Am I Obliged to Imitate You? On Copying the Grande Odalisque for the Ottoman Collection of Paintings Elvah-ı Nakşiye

Abstract

Abstract In 1813, Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples and Napoleon’s youngest sister, commissioned Jean-Auguste Ingres, the director of Villa Medici at the time, a painting (Ingres 1994: 66). It was upon this commission that Ingres created in Rome, the future icon of orientalism: La Grande Odalisque. The most reproduced masterpiece of the Louvre, second only to the Mona Lisa, La Grande Odalisque was copied by a “young Turk”, Haşmet Aral in 1951. Aral was sent to Paris with a state scholarship aimed at expanding his expertise in painting and this time it was his commission to paint the Odalisque. Upon his return, his copy was represented in the museum of copies, an initiative launched in 1915 by historian and museologist Halil Edhem, brother of celebrated Osman Hamdi, and expanded by several of his followers. This paper will bring to the foreground Haşmet Aral’s encounter as a copyist of Odalisque, with the views of Lhote and Leger, the masters he worked with in Paris, on the task of copy and Ingres. It will also dwell on the “achievements” of Aral as compared to other copyists and interpreters of the Ingres’ masterpiece among whom are Delacroix, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. And finally it will bring on the agenda the context and possible effects of the inclusion of La Grande Odalisque to the collection of a museum in Istanbul, the old capital of the Orient, at a time when orientalism was not yet criticised.