Odalisque

For most of his life Corot was known as a painter of trees and water, yet in his studio he also made figure paintings he rarely showed. This odalisque, from around 1871, is one of them. The subject was in fashion. Through the 19th century French painters turned again and again to the harem, the imagined world of women in Ottoman dress, and Corot follows the vogue here, seating a young woman in yellow harem trousers and slippers on a low divan, a water pipe at her feet, a screen behind her opening onto open country. He never travelled east, so the setting is pure studio invention, dressed from props. These figures stayed out of sight while he lived, and only after his death in 1875 were they gathered and exhibited, so that buyers who had known Corot for his silvery landscapes found a whole second body of work.