노예와 오달리스크

Ingres painted this in Rome, in 1839, while he was running the French Academy there. He had never set foot in a harem and never would. His whole vision of the East came from travellers' accounts and his own long fascination with the female nude, and he built the scene entirely in his imagination. A private collector in Paris, Charles Marcotte, had commissioned it, and when it reached him in 1840 the visitors who saw it in his home were dazzled. The reclining woman is stretched into a pose no real body quite holds, her limbs smoothed and lengthened for the sake of the line. Beside her a musician plays and a eunuch stands guard in the shadows. When the picture was finally shown in public in 1845, it drew admiring words from the poet Baudelaire. Ingres liked the composition enough to paint a second version a few years later.