Reading little augury's posts featuring the painter Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) here and here, it reminded me how the fascination with orientalism ran and ran. In the collective European imagination the Turkish and North African 'Orient', has long been a site of fantasy. The louche harem dress and those lounging poses must have been dynamite to the tightly-buttoned 19th century armchair travellers and dreamers.
Henri Matisse combined modernism with the tradition of the salon painters in his matchless series of odalisques. I suspect these paintings arrived from a collision between his love of the female form and his lifelong involvement with textiles, which will be the subject of a later post. Meanwhile I brighten up a dull day with these stunning paintings and drawings.
Seated Odalisque 1926, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Lamé Robe 1932, Yale University Art Gallery
'Odalisque' : 'a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the sultan of Turkey.' It derives from the Turkish word oda - chamber and lik - function.
All Matisse images from Matisse - His Art And Textiles pub. Royal Academy of Arts 2005
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