A nude woman lies on a bed of white sheets and pillows, propped on one arm and looking straight at us, one hand pressed flat on her thigh. She wears a black ribbon at her neck, a gold bracelet, pearl earrings and a pink flower in her red-brown hair; one slipper hangs from her foot and the other has fallen onto a fringed, flowered shawl. At the right a Black maid in a pink gown holds out a bouquet wrapped in paper, and a black cat arches its back at the foot of the bed. Two women posed.

The reclining nude is Victorine Meurent, later a painter who exhibited at the Salon from 1876 to 1904; the maid is Laure, a Black model whose address, 11 rue Vintimille, Édouard Manet noted in a small notebook and who posed for three of his paintings. Manet painted it in 1863, quoting Titian's Venus of Urbino and Goya's Nude Maja, and the theme of the odalisque with her Black attendant. At the Salon of 1865, critics attacked the 'yellow-bellied odalisque' while a small group around Émile Zola defended its modernity. In 1890 it was offered to the French state by public subscription, begun on Claude Monet's initiative.

It is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.