Orientalism in art is the name given to Western paintings, most of them from the nineteenth century, that show North Africa, Turkey and the Middle East: harems, bazaars, mosques, deserts and slave markets. Its best-known painters were French. Some, like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme, traveled to the region. Others, like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, never went, and many of these pictures were put together in Paris studios from props, photographs and memories of travel.
The word "Orient" simply meant "the East" as seen from Europe. Long before it was used for painters, an "Orientalist" was a scholar who studied the languages and texts of that part of the world. In the nineteenth century the same word was applied to painters who specialized in Eastern scenes. It took a book published in 1978 to give it the bad reputation it carries today.
The picture most often used to illustrate the term is Gérôme's The Snake Charmer, painted around 1879 and now at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. A naked boy stands on a rug with a large snake coiled around his body while an old man plays the flute. Ten men sit against a wall of blue tiles and watch him.
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The Snake Charmer looks like a record of something Gérôme saw on a journey. He painted it in Paris, more than twenty years after his first trip to Egypt, and the room it shows is assembled from several places. The tiles come from a palace in Istanbul, the costumes and the weapons come from different countries, and snake charming was a street trade in Cairo.
In 1978 the same painting went onto the cover of Orientalism, the book by the Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said that turned the word into an accusation. Yet Said never discusses the picture inside the book. It was the American art historian Linda Nochlin who, five years later, explained what a painting like this one leaves out.
What You'll Discover
How a French war started the fashion.
Why Ingres painted harems without ever traveling.
Where Gérôme found his tiles and helmets.
Why a book cover changed the word.
The Ottoman painter who answered back.
What Matisse kept from the East.