Odalisca dormida

Hayez was 76 when he sent this to the Brera exhibition of 1867, with a title that gave almost nothing away, Odalisque, half figure. An odalisque was a servant in an Ottoman palace household, and by the 1860s she had become a standard studio subject for European painters who had never been near one. The critic Camillo Boito, an architect who wrote about art in Milan, set down exactly what he saw, the woman bare to the thighs, asleep against a yellow cushion and a blue drapery, a violet turban wound round her head. He judged the forms less solid than Ingres would have made them, the colour better, and the drawing chaste rather than provoking. That description is how the painting was later matched back to the exhibition where it first appeared.