As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 Works 50 Weeks.
Executed in 1814, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, housed at the Louvre, has long been recognized as a landmark not only in the oeuvre of the artist but also in the development of the reclining nude as a topic of European art, a theme that stretches from antique models to Titian and Goya and later to Manet, Matisse, and Picasso. However, in Ingres’s painting this subject is imagined with an orientalist lens as an “odalisque,” a French term derived from the Turkish word odaliq or female domestic servant, for whom the Western European imagination transformed specifically into an enslaved concubine of a harem. Here, wearing nothing but an exoticized headdress, Ingres’s sexualized odalisque turns to look directly out at the viewer, reinforcing 18th and 19th century European stereotypes of a highly eroticized eastern “other.”
Commissioned as early as 1808 by Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, the painting was sent to Naples in 1815, but remained undelivered. Following the fall of Napoleon, Joachim Murat had been executed and Caroline went into exile. Ingres’s painting was shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, where it was not well received. A critic remarked that there was “in that figure no bones, no muscles, no blood, no life, no relief, nothing in a word that indicates it is done from nature,” adding that the artist had done so on purpose with the intent of doing badly. Indeed, the nude figure was not based on reality, but had come straight from the painter’s imagination.
The painting acquired a particular significance in the eyes of the artist, attested by the numerous variants and versions in different sizes he executed during the next 20 years. In 1820, Ingres wrote in an inventory of his works that he had executed “several small repetitions” of his large Odalisque, of which several are known.
In classical painting, small-sized works are often studies toward larger compositions—not so with Ingres, who reversed the creative process. There are in fact very few if any complete “sketches” by Ingres for his large compositions, for which he instead made numerous drawings and oil studies of details.
It is also well-known that Ingres often repeated his compositions. He wrote for instance: “It has sometimes been brought to my attention, and perhaps accurately, that I have represented my compositions too often, instead of making new works. Here is my reason: most of these works, which I love because of the subject matter, seemed to me worth improving by repeating them, or touching them up . . .” Among his works, three in particular were the object of such repetitions: his self-portrait, the Virgin with the Host, and this Odalisque.
If Ingres repeated his compositions, he never copied them. The variations on his self-portrait or on the Virgin with the Host show significant differences with one another. Such is the case also with the Odalisque. In this version (circa 1830) for instance, Ingres reintroduced elements from the original version but now only visible through technical analysis. The precision of the drawing in this version may have been obtained through an optical device—a “camera lucida”—as suggested by David Hockney in his study on the artist’s drawings. The model, however, would not have been in that case an actual figure but instead another painting. This is but one of the many fascinating elements of that small and rare painting that allows us to penetrate into the mind of one of the greatest painters of the 19th century.