Mavi Boncuk |Happy birthday to French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres[1] born today in 1780.
La Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.
Grande Odalisque attracted wide criticism when it was first shown. It has been especially noted for the elongated proportions and lack of anatomical realism. The work is housed in the Louvre, Paris.
The painting was commissioned by Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples,and finished in 1814. Ingres drew upon works such as Dresden Venus by Giorgione, and Titian's Venus of Urbino as inspiration for his reclining nude figure, though the actual pose of a reclining figure looking back over her shoulder is directly drawn from the 1809 Portrait of Madame Récamier by Jacques-Louis David.
Madame Récamier painted by Jacques-Louis David (1800).
Ingres portrays a concubine in languid pose as seen from behind with distorted proportions. The small head, elongated limbs, and cool color scheme all reveal influences from Mannerists such as Parmigianino, whose Madonna with the Long Neck was also famous for anatomical distortion.
The Turkish Bath, by the 82-year-old Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, showing nude women in a harem finished in a rectangular format in 1859, was revised in 1860 before being turned into a tondo (a circular work of art). Ingres signed and dated it in 1862, although he made additional revisions in 1863. Its erotic content did not provoke a scandal (as compared, say, with Manet's publicly exhibited 1863 Déjeuner sur l'herbe) since for much its life it has remained in private collections. It is now in the Louvre. The painter's first buyer was a relation of Napoleon III, but he handed it back some days later, his wife having found it "unsuitable" ("peu convenable").
[1]Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix.
[2] See also MB Article: Origin of the World