Odalisque in Grisaille

In 1824 Ingres came back to Paris after 18 years in Italy, and that year's Salon at last made him a success. A decade earlier his luck had run the other way. The Grande Odalisque, painted in Rome in 1814 for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, was never delivered, because the Murats lost their throne the next year, and when it was shown at the Salon of 1819 one critic said the long-backed nude had neither bones nor muscle.

Now in Paris with a busy studio of pupils, Ingres went back to her. This version is smaller and simplified, left unfinished, and painted entirely in greys, and his pupils probably helped with it. Pictures in grey were often made as guides for engravers producing black-and-white prints, and the lithographer Jean-Pierre Sudré did publish a print of the figure in 1826. The Met has never been able to link this canvas firmly to any known print, so why it was made is still an open question. Ingres himself listed it among the works he painted in Paris between 1824 and 1834, before he left to run the French Academy in Rome.