In painting, an odalisque is a woman lying on a bed or a couch, usually naked or half dressed, in a setting meant to suggest an Eastern harem: a turban, silk cushions, a fan, sometimes a water pipe. The word names both the figure and the type of picture.
French painters made the odalisque one of the favorite subjects of the nineteenth century, although no European man could enter the sultan's harem.
The word comes from Turkish. Oda means room, and an odalık was a chambermaid, a woman who looked after the rooms of a household. In the palace of the Ottoman sultans, the harem was the private part of the house where the women lived, closed to men from outside. An odalık there was an enslaved servant who waited on the sultan's wives and concubines. She did not serve the sultan himself.
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A servant could rise. Wealthy men offered odalıks to the sultan as gifts, and one of exceptional beauty or talent could be trained as a possible concubine. Until that happened, she was part of the staff.
The word changed meaning when it crossed into French and English. In Western usage, an odalisque came to mean a concubine of the harem, and painters made her its centerpiece: a woman with nothing to do but lie on silk and be looked at.
The best known of these women was painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1814. She lies with her back to us and turns her head over her shoulder. When the picture was finally shown in Paris, the critics looked first at that back.
What You'll Discover
What the critics of 1819 saw in her back.
Who painted an odalisque with no harem at all.
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.