The picture was one of six which Leighton exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862. Others included Duett, a fanciful likeness of his protégé John Hanson Walker, now in the Royal Collection; Michael Angelo Nursing his Dying Servant, recently acquired by Leighton House; and The Star of Bethlehem, which was sold in these Rooms on 11 June 1993, lot 107. Despite his brilliant RA debut with Cimabue's Madonna, exhibited in 1855 and bought by the Queen, Leighton had been badly treated by the hanging committee in recent years, his work being consistently poorly hung. However in 1862 the tide began to turn, even though two pictures were rejected. 'The swan girl [i.e. Odalisque] and the "sisters" [Ormond, op.cit., no.82] are on the line in the East Room', he told F.G. Stephens, 'the others just above or just below - they have made up by their treatment of those they have taken for the rejection of the others.' He was finally elected ARA in 1864, although the opposition which existed to his work among the more conservative RAs rather tarnished the occasion. As he wrote to Stephens, 'I can't well (speaking quite confidentially) concieve it a great honour now.'

Leighton himself was pleased with the picture, telling his father that it and Sea Echoes, another work exhibited in 1862 (untraced), were 'very luminous, and ... in that respect the best things I have done.' When the exhibition was hung he felt that 'the "Odalisque" looks best from general aspects.' The press agreed. 'As well as being the result of thought and study', the Art Journal observed prosasically, 'it is a bright picture, and stands out from all round it.' F.G. Stephens, writing in his still fairly new capacity of art critic of the Athenaeum, was more lyrical. '(The) figure is deliciously graceful, and in robes of lovely colour, richly embroidered, harmonises exquisitely with the scene, which is an eastern garden of deep red roses and waving trees; behind are domes and minarets seen through full-flowering shrubs. Intensely Eastern ...' But the warmest praise came from The Times. 'Mr Leighton's "Odalisque" is the most attractive of several very striking contributions of this young painter ... The picture is steeped in voluptuous calm; it is a nook from the garden of Armida, and this the subtle enchantress. As a consumate illustration of the dolce far niente - an idyll for Lotus-eaters - this work leaves nothing to be desired.'

Odalisque was commissioned for 400 guineas by Lewis Pocock, one of the founders of the Art Union of London, who was also to own Leighton's Jezebel and Ahab of 1863 (Scarborough Art Gallery). It quickly passed to Benjamin Godfrey Windus, a retired Tottenham coach-builder who had made a fortune out of a children's medicine, causing Madox Brown to give him the nickname of 'Godfrey's Cordial'. Windus formed a large collection of modern British paintings and drawings, and was particularly known for his Turner watercolours. These were a crucial source for Ruskin when he embarked on Modern Painters and, as he recalled, it was at Windus's house that Turner 'thanked me for my book for the first time.' John Scarlett Davis's watercolour of Windus's library lined with Turners is in the British Museum. But Windus was equally discriminating in his patronage of younger artists, buying, amongst others, Madox Brown's Wycliffe (Bradford) and Last of England (Birmingham), Millais' Isabella (Liverpool), Wandering Thoughts (Manchester) and The Bridesmaid (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), C.A. Collins's Berengaria's Alarm (Manchester), John Brett's The Hedger (private collection) and Rossetti's Lucretia Borgia (Tate Gallery). It was a visit to Windus's collection in the summer of 1855 that gave the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones one of their first, formative experiences of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Windus owned a number of early works by Leighton, including paintings now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Birmingham City Art Gallery, the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, and Leighton House. Most of them were studies of pretty models, the type of picture which Leighton sold most readily at this period and which held an obvious appeal for the elderly collector. Odalisque falls into this category, although, as the Ormonds point out in their monograph, the way the image is interpreted places it firmly within the early 'aesthetic' tradition. Having discussed a more overtly 'aesthetic' picture, Lieder ohne Worte (1861; Tate Gallery), in which the artist consciously develops 'the idea of finding visual equivalents for musical or natural sounds,' they continue: 'Two pictures of models, painted in 1862 and 1863, follow the same genre as Lieder ohne Worte. Entitled Girl feeding Peacocks [Ormond, no. 89; untraced] and The Odalisque (sic), they might almost be companion pieces, representing times of the day or contrasting aspirations, the first suggesting morning and hope, the second evening and melancholy, or, to take an art-historical view, the geniuses of Florentine and Venetian art, respectively. Both evoke an atmosphere remote in time and space, but neither is in the least concretely historical or geographical. They are simply studies of beautiful girls artfully arranged.'

The same might be said of many paintings by other exponents of 'aestheticism', pre-eminently Albert Moore, but Whistler, Rossetti and Burne-Jones to an only modified degree. Leighton, however, was remarkably advanced in embodying 'aesthetic' values in this type of composition. Moore was not to reach this point until the later 1860s, and Burne-Jones's Day and Night (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard) date from 1870-71. These full-length figures, commissioned by F.R. Leyland and soon to grace the famous 'aesthetic' interior created for him at 49 Prince's Gate, London, offer a close parallel to Leighton's two pictures if these were indeed intended to represent contrasting times of day, as the Ormonds suggest. As if to reinforce the 'aesthetic' credentials of Odalisque, the model is shown holding a fan of peacock feathers, while two butterflies hover towards the left. Peacock feathers were one of the key motifs of the Aesthetic Movement, challenged in popularity only by the sunflower; indeed Leighton himself had a stuffed peacock (still in situ) prominently displayed at the foot of the staircase in that temple of 'aesthetic' values, Leighton House. As for the butterflies, the Whistlerian parallel needs no emphasis.

The picture has been lost since 1953 and the composition was known only from Lumb Stocks' engraving in the Art Journal, which represents it in the Ormonds' book.