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Lot Essay
The Grande Odalisque (Louvre; fig. 1) – one of the signal masterpieces of 19th-century art and among the most immediately recognizable and celebrated images in the world – was commissioned from the 33-year-old Ingres in 1813 by Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat (fig. 2), as a pendant to the ‘Dormeuse de Naples’ (1808), which her husband, Joachim Murat, King of Naples, had purchased from Ingres in 1809. The Dormeuse, lost and presumably destroyed in the chaos that followed the fall of Napoleon in 1815, showed a similar reclining nude female seen from the front. The Grande Odalisque had not yet been delivered when the Murats lost their throne in May 1815. The Comte de Pourtalès stepped in and acquired it instead, lending it to the Paris Salon of 1819.
Ingres returned again and again throughout his career to the cloistered and perfumed interiors of the Turkish harem. Beginning with the famous Bather of Valpinçon (1808; Louvre, Paris) and continuing with his mid-career masterpiece, Odalisque with Slave (1839; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; a 1842 repetition in The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) – a variation on the lost ‘Dormeuse de Naples’ – and concluding with the erotic surfeit of feminine voluptuousness that is his grand Turkish Bath of 1862 (Louvre), itself a final compendium of Ingres’ variations of the nude female figure, the artist never grew tired of the many exotic, sensual and sensuous delights he could evoke in depictions of the mysterious and sequestered seraglio.
In the Grande Odalisque, Ingres draws on artistic traditions of depicting the nude traceable to classical antiquity and the Italian High Renaissance to create a hermitic world entirely his own. From the first, Salon critics compared the painting to the Venus of Urbino by Titian (a painting Ingres would later copy) and recent writers have noted its debt to Michelangelo’s monumental figure of Day on the exterior of the Tomb of Giuliano de’Medici. But the celebrated art works that influenced Ingres’ conception of the Grande Odalisque are completely transformed by the artist’s singular and indelible personal vision. In Ingres’ hands, Titian’s pliant and comely nude becomes a chilly and marmoreal figure of erotic contradiction and complexity, her body displayed for our delectation with uncompromising directness, but her sphinx-like expression a mask of frosty obliquity. Reclining in Oriental splendor amid an exquisite tangle of silks, satins, furs and feathers, the odalisque exerts an enigmatic fascination that simultaneously invites and repels in equal measure. Despite trafficking in the taste for ‘turqueries’ and Oriental Exoticism that had been fashionable in French art and decoration for more than a century, Ingres’ Grande Odalisque would prove a singularly modern creation, one that would exert its seductive influence over Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Picasso’s sibylline portraits of Dora Maar.
The sumptuous nude perplexed many viewers and critics alike with its Mannerist proportions when it was first exhibited in the Salon of 1819. The boneless, serpentine line of her form, her arbitrary anatomical structure -- which one writer observed includes ‘three vertebrae too many’-- her impossibly crossed legs and arms that would never match if they were extended, were described by Salon reviewers as ‘bizarre’, ‘Gothic,’ ‘devoid of harmony’, and ‘barbarous’. The hostile reception that greeted the picture from critics who had been raised in the classical tradition is inexplicable to modern viewers, conditioned as we are by the art of Picasso and Matisse. Nevertheless, even at the time of its unveiling, there were some sophisticated contemporary connoisseurs who understood Ingres’ extraordinary vision and succumbed to the Odalisque’s seductive charms. By the time of Ingres’ triumphal return to Paris in 1824, following his long stay in Rome, the artist began to receive commissions for copies of some of his now-canonical early compositions, including the Grande Odalisque.
The Wrightsman Odalisque, which is signed by Ingres and inscribed in his hand on the reverse (fig. 3), is almost certainly the version of the Grande Odalisque that Ingres had promised his friend Jean-Pierre-François Gilibert (1793-1850) at least as early as 1829. In a letter posted on 7 April 1829, Ingres’ wife wrote to Gilibert that “I won’t have the frame for the Odalisque until the end of this week. I hope to have everything next week. Time is necessary to ensure that the clock is well regulated. Don’t worry about the shipping; all will go well.”
Like Ingres, Gilibert was a native of Montauban, and was the artist’s lifelong friend. After their shared childhood in the south of France, the two were reunited in Paris in 1797, where Ingres was a pupil at the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture and Gilibert was completing his legal training. A lover of art and music, Gilibert was fully immersed in the artistic circles in which Ingres moved and their close camaraderie lasted until Ingres left for Rome in September 1806. The artist’s painted portrait of Gilibert (1804-05; Musée Ingres, Montauban; fig. 4)) is one of his most intimate and accomplished early works. In correspondence in 1817, Ingres affirmed their bond, writing to Gilibert that “you are my oldest (since we knew each other as children) and only real friend; and so we shall remain, I hope, as long as we live.”
