Ingres’s Odalisque

Ingres’s Odalisque is both a celebrated work of the older artistic tradition and a recurring measure of change in Philip Carey’s taste. Set against Manet’s Olympia in a debate over whether modern painting will endure, it later appears in Philip’s visits to the Louvre and, as a photograph beside Olympia, in the private ritual through which he embraces Impressionism.

A Masterpiece Put on Trial

At a dinner in the Latin Quarter, Lawson invokes the Odalisque as the benchmark against which the future reputation of Manet’s Olympia can be tested. Recalling Zola’s prediction that Olympia would hang in the Louvre opposite the Ingres, Lawson argues that comparison would favor Manet’s picture. Flanagan counters that Olympia is only a passing fashion and will be dead within ten years. The Odalisque thus enters the discussion not simply as an admired painting, but as an emblem of inherited artistic authority whose standing modern art might unsettle.

The argument belongs to a wider change in artistic standards. Impressionism has recently prevailed in the Latin Quarter, where young painters champion Manet, Monet, and Degas against academic painters such as Carolus-Duran and Bouguereau. Raphael, long revered, has become a target of youthful derision; the debaters would exchange his works for Velasquez’s portrait of Philip IV in the National Gallery. Against this unsettled hierarchy, the Odalisque gives the dispute a concrete form: the question is whether the new painting can survive the test of time beside an established masterwork.

Looking at the Louvre

Fanny Price takes Philip to the Louvre and shows him the Odalisque alongside Ingres’s La Source. Her tour is purposeful and controlling: she chooses the works and tries to direct his admiration, just as she presents Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus as a test of whether he can feel beauty in painting. Philip, meanwhile, is still inclined to interpret art through literary language. At Mona Lisa he recites the words of Walter Pater, but Fanny dismisses that response as literature and urges him to get away from it. The encounter places the Odalisque within her earnest effort to teach him to attend to paintings on their own terms.

The guided visit does not fix Philip’s taste. He is drawn instead to the sunny view through a Long Gallery window, and his attention to the museum’s setting contrasts with Fanny’s insistence on the pictures she considers important. The Odalisque is therefore part of an early education in art that exposes a difference between prescribed admiration and Philip’s still-developing way of seeing.

A Photograph Beside Olympia

As Philip’s old allegiances fall away, the Odalisque returns in a more personal form. He buys a photograph of Ingres’s painting and another of Olympia, pinning them side by side above his washing-stand so that he can contemplate them while shaving. The pairing turns Lawson’s public argument into part of Philip’s daily life: the two works whose future relation had been disputed now stand together in the room where he repeatedly encounters them.

Philip’s broader transformation is visible in the same period. His initial amazement at Impressionism becomes admiration, and he begins speaking as emphatically as his companions about Manet, Monet, and Degas. He comes to think there had been no landscape painting before Monet, and he responds strongly to Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus and Velasquez’s Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. He also exchanges his bowler hat and neat spotted tie for a broad-brimmed hat, a flowing black cravat, and a romantic cape, and learns to drink absinthe without distaste. The photographs of the Odalisque and Olympia are a compact record of this conversion: the older work remains present, but now in direct visual company with the modern painting whose claim to lasting value it once helped define.

Changing Standards of Artistic Value

The painting’s significance lies in how its role shifts with the people looking at it. For Lawson, it is the established counterpart that makes a prediction about Olympia’s future legible. For Fanny, it belongs to a canon she wants Philip to appreciate through disciplined looking. For Philip, it becomes part of a private, repeated encounter through photographs, while his taste increasingly aligns with the Impressionists.

The novel does not make the Odalisque disappear when Philip changes sides. Instead, its continued presence beside Olympia preserves the tension between inheritance and innovation. Artistic value emerges through changing standards, argument, teaching, and sustained attention—not from a single verdict that settles the contest between old and new.