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Among all the Orientalists who painted odalisques, only Delacroix actually succeeded in penetrating an oda, the forbidden inner sanctum of a harem. His record of the visit, the magnificent Women of Algiers, is missing from this show, though it is arguably the most influential picture in the Orientalist canon. Cézanne remarked that the color of the red slippers belonging to the three odalisques in Delacroix's picture "goes into one's eyes like a glass of wine down one's throat." Renoir said he thought he could smell incense when he got close to the painting. But the greatest tribute to Women of Algiers was paid by Picasso, who painted 15 variations on Delacroix's picture in 1954 and 1955.
Delacroix's real-life harem scene conspicuously lacked the eroticism that made his fellow artists' imaginary concubines so popular. Indeed, painters and public alike were indifferent to the French novelist Theophile Gautier's observation, confirmed by Delacroix, that "dignity and even chastity" reigned in the Muslim harem. The naturalist painter Gerome tried to offset his ignorance of harem interiors in some instances by painting sexy French models against the background of the Turkish baths he had sketched in Cairo. Renoir, who traveled twice to North Africa in the 1880s, complained that British artists had so overpaid models in Morocco that he could not find a cheap enough sitter to represent a concubine. For his Woman of Algiers, Renoir made do with his own darkly voluptuous mistress Lise Tréhot, decked out in bells, beads, Turkish pantaloons and other oddments of Eastern costume. As for Ingres, who produced the greatest odalisques of them all, he scarcely strayed from his Paris studio. The Orientalist touches in his pictures served largely as an excuse for painting the naked figure, which during much of the 19th century was unacceptable unless it was presented in a foreign or classical context. In his Odalisque and Slave, Ingres copied a landscaped garden, an ornate fan, a jeweled headdress and other details from Persian miniatures and from descriptions supplied by travelers to the Arab world.
The Orientalist exhibition originated at London's Royal Academy, but the National Gallery version has been reinforced by 50 more pictures from U.S. museums. The role of Gérôme has been particularly played up, with eight pictures having been added to the four that were exhibited in London. The most arresting of them all is The Rug Merchant, with its subtly managed interior light, its meticulously executed detail and its once fashionable "licked surface," in which the canvas appears preternaturally polished and free of brush marks. Sadly scanted, however, are the American artists who heeded the siren call of Orientalism. Among the rare American pictures is Elihu Vedder's The Questioner of the Sphinx, an ineffably silly work that depicts an Arab crouched at the mouth of a sphinx. Most grievously absent is John Singer Sargent, whose wondrous concoction of white robes and smoky incense, Fumée d'Ambre-Gris, hangs in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.