L'odalisca bruna

Boucher painted this reclining woman around 1740, at the point when he was becoming the favourite painter of fashionable Paris and, before long, of Madame de Pompadour herself. He called her an odalisque, a woman of a Turkish harem, which in the France of Louis the Fifteenth was a polite licence to paint a nude and dress the room around her in silk and incense and imagined Eastern luxury. But the face is too particular to be pure fantasy. Scholars have long argued she is a real person, with names put forward from Boucher's own wife to a young woman of the O'Murphy family. He signed the painting on the little table in the foreground, close enough to touch the cushions, as if he wanted his name inside the room rather than outside the picture.