Returning to the related subject of costuming, Mata Hari again plays with the exposed and concealed parts of her own body in this photograph. Though she reclines on the fabric and flower petals mostly nude, her breasts remain concealed by a bedecked brassiere. The cache-seins as it was called, was a device of her own invention that she used as a part of her elaborate costuming, a vital aspect in creating the exotic atmosphere her performances required. Throughout the duration of her career, Mata Hari, one of the most famous courtesans in belle époque Paris, never revealed her breasts.^[25] There have been speculations on why she never uncovered her bosom, but even without a practical explanation, this serves an artistic purpose in this portrait. By laying on the ground exposed from the waist down, she is exhibiting both her vulnerability and her sexual potential. This again harkens back to the paradoxical view of the harem woman as both the innocent and the seductress. However, by wearing the cache-seins to cover her breasts, she is also maintaining a level of mystery, a desire to see what lies underneath her brassiere. This knowledge of the Western attitudes towards the East and the male gaze’s role in those attitudes helped her create an exotic, sexualized image that would last for decades after she stopped performing.

Odalisque with Slave, 1842
(Oil on canvas, 76 x 105 cm)
BY Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
The Walters Art Museum
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE YORCK PROJECT:
10.000 MEISTERWERKE DER MALEREI

As touched on before, the Western interest in the exotic lands of the East had given rise to particular motifs in Orientalist art. One of these motifs was the classic reclining nude placed into a harem setting. Mata Hari’s photograph harkens back to the reclining odalisques often pictured in high art of the time, such as Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Odalisque with Slave. The painting shows a nude woman of the harem languishing among exotic objects, such as the hookah and dulcimer. Though in Mata Hari’s portrait there are no such objects, the flowers and fabric paired with the costuming bring to mind the odalisque tropes of the far East. This languishing about in the nude was a common perception of harem life, something that was very much misunderstood by Westerners. The West propagated an image of the harem that became synonymous with a brothel. The term came to connote sexual despotism, the idea that a man had free reign over his own personal whores.^[26] The odalisque stereotype is another element of the Western male sexual fantasy, a place that Mata Hari attempts to fill in this photograph. Though Ingres’ Odalisque with Slave was painted almost a century before Mata Hari’s photograph was taken, the interest in the reclining harem beauty was still relevant to her contemporaries and had arguably grown even more fervent since.^[27]

The harem dancer and odalisque were both stereotypes rendered in Western depictions of the East that became a fascination for Western society. Not only were these stereotypes a way to access the exotic as a means of escapism, they were also objects of sexual fantasy. This was something Mata Hari was no doubt conscious of when crafting these photographs of herself for the public’s viewing pleasure. Had these photographs not placed themselves into a long line of harem imagery in art, it could have been considered distasteful and landed Mata Hari in prison like some of her stripping counterparts.^[28] Instead, by appealing to an audience ever-hungry for the exotic and eroticism, she became one the most successful courtesans in la belle époque Paris and gained the attention she had always desired.