After Gilibert returned to Montauban, where he lived the rest of his life, he and Ingres saw each other only infrequently, though they continued a lively correspondence. Ingres’ subsequent portrait drawing of Gilibert (Musée Ingres, Montauban, fig. 5) commemorated a rare trip to Paris that the lawyer made early in 1829, certainly the very trip when Ingres promised to paint him the Odalisque now in the Wrightsman Collection. By April of that year, Gilibert was back in Montauban – prompting Mme. Ingres’ aforementioned letter encouraging his patience over shipping the painting – and he shortly thereafter married. Tragically, his young wife died in 1832, only three years after their marriage and two years after giving birth to their only child, Pauline (1830-1908). Ingres was very fond of the girl (making a portrait drawing of her, when she and her father visited the artist in Paris in 1842; Musée Ingres, Montauban; fig. 6), and after Gilibert’s own premature death in 1850, the childless Ingres treated Pauline like an adopted daughter. The present painting was inherited by Pauline Gilibert, later Mme. Emilien Montet-Noganets, upon the death of her father and passed by descent through her heirs until its sale at auction in 2001, when it was acquired by Jayne Wrightsman.
The Wrightsman painting, which is executed on fine linen laid down on cardboard, corresponds in size to an 1828 engraving of the Grande Odalisque by Ingres’ friend Achille Réveil. Ingres used tracing throughout his career to transfer images, and it is likely that in order to make the present work he used a sheet of tracing paper to copy the etching and then employed a stylus to trace the contours of the figure onto the piece of linen on which the present work is painted. Infrared reflectography demonstrates that the composition was drawn in pencil in all its details by Ingres, then colored in paint. Returning to the subject years after completing the Grande Odalisque, Ingres imbues this replica made for his childhood friend with a warmth and gentleness absent in the cool and imperious canvas in the Louvre. The delicacy and fluency of the paint handling, flickering lightness and facility of the brushwork, and elegance of the color palette are all characteristic of Ingres’ finest paintings of the late 1820s, making the Wrightsman Odalisque an object of exquisite aesthetic refinement. Its fascinating genesis reveals it to be a poignant and personal memento of a deep and lifelong friendship.
In addition to the present painting, at least four other variant versions by Ingres of the Grande Odalisque are known, all larger than the Wrightsman painting: a grisaille in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 7); a version, dated 1817 and once owned by the sculptor Baron Henri de Triqueti, now in a private collection in New York (fig. 8); a version from 1824, made as a gift for the painter Comte Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé, and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers (fig. 9); and a version with a gray painted border, made for Marcotte Genlis and now in the Musée Mahmoud Khalil, Cairo.
Ingres returned again and again throughout his career to the cloistered and perfumed interiors of the Turkish harem. Beginning with the famous Bather of Valpinçon (1808; Louvre, Paris) and continuing with his mid-career masterpiece, Odalisque with Slave (1839; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; a 1842 repetition in The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) – a variation on the lost ‘Dormeuse de Naples’ – and concluding with the erotic surfeit of feminine voluptuousness that is his grand Turkish Bath of 1862 (Louvre), itself a final compendium of Ingres’ variations of the nude female figure, the artist never grew tired of the many exotic, sensual and sensuous delights he could evoke in depictions of the mysterious and sequestered seraglio.
In the Grande Odalisque, Ingres draws on artistic traditions of depicting the nude traceable to classical antiquity and the Italian High Renaissance to create a hermitic world entirely his own. From the first, Salon critics compared the painting to the Venus of Urbino by Titian (a painting Ingres would later copy) and recent writers have noted its debt to Michelangelo’s monumental figure of Day on the exterior of the Tomb of Giuliano de’Medici. But the celebrated art works that influenced Ingres’ conception of the Grande Odalisque are completely transformed by the artist’s singular and indelible personal vision. In Ingres’ hands, Titian’s pliant and comely nude becomes a chilly and marmoreal figure of erotic contradiction and complexity, her body displayed for our delectation with uncompromising directness, but her sphinx-like expression a mask of frosty obliquity. Reclining in Oriental splendor amid an exquisite tangle of silks, satins, furs and feathers, the odalisque exerts an enigmatic fascination that simultaneously invites and repels in equal measure. Despite trafficking in the taste for ‘turqueries’ and Oriental Exoticism that had been fashionable in French art and decoration for more than a century, Ingres’ Grande Odalisque would prove a singularly modern creation, one that would exert its seductive influence over Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Picasso’s sibylline portraits of Dora Maar.
