Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, literary and visual representations of the Orient (North Africa and the Middle East) became bound up in a larger colonial project of defining cultural differences between East and West. French artists particularly developed the odalisque as a genre of the imperial exotic. Odalisk is the Turkish word for the slave attendant to women of the harem, but it entered into the French language as a word signifying a harem temptress. Odalisque paintings typify the West's eroticized fantasies of the area then known as the Orient, which mixes the sensually delightful with the tyrannical. Jean August Dominique Ingre's Odalisque with Slave, presented in 1839, is a classic example of the Orientalist genre. How did is this fantasy of Middle Eastern culture defined by the subject matter in the painting below?
