The Skin of the Orient: Representation of the “Oriental Woman” in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch

By Jade Xiao, Harvard University

Edited by Rachel Barker and Anna Robinson

Introduction

From the sumptuous, crimson curtains to the lavish decorations, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch (Fig. 1), transports the viewers into a distant, wondrous realm. The alluring odalisque, with her glistening white skin and luscious blond curls, persuasively coaxes the audience into Ingres’ fantasy of an Oriental harem, with its endless luxuries and exotic treasures. The ornate feather fan, the gilded smoking device, and the patterned carpets transform the space into the Orient of nineteenth-century French dreams. From an initial perusal, Ingres’ rich composition seems to be the quintessential paradigm of an Orientalist painting, satiating every desire through the classical emblem of the “East.”

To the left of the outstretched, enticing odalisque is a seated musician. Clad in a green silk gown, a delicately-patterned skirt, and a stereotypically “Eastern” headdress, the woman glances aimlessly towards the ceiling, lost in her own music and perhaps the languid humdrum of the harem. Yet, despite her compositional prominence in the foreground and beyond the shadows of the architectural backdrop, her identity and purpose within the image remain an enigma. In contrast to the explicitly established trope of the odalisque, the musician appears unremarkably nondescript, a mere ethnicizing, Oriental accessory to the saturated scene.

Indeed, despite her vague, unidentifiable features, Ingres portrays the enslaved woman as an embodiment of the “Orient,” and this paper will investigate the various artistic choices and ideology that shape the meaning of the figure in conjunction with nineteenth-century French racial theory, textiles, and Orientalist beliefs. Even though French racial theory of the period sought to visually distinguish figures through the color of their skin, the ambiguous skin tone of the enslaved musician exemplifies the failures of the arbitrary categorizations. With the most typical denotation of race undermined, her “Oriental” identity relied upon other external, exoticizing factors. In Ingres’ composition, textiles became a second skin to the “Oriental” woman, both exoticizing and eroticizing her. The skin as the surface of the body emerges as the ideal plane for Ingres’ imaginary projection of his Orientalist fantasies, visually manifest yet intangible.

Figure 1: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch, 1839-1840. Oil on canvas, 72.1 x 100.3 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I: The Ambiguous Skin of the Orient 

Beyond the lavish ornamentation and the sumptuous architecture of the fantastical harem, one of the most striking features of the composition is the three figures and the gradience of their skin colors as they recede into the darkened background of the painting. This intentional construction was highly acclaimed by contemporary viewers, as nineteenth-century critics praised Ingres’ masterful depiction of the three shades of skin tone and his comprehensive understanding of “the variety and nature of the races.”[1] With the artist’s deliberate distinguishing of the racial identities, the true identifications of each figure emerged as a subject of curiosity for Ingres’ contemporaries and modern scholars alike. Race and otherness were certainly a central theme of the work in the critics’ eyes. Since the seventeenth century, intertwined with color theories and pseudo-scientific racial definitions, skin color became an emblematic factor of race in the fine arts.[2] In visual representations, the juxtaposition of white- and darker-skinned figures often served to strengthen the hierarchy of races and to elevate the status of the fair-skinned subjects.[3] Such usage of skin color as reinforcement for the racial hierarchy is likewise present in Ingres’ image, with the compositionally-central odalisque and the black eunuch relegated to the shadowed background adhering to the racial theories of his time and their representation in visual depictions. Indeed, modern scholarship of racial hierarchies in terms of skin color often discusses the dichotomy between the fair odalisque and the black eunuch as a prime example of the use of skin color in visually defining race categorizations.

Yet, contrary to the visually definite contrast between “whiteness” and “blackness,” the presence of the enslaved musician between the odalisque and the eunuch complicates the explicit racial dynamics of this image. Théophile Gautier, a French poet, novelist, and journalist and also an avid art and literary critic, described the painting as featuring the “white favorite,” the “young Abyssinian slave . . . tawny like bronze,” and the “black eunuch.”[4] Gautier was deeply interested in the concept of the Orient in his own writing and his reviews of Orientalist works, dedicating his essays in the 18th and 25th editions of 1855 of Le Moniteur universel to Ingres’s works, particularly his odalisques.[5] However, despite his prolonged curiosity in this subject, his identification of the woman as “Abyssinian” was likely unfounded, with no basis beyond his own Oriental fantasies. The musician does not appear Ethiopian, nor were there any extant writings by the artist recording his intentions. Scholarship cast doubt upon Gautier’s attribution, yet most readings of the painting continued to overlook the musician woman’s presence.[6] Joan DelPlato, in Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, briefly discusses the musician as an intermediary figure in the hierarchy of races.[7] However, as this paper will argue, the figure of the musician embodies not only a stage within the racial hierarchy, but also reflects the ambiguity within definitions of race in nineteenth-century France that undermine the system of division by skin color.

