing fondness for trips to the Orient, the influence of travel books, and the taste for the exotic were the main contributing factors to the rise and enduring popularity of Orientalism in European painting in the 19th century. But unlike Delacroix, for example, Ingres never went East, drawing on engravings and Persian miniatures to make his décors as exotic as possible. Here the oriental atmosphere owes less to the use of color than to the voluptuous arabesques. At one point, Ingres considered titling this work Sultana Resting.

Documentation    

– PRAT Louis-Antoine, Ingres, Paris, Milan, 5 Continents éditions, 2004, n 48.

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