Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
Olympia is a 1863 oil painting by Édouard Manet, depicting a nude woman ("Olympia") lying on a bed being attended to by a black maid. The French government acquired the painting in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. The painting is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter. He is considered one of the leading artists of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, and is renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories, and portraits.
Exoticism is a trend in art and design, whereby artists became fascinated with ideas and styles from distant regions and drew inspiration from them. This often involved surrounding foreign cultures with mystique and fantasy which owed more to the culture of the people doing the exoticism than to the exotic cultures themselves: this process of glamorisation and stereotyping is called "exoticisation".
Odalisque With Raised Arms is a painting by Henri Matisse, completed in 1923. The oil on canvas measuring 23 by 26 inches is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Matisse's style changed and evolved drastically throughout his career, including a wide and varying collection of paintings depicting the female nude. His Odalisque paintings were inspired by his trip to Morocco. Many of the female subjects in the Odalisque paintings were modeled after Matisse's main model at the time, Henriette Darricarrère.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
The Turkish Bath is an oil painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, initially completed between 1852 and 1859, but modified in 1862. The painting depicts a group of nude women at a pool in a harem. It has an erotic style that evokes both the Near East and earlier western styles associated with mythological subject matter. The painting expands on a number of motifs that Ingres had explored in earlier paintings, in particular The Valpinçon Bather (1808) and La Grande odalisque (1814).
An odalisque was a female slave of a Turkish harem.
Odalisque with Slave is an 1839 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres commissioned by Charles Marcotte. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts a nude odalisque, a musician, and a eunuch in a harem interior. The painting is in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a classic piece of Orientalism in French painting.
The Blue Room is a 1923 painting by French artist Suzanne Valadon. One of her most recognizable works, it has been called a radical subversion of representation of women in art. Like many of Valadon's later works, it uses strong colors and emphasizes decorative backgrounds and patterned materials. Valadon depicts a modern 20th-century woman, clothed and smoking a cigarette, in a pose traditional to female nudes, particularly 19th-century images of odalisques and prostitutes, such as Edouard Manet's Olympia.
Jacqueline Marval was the pseudonym for Marie Josephine Vallet, who was a French painter, lithographer and sculptor.
Raphael and La Fornarina is an oil painting on canvas executed in 1813, in Italy, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It is the first of five versions of the painting he produced between 1813 and his death in 1867. In 1814 his first version was exhibited at the Salon. The work shows the renowned painter, Raphael, sitting in his studio with his mistress, La Fornarina, on his knee. His embrace reflects his affection and desire for her, while his gaze towards his own artwork, his portrait of his mistress, indicates his love for art. This contrast represents the painter's major conflict between who he loves and what he loves. The mistress makes eye contact with the viewer and her posture, specifically her arms resting on his shoulders, shows how proud and satisfied she is with being his mistress and inspiration. The Fornarina's sensual gaze at the viewer claims her importance and place both within the artist's studio and profession.
Roger Freeing Angelica or Ruggiero Freeing Angelica is an 1819 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, inspired by Orlando Furioso by Ariosto. An oil painting on canvas measuring 147 x 199 cm, it is owned by the Louvre. Ingres subsequently painted several variants of the composition.
La Dormeuse de Naples was an 1809 painting by the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, now lost. He reused the pose in two later works, Odalisque with Slave (1839) and Jupiter and Antiope (1851).
The Portrait of Comtesse d'Haussonville is an 1845 oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
Portrait of Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples is an 1814 oil on canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Caroline Murat, née Bonaparte, was the sister of Napoleon, and married Joachim Murat, a Marshal of France and Admiral of France, and later King of Naples. Caroline commissioned the portrait as part of an effort to convey her standing and worth to reign as Queen of Naples during an unstable political climate.
Nu couché is a 1917 painting by Amedeo Modigliani. The painting was included in a 2017/2018 Tate Modern exhibition of Modigliani's works. The painting was sold by auction by Sotheby's in April 2018. Writing in The Guardian, British arts journalist Jonathan Jones compared it to Ingres' 1814 work Grande Odalisque.
The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art.
