Odalisque

1874

Jules Joseph Lefebvre
French, 1836-1912

A luminous nude woman reclines in a dimly lit interior filled with textiles, fruits, and luxury goods evocative of the Arab world. The painting’s setting and title suggest that she is a courtesan in a harem. For 19th-century European artists, depicting the nude female form was a fundamental component of academic training and a benchmark of artistic excellence. The imagined harem setting—a space historically forbidden to men—provided narrative context for the nude and appealed to the sexual and colonialist fantasies of European audiences.

Status: On View, Gallery 223
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Title: Odalisque
Place: France (Object made in)
Date: 1874
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Inscribed upper right: Jules. LeFebvre 1874.
Dimensions: 102.4 × 200.7 cm (41 5/16 × 79 in.)
Credit Line: George F. Harding Collection
Reference Number: 1983.381
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Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Report 1983–84 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1984), p. 45.
Richard R. Brettell, French Salon Artists 1800–1900 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987), pp. 99–100 (ill.), 119.
Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 51–53, fig. 30; reprint (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013).
Stephanie Holt, “Chloe: A Curious History,” (Ph.D diss, University of Melbourne, 1992), pp. 4–6.
Stephanie Holt, “Chloe: A Curious History,” in Jeanette Hoorn, ed., Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourn University Press, 1994), pp. 118–120, pl. 20.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 25, fig. 2.
Shalon Detrice Parker, “A Tradition Gone Awry: The Salon Nude in Fin-de-siècle France” (Ph.D diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2003), pp. 41–3, 228, fig. 17.
Shalon Detrice Parker, “‘With a Sincere Spirit and Deep Conviction”: Lefebvre’s Lady Godiva and Salon Artistic Culture in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Southeastern College Art Conference Review 15, 4 (2009), pp. 422–23, fig. 3.
Allison Lee Palmer, Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2011), p. 143.

Memphis, Tennessee, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Scent and Symbolism: Perfumed Objects and Images, April 9-July 2, 2017, cat 191.

Vincent Astor, New York, by 1926; sold, sale of the Astor Residence, American Art Association, New York, April 21, 1926, lot 450, to George F. Harding, Jr. [buyer according to a Harding Museum record in the George F. Harding files, Art Institute, copy in curatorial file]; George F. Harding, Jr. (died 1929), Chicago; bequeathed to the George F. Harding Museum, Chicago; transferred to the Art Institute, 1983.

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