Despite the ubiquity and popularity of Orientalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the concept of the “Orient” was in reality very loosely defined. As Edward Said posits in his seminal 1978 publication of Orientalism, the Orient “was almost a European invention” to create a distinction between the “West” and the “East.”[8] Thus, the boundaries of the “Orient” were arbitrary definitions that both include and exclude a vast geographical area, “whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, [including] the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands.”[9] However, given that the driving motivation behind Orientalism was to create a concrete divide between the European “we” and the Eastern “them,” the scope was based solely on the European perspective, not any factual geographic or cultural factors. The abstract scope, in conjunction with the great diversity of the societies within the region, such as in the Ottoman Empire, resulted in an expansive realm that encapsulated a tremendous amount of distinctive cultures and peoples. The ethnography and racialization of the Orient, therefore, became a pertinent, convoluted issue.

The earnest, yet unfruitful attempts to neatly categorize the people of the Orient into distinct categories by skin tones are found throughout the French racial treatises. When considering French racial theory, the white and black “races” were often explicitly defined based on geographical and pseudo-scientific physiological traits. However, in those same treatises, the definitions for the “other” races are often much more ambiguous and loosely defined. In François Bernier’s 1684 treatise, the Nouvelle Division de la terre, par les différentes Espèces ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent, he developed “the concept of partition by color of the diversity of human beings” for the first time.[10] However, despite his absolute language and evident attempt at classifying races, these partitions are extraordinarily vague and ambiguous, with many blurring the lines. For example, the categorization of “white” includes not only Europe, but also “a small part of Africa” and “a large part of Asia.”[11] However, the third “type” that he posits, the “Asia-Whites,” also includes many other regions of Asia, such as the Far East, Ganges, Tartars, and Turkomans, all of whom he deems “really white” but with some physiological differences, such as flatter faces, oval-shaped eyes, and “snub noses.”[12] Not only are the classifications of race problematic, but the overlap between the two groups, the arbitrary assignment of peoples, and his inability to justify his conclusions all collectively underline the difficulty of classifying the diverse region by skin color. The treatise of Jean-Joseph Sue in 1797 further underscores the complications of classifying the “Orient” for the racial theorists, even a century later, as Sue admitted that there remains “an infinity of nuances between these two extreme colours.”[13] One of the categorizations of race Sue utilized is “basané,” or swarthy; within the same section, he characterizes various cultures and nations with differing colors such as yellow, olive, bronze.[14] The multitude of skin colors that Sue assigned to “basané” proved too expansive and indeterminable, leading to Sue’s acknowledgement that “one can only approximate a matter the observation of which is so delicate, and where language lacks expressions that could paint such nuances with precision; even the arts that speak to the eye can only imperfectly imitate them.”15 [15]While all of these racial categorizations are arbitrary and unbased, the classification of nations and cultures into races between white and black is especially haphazard and inconsistent.

The innumerable conflicting, unsubstantiated theories of race during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries posited a tension in the representation of the Orient. With the vastness of the “Orient” and the ambiguous racial definitions, attempts at divisions by skin color were inconsistent and nearly implausible. In visual representations, the ideological ambiguity translated to a practical crisis, especially for artists who have never been to the Orient nor had in-person experiences, like Ingres. As Anne Lafont delineates in How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker, in contrast to the explicit separation of whiteness and blackness through skin color, “visual arts did not systematically tend to ethnicize these two supposed human groups” of “yellow” and “red.”16[16] The lack of ethnicization by skin color for the Orient does not suggest a more tolerant or benevolent view, but underlines the difficulties in visually delineating such differences.

