Odalisque in Grisaille
Artist: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)
Original Dimensions: 32 3/4" x 43"
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
About Artwork: (ca. 1824–34) "This is an unfinished repetition, reduced in size and much simplified, of the celebrated Grande Odalisque of 1814 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), an imagined concubine in a Middle Eastern harem. The painting was central to Ingres’s conception of ideal beauty, and its influence was bolstered by his longevity: Ingres continued to paint nudes like this one as late as the 1860s, by which time he had trained hundreds of followers. Paintings in shades of gray—en grisaille—were often made to establish variations in tone as a guide to engravers of black and white reproductive prints, but the intended purpose of this work remains uncertain." - (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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