The sumptuous nude perplexed many viewers and critics alike with its Mannerist proportions when it was first exhibited in the Salon of 1819. The boneless, serpentine line of her form, her arbitrary anatomical structure -- which one writer observed includes ‘three vertebrae too many’-- her impossibly crossed legs and arms that would never match if they were extended, were described by Salon reviewers as ‘bizarre’, ‘Gothic,’ ‘devoid of harmony’, and ‘barbarous’. The hostile reception that greeted the picture from critics who had been raised in the classical tradition is inexplicable to modern viewers, conditioned as we are by the art of Picasso and Matisse. Nevertheless, even at the time of its unveiling, there were some sophisticated contemporary connoisseurs who understood Ingres’ extraordinary vision and succumbed to the Odalisque’s seductive charms. By the time of Ingres’ triumphal return to Paris in 1824, following his long stay in Rome, the artist began to receive commissions for copies of some of his now-canonical early compositions, including the Grande Odalisque.
The Wrightsman Odalisque, which is signed by Ingres and inscribed in his hand on the reverse (fig. 3), is almost certainly the version of the Grande Odalisque that Ingres had promised his friend Jean-Pierre-François Gilibert (1793-1850) at least as early as 1829. In a letter posted on 7 April 1829, Ingres’ wife wrote to Gilibert that “I won’t have the frame for the Odalisque until the end of this week. I hope to have everything next week. Time is necessary to ensure that the clock is well regulated. Don’t worry about the shipping; all will go well.”
Like Ingres, Gilibert was a native of Montauban, and was the artist’s lifelong friend. After their shared childhood in the south of France, the two were reunited in Paris in 1797, where Ingres was a pupil at the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture and Gilibert was completing his legal training. A lover of art and music, Gilibert was fully immersed in the artistic circles in which Ingres moved and their close camaraderie lasted until Ingres left for Rome in September 1806. The artist’s painted portrait of Gilibert (1804-05; Musée Ingres, Montauban; fig. 4)) is one of his most intimate and accomplished early works. In correspondence in 1817, Ingres affirmed their bond, writing to Gilibert that “you are my oldest (since we knew each other as children) and only real friend; and so we shall remain, I hope, as long as we live.”
After Gilibert returned to Montauban, where he lived the rest of his life, he and Ingres saw each other only infrequently, though they continued a lively correspondence. Ingres’ subsequent portrait drawing of Gilibert (Musée Ingres, Montauban, fig. 5) commemorated a rare trip to Paris that the lawyer made early in 1829, certainly the very trip when Ingres promised to paint him the Odalisque now in the Wrightsman Collection. By April of that year, Gilibert was back in Montauban – prompting Mme. Ingres’ aforementioned letter encouraging his patience over shipping the painting – and he shortly thereafter married. Tragically, his young wife died in 1832, only three years after their marriage and two years after giving birth to their only child, Pauline (1830-1908). Ingres was very fond of the girl (making a portrait drawing of her, when she and her father visited the artist in Paris in 1842; Musée Ingres, Montauban; fig. 6), and after Gilibert’s own premature death in 1850, the childless Ingres treated Pauline like an adopted daughter. The present painting was inherited by Pauline Gilibert, later Mme. Emilien Montet-Noganets, upon the death of her father and passed by descent through her heirs until its sale at auction in 2001, when it was acquired by Jayne Wrightsman.
The Wrightsman painting, which is executed on fine linen laid down on cardboard, corresponds in size to an 1828 engraving of the Grande Odalisque by Ingres’ friend Achille Réveil. Ingres used tracing throughout his career to transfer images, and it is likely that in order to make the present work he used a sheet of tracing paper to copy the etching and then employed a stylus to trace the contours of the figure onto the piece of linen on which the present work is painted. Infrared reflectography demonstrates that the composition was drawn in pencil in all its details by Ingres, then colored in paint. Returning to the subject years after completing the Grande Odalisque, Ingres imbues this replica made for his childhood friend with a warmth and gentleness absent in the cool and imperious canvas in the Louvre. The delicacy and fluency of the paint handling, flickering lightness and facility of the brushwork, and elegance of the color palette are all characteristic of Ingres’ finest paintings of the late 1820s, making the Wrightsman Odalisque an object of exquisite aesthetic refinement. Its fascinating genesis reveals it to be a poignant and personal memento of a deep and lifelong friendship.
In addition to the present painting, at least four other variant versions by Ingres of the Grande Odalisque are known, all larger than the Wrightsman painting: a grisaille in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 7); a version, dated 1817 and once owned by the sculptor Baron Henri de Triqueti, now in a private collection in New York (fig. 8); a version from 1824, made as a gift for the painter Comte Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé, and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers (fig. 9); and a version with a gray painted border, made for Marcotte Genlis and now in the Musée Mahmoud Khalil, Cairo.