Ingres’ depiction of the “Oriental” woman reflects this ambiguous, undefinable skin color for the East. Though her skin is darker than that of the odalisque, it is undeniably ambiguous. In many ways, Ingres positioned the musician to serve as the opposite of the odalisque: the “Oriental other” as opposed to the “white,” European beauty, for odalisques were often conceived of as having fair complexions and idealized as Circassian or Greek. The musician, placed in a seated position on the left of the canvas, gazes towards the right, directly complementing the lounging odalisque on the right. Yet, even when set up as direct comparisons for the pure purpose of constructing a hierarchy, skin tone proves an ineffectual means of division due to the lack of contrast. Her skin tone is not what ethnicizes her; her identity cannot be determined from the color of her skin, and that ambiguity seeks to bridge the differences between whiteness and otherness. At least in part, skin color cannot distinguish the Occident and the Orient, and the ambiguous color of the enslaved woman, even in direct parallel with the white odalisque, reflects such a tension.

II: Textile as Exoticism

Figure 2. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La petite baigneuse. Intérieur de harem, 1828. Oil on canvas, 35 x 53.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

Thus, skin color is not an adequate visual identifier to convey the musician’s racial identity. When skin color fails to establish the Oriental identity, and therefore fails to degrade the “Other” to a state of inferiority, external layers must be implemented to establish the distinction. For Ingres’ portrayal of the enslaved musician, the orientalizing feature resides in her clothing, a surface feature which serves as a second skin. The Oriental-servant trope appears at least twice in Ingres’ oeuvre, in this composition and in the background of the Small Bathers (Fig. 2). In both instances, Ingres portrays her as fully clothed in extravagant textiles with intricate embroideries and a headdress, while his white odalisques and bathers are almost always depicted as fully nude, their undone clothing scattered around them. Indeed, in lieu of skin color, it is the clothing that distinguishes the Oriental servant from the white odalisques.

Upon initial perusal, Ingres’s depiction of the woman’s extravagant attire appears extraordinarily precise. The vibrant cotton skirt is decorated with floral and geometric motifs that gently wrap around her figure; the loosely-undone, green silk robe glistens under the light, an emblem of luxury and elegance. The white turban, with delicate pale blue stripes, along with the sumptuous red and gilded golden headdress echoes the opulent jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles. However, despite the meticulous details in the textiles and jewelry, Ingres’ fashioning of the woman is anything but accurate, nor was it likely intended to be. Having never travelled to the East, Ingres, unlike some other Orientalists such as Eugène Delacroix, had no in-person experiences with the Orient. Ingres’s Orientalist compositions arise from a conflation of his own Orientalist fantasies and various travelogues, such as that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and costume books such as those of Jean-Étienne Liotard, Francis Smith, and Jean-Baptiste Vanmour.[17] These sources, widely read in nineteenth-century France, fueled the insatiable curiosity for the East and materialized the imaginations. Ingres was likely inspired by Vanmour’s eighteenth-century print of Fille Turque (Fig. 3) from his series of plates depicting the “different nations of the Levant.” Vanmour portrays the “Turkish” woman languidly lounging in an Orientalized interior, decorated with lush, patterned carpets and embroidered textiles. The turban, ornate jewelry, and silky robe reinforce the association of these ethnicized clothing items as “Turkish.” Moreover, objects from the East were available in France, so Ingres had access to these tangible sources while crafting his Orientalist compositions.[18] Jules-Robert Auguste, an artist and likely acquaintance of Ingres, possessed a collection of Orientalist accessories and pieces, and Ingres likely loaned pieces to use as references during the creation of this painting.[19] Ingres’ knowledge of the Orient and its fashion was thus piecemeal and dependent upon stereotypical sources.

Figure 3. Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, “Fille Turque,” in Recueil de cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant. Paris: Chez Basan, 1714.

This meticulous attention to detail does not arise from any particular desire to accurately portray the Orient, but rather, to give the appearance of a “documentary realism.”[20] According to Linda Nochlin’s The Imaginary Orient, Orientalist artists paid painstaking attention to every detail in an attempt to evoke the “reality effect,” through which the audience is enticed to “forget that his art is really art,” but a documentary reflection of the Orient.[21] The intricate detailing of the woman’s textiles underlines the value Ingres placed upon fashion and the ways that Eastern textiles were manipulated by artists to exoticize and to other. As Aileen Ribeiro stated in Ingres in Fashion, “one of the ways in which artists and writers entered the world of oriental imagination was through costume and textiles, which were so different from the clothing and accessories of the West.”[22] Thus, the purpose of the woman’s textiles is not to accurately depict a woman from the eastern regions, but to emphasize her Otherness. Despite the almost-exact replication of the composition of the women from the prints of Vanmour and Liotard, Ingres made additions of patterns and modified headdresses to amplify the otherness of the figure. Belonging to no specific culture,, the musician’s dress is an amalgamation of the most traditionally stereotypical symbols of the Orient and a figment of Ingres’ imagination, with the exaggerated turban and headdress, vibrant colors, and emphasized patterned prints.

