An odalisque is a painting of a reclining woman, naked or half dressed, set in an imagined Eastern harem, with a turban, silk cushions and sometimes a water pipe around her. The same word is used for the woman herself.
French painters made her one of their favorite subjects in the nineteenth century, although no European man could enter the sultan's harem.
Behind the French word stands a Turkish one, odalık, built on oda, a room. In the palace of the Ottoman sultans, the harem was a whole wing of rooms and courtyards where the women of the household lived, closed to men from outside.
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An odalık was one of the women who kept those rooms, an enslaved servant who cleaned and waited on the sultan's wives and concubines. She did not serve the sultan himself, and most odalıks stayed part of the staff.
Some could rise, though. Wealthy men offered young servants to the sultan as gifts, and a girl of exceptional beauty or talent could be trained as a possible concubine. The chambermaid could become a favorite.
Europeans kept only that last stage. When the word crossed into French and English, the odalisque became a concubine of the harem, and painters turned her into a woman with nothing to do but lie on silk and be looked at.
A reclining nude in a new costume
Painters already had a pose ready for her…
What You'll Discover
What the critics of 1819 saw in her back.
What Delacroix really saw inside a house in Algiers.
Where Ingres found the women of his Turkish bath.
Why Matisse set up his harem in Nice.