The Snake Charmer

Gérôme painted this around 1879, a French artist selling European viewers a vision of 'the East' as a place of idle spectacle. A naked boy holds a python before a row of seated men against a wall of gorgeous blue tiles. Almost every part is borrowed from somewhere real, the tilework copied from the Topkapı palace in Istanbul, the floor from a Cairo mosque, yet assembled into a scene that never existed, staged for a Paris salon. A century later the critic Edward Said put this exact picture on the cover of his 1978 book Orientalism, and it became the standard image of everything he was attacking, the West inventing an exotic East for its own eyes. Said himself never once mentioned the painting inside.