Colorful clothing was intimately associated, almost inextricable, with the Orient. According to Michael Taussig, the European distaste for color arose from the experience of the “colored Otherness,” a chromophobia that conflated the Other with colorfulness.[23] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1810 publication of the Theory of Colour underlined this diminutive association, claiming that “uncivilized nations and children have a great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness.”[24] The Orient was most closely associated with vibrant colors due to the pervasive trade of precious, brilliant pigments, colorants, and dyestuff, such as saffron and indigo.[25] Vibrant colors and patterns, thus, became an unmistakable “sign” of the East, especially with the proliferation of colored costume books and prints. In Dupres’ prints of the East, for example, color was the “defining feature of this image” that not only attracts the attention of the viewers but also further perpetuates this association.[26] The singular, generalized understanding of Oriental fashion further contributed to the stereotype of the Orient as stagnant, unchanging, and underdeveloped, “a world without fashion where clothing remained the same for generations on end.”[27] With this association and the ardent chromophobia, colorful pattern textiles became an emblematic symbol for the East and a convenient, obvious “racial” identifier, a secondary skin in lieu of the ambiguity of skin tone itself.

III: Textile as Desire

The metaphorical understanding of the textiles as the “second skin” of the Orient could be further interpreted through the eroticizing nature, for the “skin” of textile embodies yet another significance as the object of desire. Indeed, concurrent to this intense compulsion to “other” and to distinguish between the European “us” and the Eastern “them,” the foundation of Orientalism in both society and in art was driven by an equally ardent desire for the Orient, through the erotic harem fantasies and material goods. Textiles, in particular, were one of the most desirable “exotic” objects from the Orient in both senses. Not only a coveted item in European material culture, it also served as an indicator of erotic appeal in visual representation. Ingres’ portrayal and application of the clothing in his work reflect the dual purpose of textiles: while they evidently distinguish the enslaved musician from the white odalisque, it simultaneously acts to eroticize the figure into an object of desire.

Despite being covered by her exoticizing dress, the musician figure still embodies an erotic air due to her clothing. The delicate, silky fabric drapes around her figure, defining her shape despite its opacity. The textile, as the second skin of the woman, possesses an inherent eroticizing power, and artists “use the shapes and styles of oriental costume to convey images of sensuality.”[28] The European travelogues, such as those of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, rapturously praise the exquisite beauty of the women in the harems, focusing specifically on their intricate, opulent clothing.[29] The clothing of the Oriental woman thus became inextricable in association with their sensuality, augmenting their intangible allure. As Phillipe Perrot posits in Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, “clothing reveals as it veils and showcases the sexually charged body parts it conceals.”[30] The Oriental woman's clothing is conflated with their skin, exposing her to erotic desires while concealing her.

Moreover, unlike Vanmour’s etching of the Fille Turqe and Ingres’ earlier representation of the figure in the Small Bather, which both depict the woman as elegantly dressed, Ingres manipulates the fabric in a more insidious fashion. Under the shadow of her instrument, her silk dress appears just slightly undone to unveil her chest. The subtle suggestion of nakedness captures the tension between a sense of modesty and eroticism. Scholars such as Joan DelPlato have noted the inclusion of textiles and clothing items in images of nude women, such as that of Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, as heightening the eroticism in the image through its suggestive nature.[31] The loosening of the robe around the enslaved musician functions along the same veins; even though the fabric is intended for concealment, it is ripe with an erotic undertone. The presence of clothing was necessary to exoticize her identity, while the absence was to eroticize.

