An odalisque was a chambermaid or a female attendant in a Turkish seraglio, particularly the court ladies in the household of the Ottoman sultan. In western European usage, the term came to mean the harem concubine, and refers to the eroticized artistic genre in which a woman is represented mostly or completely nude in a reclining position, often in the setting of a harem. It was part of a fascination with Orientalism, particularly in Great Britain and France.
Marià Fortuny's The Odalisque
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque
Odalisque painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1874)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, L'Odalisque à l'esclave
Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.
Grande Odalisque
Venus of Urbino (c. 1534), Titian
Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800), Jacques-Louis David