Achille-Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria (French, 1800–1857)
Odalisque, c. 1830–35
Oil on panel
Norton Simon Art Foundation, M.1967.06.P

Sensory indulgence and foreign mystique are evoked by this small jewel-like painting of a young woman lounging in a courtyard. She is dressed in a costume loosely inspired by North African and Middle Eastern garments, and her unbuttoned blouse, bare feet with gold toe rings, cast-off babouches or sandals and reclining posture would have implied her sexual availability to most 19th-century viewers. On the floor beside her is likely a tobacco box and a metal ibriq, or ewer, with a cup for drinking coffee. Thick white strokes of paint may indicate tobacco rolling papers next to the box. Her divan or daybed is covered with a lightweight cotton or linen textile, and behind her perches a red-crested parrot with a white face, resembling a combination of a macaw and a cockatoo, birds native to South America and Australasia respectively. A flowing fountain and cypress and orange trees populate the lush, verdant landscape. Rendered with exquisitely fine brushwork, each pictorial element tempts one of the five senses (smell, sight, sound, touch and taste).

Through these luxuriously rendered details, Achille Devéria asserts French imperial economic and political interests. Such fantastical representations are part of the Orientalism movement of the late 18th and early 19th century—artworks and literature that express ideas of an imaginary “East” that offers an environment of moral laxity and decadence as an escape from contemporary European life. In these paintings, gustatory and olfactory indulgence in coffee and tobacco signals eroticism and pleasure. Women are shown in reclined positions with long chibouk pipes or hookahs, often accompanied by servants, musical instruments, exotic birds and luxurious furnishings, as in Gabriel Alexandre Decamps’s Cypriot Woman Smoking a Chibouk (after 1828) or Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834) (Figures 6 & 7). However, Devéria takes some liberties with these tropes. Significantly, the woman holds a rolled cigarette, which became popular during the 1830s, the decade of French colonial excursions into Ottoman Algeria. This emblem of modernity and commercialism situates the painting at the beginning of official French colonial presence in Africa, which lasted well into the 20th century, the political ramifications of which are still felt today.