Odalisca (3).

Valencia

Since the first romantic painters, the spell of the Oriental, thanks to the traveling painters who visited Egypt and the entire Ottoman Empire, became fashionable, first, in Napoleonic France (Gerôme, Delacroix, etc.), and later, in Starting in the second third of the 19th century, it ended up spreading from Paris to the countries that were most historically related to North Africa, such as Italy and Spain. In our Hispanic case, a style called “Granada Orientalism” was even coined in reference to the painters who, among others Agrasot, responded to the call of Fortuny, who from 1870 to 1872 had set up his studio very close to the Alhambra, then in restoration. The palace architecture was perfect for recreating a glorious Nasrid past, while travel literature expanded on worlds similar to the Arabian Nights, with their harems where the odalisques ruled as the sultan's favorites. Although there is no evidence that our painter could accompany Fortuny and Moragas to Morocco, he must have been captivated by the beautiful material of legends, human, architectural and landscape images that both Catalan artists contributed to him upon his return from Morocco, so Agrasot decided give us his particular and naturally fanciful version, more aestheticist who, logically and in his case, could not have been a documentarian. From the face with its determined look, self-assured and observant, with clothing and ornamental attire, of what was previously called “an oriental luxury”, it seems that we are looking at the same model of the “Odalisque” exhibited at the MUBAG ( Museum of Fine Arts, Alicante). In addition to his beautiful face, the tiara, earrings with wide hoops, pearl necklace and silver and gold bracelets stand out, offering different chromatic brilliance, in a clear demonstration of a proportionate purely artistic idealization.