The painting was made when the artist was living in Rome. It depicts a girl dressed in a low-cut blouse set against dense vegetation. The subject is Albaydé, a character from Victor Hugo’s collection of poems, Les Orientales, about the Greek War of Independence. Her premature death at the age of fifteen is recounted in his poem "Les Tronçons du serpent".[2][3]
In the orientalist style, she is portrayed in a seductive way, as a reclining odalisque, dressed in a simple gown, on a harem divan, holding a blooming bindweed flower. She was actually a slave held prisioner there. Her expression seems absent and the excessive whiteness of her skin seems to anticipate her premature death.[4][5]
