The Great Odalisque
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1814)
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s The Great Odalisque (1814) turns a reclining nude into an idealized, remote vision, polished to an <strong>enamel-like finish</strong> and staged with <strong>Orientalist</strong> props—turban, peacock-feather fan, blue curtain, and hookah. Commissioned by Caroline Murat and shown at the <strong>Salon of 1819</strong>, it fuses classical line with erotic fantasy, its elongated back and rotated shoulder declaring beauty as a constructed ideal <sup>[1]</sup><sup>[3]</sup>.
