Generations of French artists were enthralled with the pictorial possibilities of what they called the Orient. This infatuation with the East was called Orientalism. And many Orientalist pictures represent the female nude. This Orientalist painting by Henri Matisse, dating from the late 1920s, shows an odalisque, naked except for a pair of gray trousers, reclining in an exotic interior.

Although his choice of subject was clearly legitimized by the venerable pedigree of nineteenth-century Orientalism, Matisse, like Delacroix before him, had actually traveled to Northern Africa in the early nineteen-teens. Thus, he attempted to justify his engagement with the theme on more immediate, less exalted grounds. "I paint odalisques in order to paint the nude," he said, "and also because I know it exists. I was in Morocco. I saw it."