Orientalism in art is the name for the nineteenth century Western paintings of North Africa, Turkey and the Middle East: harems, bazaars, mosques, deserts and slave markets. Its most famous painters were French.
Since 1978, when the scholar Edward Said published a book called Orientalism, the word has also named an argument: do these pictures show the region as it was, or a version of it invented in Europe?
Some of these painters made the journey east. EugĂšne Delacroix, who led the French Romantic painters, a group that put color and movement ahead of careful drawing, sailed to Morocco. Jean-LĂ©on GĂ©rĂŽme, one of the most admired artists of official Paris, went to Egypt more than once.
Others stayed home. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great defender of precise drawing, never went east at all, and even the travelers did most of the work in France. Many of these pictures were put together in Paris studios, from props, photographs and memories of travel.
The label came from scholarship. Long before it was used for painters, an "Orientalist" was a scholar who studied the languages and texts of the lands east of Europe. In the nineteenth century the word passed to painters who specialized in Eastern scenes.
Of all their pictures, one is used most often to show what the word means: GĂ©rĂŽme's The Snake Charmer, painted around 1879. A naked boy stands with his back to us, a python coiled around his waist and over his shoulder, while an old man beside him plays the flute.
Facing them, a row of men sit on the ground against a wall of blue tiles and watch. The scene reads at first like a page from a travel diary, yet GĂ©rĂŽme painted it in Paris, and the room he shows never existed in one place.
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The canvas hangs today in Williamstown, a small town in Massachusetts, in the museum founded by the American collector Sterling Clark, who bought it at auction in New York in 1942.
It is also the picture on the cover of Said's book. Said, a Palestinian American literary scholar, argued that Western writers had described the East as backward, irrational and inferior, and that this description had helped Europe justify its empires.
Yet Said never discusses the painting anywhere inside the book. That work was done in 1983 by the American art historian Linda Nochlin, who explained what a picture like this one leaves out.
Napoleon's army in Egypt
The pictures that Said and Nochlin looked back on belong to a fashion that began with a warâŠ
What You'll Discover
Why Ingres painted harems without ever traveling.
Where GĂ©rĂŽme found his tiles and helmets.
Why a book cover changed the word.
Who disagreed with Said, and on what.
The Ottoman painter who answered back.
What Matisse went looking for in Tangier.