The western opinion of Eastern textiles as an exotic, luxury object was wrought with a parallel tension; while they were seen as foreign and viewed in a diminutive light due to their excessive colors and patterns, they remained highly desirable for Western consumers. Textiles were imported in great quantities to the West, and the English and French vocabularies for textiles were rooted in the East.[32] Even when European production of “knockoff” products, such as chinoiserie or indiennes, rampaged the market, the desire for Eastern-inspired textile was unrelenting.[33] The fashion of the East was seen as explicitly exotic, yet simultaneously, it was a coveted object of great desire. Between the visual representation and material culture, Ingres’ enslaved musician embodies the central tenets of Orientalism.

Conclusion: The Orient’s Second Skin

Encapsulated in this singular “Oriental” woman is the ambiguous tension between the paradoxical views of the Orient in nineteenth-century France. Since the physical surface of her body, her skin, fails to distinguish her, Ingres constructs a second layer through exoticizing textiles. The textiles fuse with her being, transforming into yet another surface upon which Ingres projects his Orientalist imaginations. As a nineteenth-century viewer, Marquis de Custine, wrote, “the painter has depicted his dream; he has painted neither that which he has seen, nor seen that which he thought.”[34] The textiles draped around the enslaved musician’s body became the surface onto which Ingre could visualize his dream. Her explicitly orientalized, vibrantly colored textiles serve to emphasize her otherness and to distinguish her as undeniably “foreign” and thereby inferior; yet, the suggestive loosening of her blouse alludes to the erotic desires for the East, paralleling the seemingly paradoxical view of both desiring and diminishing the East.

Reflected in Ingres’ depiction of the woman is the tense, convoluted conceptualization of the Orient, one of both dismay and desire. The enslaved musician and her textiles reflect the great conception of Orientalism in French society at the time, her textiles serving as the second skin for the Orient, to be classified and exoticized.

Endnotes

[1] “1943.251: Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch,” Harvard Art Museums, accessed May 9, 2025, https://hvrd.art/o/299806.

[2]Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,”

Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 90.

[3] Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker,” 93.

[4] Pascal Dethurens, Ecrire la peinture: De Diderot à Quignard (Citadelles et Mazenod, 2009), 87.

[5] Dethurens, Ecrire la peinture, 87.

[6] For example, Michael Harris’s Colored Picture: Race and Visual Representation includes a poignant discussion of Ingres’ painting through the lens of the skin color, but only includes the white odalisque and the black eunuch.

[7] Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2002), 38.

[8] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), 1.

[9] Said, Orientalism, 4.

[10] Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker,” 93.

[11] François Bernier, “A New Division of the Earth,” trans. Janet L. Nelson, History Workshop Journal, no. 51 (Spring, 2001): 247.

[12] Bernier, “A New Division of the Earth,” 248.

[13] Mechthild Fend, “Skin Colour,” in Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2016), 166-7.

[14] Jean-Joseph Sue, Essai sur le physiognomonie des corps vivans considérée depuis l'homme jusqu'à la plante

(Paris: Chez l'auteur, 1797), 74-82; translations are my own.

[15] Fend, “Skin Colour,” 166-7.

[16] Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker,” 90.

[17] Aileen Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women (Yale University Press, 1999), ch. 10.

[18] Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion, ch. 10.

[19] Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion, ch. 10.

[20] Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision (Harper and Row, 1989), 33.

[21] Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” 38.

[22] Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion, ch. 10.

[23] Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10.

[24] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, ed. and trans. Charles L. Eastlak (Newburyport: Dover Publications, 2012), 356.

[25] Elizabeth Fraser, “The Color of Orient: On Ottoman Costume Albums, European Print Culture, and Cross-Cultural Exchange,” in Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices, ed. by Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich (Routledge, 2018), 53.

[26] Fraser, “The Color of Orient,” 54.

[27] Madeleine Dobie, “The Fabric of Two Worlds,” in Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth Century French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 95.

[28] Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion, ch. 10.

[29] Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, and Lady Louisa Stuart. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), 314-319.

[30] Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the bourgeoisie: a history of clothing in the nineteenth century (Princeton University Press, 1994), 12.

[31] Joan DelPlato, “Dress and Undress: Clothing and eroticism in nineteenth-Century visual representations of the harem,” in Harem Histories, ed. by Marilyn Booth (Duke University Press, 2011), 266.

[32] Dobie, “The Fabric of Two Worlds,” 91.

[33] Dobie, “The Fabric of Two Worlds,” 93.

[34] Hans Naef, “Odalisque à l'esclave" by J. A. D. Ingres,” in Acquisitions (Fogg Art Museum) 1968 (Cambridge: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1968), 84.