In what ways does the painting 'La Grande Odalisque' by Ingres (1814) reflect an “orientalist” vision of the "East"?

'La Grande Odalisque' depicts an odalisque, or concubine, reclining on a bed as she greets her next customer who has entered the scene (supposedly the viewer). It not only marks Ingres' combination of neoclassical composition and romantic subject matter, but also reflects social impacts of colonisation in the Middle East. With European empires (e.g. Napoleon) conquering Northern Africa and much of the Arabic world, there was a burning curiosity from Europeans at home to see and understand what was happening in these far away lands. Many artists who specialised in these idealised and even mythical portrayals had never actually visited these places and so their misrepresentation of an exotic, lazy and uneducated “East” led to the cultivation of “orientalism”: ‘a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological differentiation between the “Orient” and the “Occident”’ (Said, 1978). Due to the exotic, erotic and luxurious tropes represented in this piece, we can infer that Western men fantasised about Eastern women and the unknown. Ingres represents the figure as sensuous and erotic though her direct gaze, the suggestive parting of the curtains and more obviously her nudity (bar some jewellery). Ingres’ fascination with the East and lack of historical accuracy is also evident as her body is not anatomically correct and she appears to be an idealised French woman rather than a local African or Arabic woman.Ingres is therefore reflecting contemporary sexual fantasies about women of the “Orient”, the values of which were established by colonialist interpretation of Enlightenment philosophy.