François Boucher's L'Odalisque

Jen here to enthusiastically introduce today’s very special edition, which we’re launching in support and celebration of my dear friend Glynnis MacNicol’s new memoir. I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is a luminous account of her adventures in Paris just as the world was beginning to emerge from the first wave of the pandemic. There’s a lot of excitement around this book, and its contents and its cover have generated a soupçon of controversy too. Our modern society just isn’t sure what to do with a mature, independent woman who wholeheartedly pursues joie and fulfillment on her own terms and apparently they (we?) just can’t handle the female form either, even if the form in question happens to be a 1745 painting that hangs in the freaking Louvre. Naturally, we decided to make a print based on the original Boucher work that’s featured on the book cover, and are delighted that Glynnis herself wrote an introduction about the painting for us.

— Jen

In August 2021, I was in Paris and decided to go to the Louvre. While I’d visited Paris many times over the years, I hadn’t been to the Louvre since 1994 when I was 19-years-old. There was always an enormous line snaking around the glass pyramid and I didn’t relish doing battle with all the tourists inside. There were plenty of other museums in Paris.

But that summer, thanks to a combination of travel restrictions and the arrival of the Delta variant, Paris was mostly empty. Each time I biked past the Louvre, the absence of that line was notable to me. What the hell, I thought one day. Now’s your chance. So, I bought a ticket.

Having the Louvre almost entirely to oneself is a privilege generally reserved for the very wealthy or the overnight staff. There was still a small crowd around the Mona Lisa that day, but otherwise entire corridors were empty. By the time I made it up to the second floor I hadn’t seen another person in fifteen minutes.

The Louvre is an intense museum full of intense artwork. Lots of blood and guts and angels and vengeance. Having no buffer between me and all these operatic masterpieces soon became overwhelming. The second floor felt calmer, though. Less Heaven and Hell and more portraiture. Not everyone appeared to be bleeding to death.

Then I turned a corner and saw myself.
Or at least, that’s how it felt.

What actually happened was, I turned a corner and came upon, for the first time, François Boucher’s L'Odalisque.

After a certain age, one stops seeing oneself represented in culture. To be a woman without a partner or children in your mid-forties (I was on the brink of turning 47 that summer) is to be largely rendered invisible. It’s often been notable to me that when I do find representations of myself – a woman having a solitary meal; walking alone; appearing to enjoy her own company – it’s frequently in paintings depicting sex workers (or in the case of Matisse’s Odalisques, models modeling sex workers). In other words, the only women who were allowed on the streets without a chaperone (though, they needed to apply for a license from the city).

+ Limited-edition, exclusive to 20x200
+ Museum quality: archival inks, 100% cotton rag paper unless noted
+ Handcrafted custom-framing is available

Our quoted dimensions are for the size of paper containing the images, not the printed image itself. We do not alter the aspect ratio, nor do we crop or resize the artists’ originals. All of our prints have a minimum border of .5 inches and maximum of 2.5” to allow for framing.

Inkpress Duo Matte

François Boucher was a prolific French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. He was one of the most celebrated painters of the 18th century, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes(the latter were somewhat influenced by his work creating stage sets and tapestry designs). He came under harsh criticism later in his career, when his work was labelled as trivial, decorative, and at times, erotic. The dark-haired version of the Odalisque portraits prompted claims by the art critic Denis Diderot that Boucher was "prostituting his own wife".

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L'Odalisque

François Boucher

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