Louise O’Murphy (Blonde Odalisque or Resting Girl or Reclining Girl or Nude on a Sofa) - Francois Boucher Oil Painting for Sale

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Louise O’Murphy (Blonde Odalisque or Resting Girl or Reclining Girl or Nude on a Sofa): Francois Boucher

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Francois Boucher Oil Painting - Louise O’Murphy (Blonde Odalisque or Resting Girl or Reclining Girl or Nude on a Sofa)

Keywords: Louise, O’Murphy, Blonde, Odalisque, Resting, Girl, Reclining, Girl, Nude, Sofa

Work Overview: Louise O'Murphy (Blonde Odalisque; Portrait of Marie-Louis O’Murphy; Resting Girl; Reclining Girl; Nude on a Sofa)
Francois Boucher
Date: 1752
Style: Rococo
Genre: nude painting (nu)
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 59 x 73 cm
Location: Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Marie-Louise O'Murphy (French pronunciation: [ma.ʁi.lwiz ɔ‿.myʁ.fi]; also variously called Mademoiselle de Morphy, La Belle Morphise, Louise Morfi or Marie-Louise Morphy de Boisfailly; 21 October 1737 – 11 December 1814) was one of the lesser mistresses (petites maîtresses) of King Louis XV of France, and a model for the famous painting of François Boucher.

The name of the model who has made herself comfortable here on the sofa has been given to us by no lesser person than Casanova. She was Marie-Louise O’Murphy, born in 1737, who had begun work as a seamstress in Paris. The painter Boucher must have discovered her in 1751, because from then on she was employed as his model. Later she became the mistress of Louis XV.

Lying on her stomach with her legs gracefully bent, the naked girl is shown on a couch covered with a sumptuously patterned yellow fabric. This choice piece of furniture must have stood in the boudoir of one of the aristocratic palaces in Paris, leaving the pressing question as to whether the girl really came from there. She is looking with interest over the backrest of the couch, out of the picture. And if the viewer wonders what it is she is looking at, the picture’s intention has been achieved, because it is meant to awaken, not satisfy, our curiosity. This maintains the tension.

Boucher did two versions of this motif. The other one is in the keeping of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. And one of the two, although it is uncertain which, was actually bought from the painter by the Marquise de Pompadour`s brother.

Contemporary and modern historiography concur in identifying Marie-Louise O'Murphy as the very young model who posed for the la Jeune Fille allongée (the lying Girl), of François Boucher,[7] a famous painting for his undisguised eroticism, dating from 1752. Two versions of this painting have survived, both conserved in Germany, one in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich and the other in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum at Cologne. Boucher, at the height of his fame, had made a specialty of these deliberately licentious nudes, represented in lascivious poses outside a mythological context. La Jeune Fille allongée, also known as l'Odalisque blonde (the Blonde Odalisque), echoes to the also erotic Odalisque brune (Brown Odalisque), painted around 1745, whose several copies are kept at the Louvre or the Museum of Fine Arts, Rheims.

In his Histoire de ma vie (vol. 3, chap. 11), Giacomo Casanova relates that he found her "a pretty, ragged, dirty, little creature" of thirteen years in the house of her actress sister. Struck by her beauty when seeing her naked, however, he had a nude portrait of her painted, with the inscription "O-Morphi" (punning her name with Modern Greek ὄμορφη, "beautiful"), a copy of which found its way to King Louis XV, who then asked to see if the original corresponded with the painting:

The skilled artist had drawn her legs and thighs so that the eye could not wish to see more. There I write below: O-Morphi wasn't a Homeric or either Greek word. Was simply mean Beautiful.[8]
In his account of those events, which were written many years later, the Venetian seducer seeks to obtain the central role, even though he was perhaps only a partial witness. He did not specifically cite Boucher and seems rather, in the evening of his life, to have recorded this episode from gossip and pamphlets which circulated very freely in Europe at the end of the 18th century. Other sources are more accurate.

Police inspector Jean Meunier echoes in his diary another version of the facts, that circulates in the months following the meeting of Louis XV and Marie-Louise O'Murphy. On 8 May 1753 he wrote very specifically:

They say that the youngest Morfi, fourth sister and therefore the youngest served as a model of the Boucher painting, he painted her naked and gave or sold the painting to Monsieur de Vandières (brother of Madame de Pompadour) and when the King saw it, became intrigued if the painter hadn't flattered the model, so he asked to see the youngest Morfi, and after their meeting, he found her even better that the painting.

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The surrealist Georges Bataille said, "No collector could ever love a work of art as much as a fetishist loves a shoe." Was he right? Sexual arousal has always been part of painting's business.

Moralists have qualms. They try to draw lines – between art and pornography; or erotica and pornography. They ask: is the body being treated as a person, or as an object? Painting has a way of baffling such distinctions.

Boucher's Mademoiselle O'Murphy is one of the most sexually provocative pictures in the canon. Its subject, lying naked and splayed on a daybed, is Marie-Louise O'Murphy – a Parisian "child-courtesan", 14 at the time of painting, soon after to become the mistress of Louis XV.

Her age is perhaps why Boucher refrains from showing her frontally naked. But this notional decency only contributes to making her a more passive object. Beyond any seductive welcome, this body is simply ready.

The focus is on the buttocks. But that's not precisely where the provocation lies. This picture offers buttocks with wide-open legs – a direct invitation to penetrate.

But they're also where the painting gets most interesting. If you look at the contours of the two buttocks, the two legs and the pillow, you find an interplay of curves and tucks and creases and outlines and overlaps.

All that formal activity is designed to keep your eye on this spot. But it's also a kind of distraction. You now see the body in terms of the shapes it's making. You lose touch with its anatomy. At the sexual centre of the painting, pictorial interest and sexual interest are in conflict.

Boucher's priorities are divided. The pornographer in him may want to make a body that's helplessly available. But the painter can't help being excited by its potential as a composition. Each way the body is "objectified" – but in two different and diverging ways.

And when it comes to "objectifying", painting is always an unstable medium. It tends to blur the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. It treats living creatures like objects – and invests objects with life.

Look at the girl's right leg. The picture simply omits the thigh (which we understand to be bent up behind her), and leaves the lower leg lolling on the pillow, a bit of entirely lifeless flesh.

But then, look at the tumultuous bedding and the cascading curtain, which writhe and strain and press as if possessed by a muscular, anatomical life. The pillow pushes up between the girl's legs. There's an echo of mythological scenes where the god Jupiter impregnates a nymph in the form of a cloud or a shower of gold.

The art of painting, in other words, has its own compulsions. It's not very good at making proper moral distinctions between persons and things. The whole physical world tends to get mixed up, with life circulating though it promiscuously. But painting isn't very good at doing pure pornography either. Its sexual attention is always getting distracted.

And Mademoiselle O'Murphy, though it seems to have such an explicit purpose, will satisfy neither the moralist nor the lech. Like any true painting, if you love it, it has to be on its own terms.

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