The Odalisque

A year or two before he painted this, Fortuny had been sent to Morocco as a kind of war artist. In 1860 the authorities in Barcelona commissioned the young Catalan to follow the Spanish army's campaign against Morocco and record its battles. He came back with sketchbooks full of light, costume and North African streets, and for the rest of his short life the East kept surfacing in his work. Here it turns into a reclining nude in a harem, a musician with a long-necked lute seated beside her, the whole thing painted on cardboard in warm brownish tones. The subject was a European fantasy more than anything Fortuny had actually seen, part of a long line of such odalisques reaching back to Ingres. He was 23 when he made it.