The Snake Charmer (Gerome, 1870).

The snake charmer is a painting by a French historical artist Jean-Leon Gerome. It was completed at 1870 AD. The landscape focuses on a naked boy who is holding the python and pointing it upwards. On the ground pointing towards the snake charmer is an old man who is playing a fipple flute. Mercenaries are watching intently from the side. They seem to be from different tribes as connoted by their garments. They have differing weapons and ornaments. This is an exotic and erotic imagery of the Middle East which was very popular in the late years of the nineteenth century.

The artist of this landscape, Jean-Leon Gerome, lived in the years between 1824 and 1904. During the period of the second half of the nineteenth century, he was one among the most respected and wealthy artists of the French (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010). The debates of the present and the future French painting traditions focused to a great extent on his paintings. Gerome  seems to have used brand new photomechanical processes to reproduce his paintings. They were distributed across America and Europe and were popular much because of their imagination and the ability to provoke mass entertainment from both film and theatre.

The snake charmer portrays a sleazy kind of imperialist vision of the east part of the world. The painting shimmers with silver and blue as reflected by the shiny Islamic tiles. This shows an impression of an orientalist fantasy (Jones, 2013). Overtime people have used the painting in different ways. For example, Edward Said has used it in his book entitled ‘Orientalism’ (Jones, 2013). Voyeurism seems to be titillated in the snake charmer. However, the blame for this is shifted to the audience that is slumped in the painting.  The Islamic tiles portray a survival of the finer and older cultures which claimed that they knew how to love and to think well than the locals.

Jean-Leon Gerome compiled the paintings of the snake charmer from multiple sources to portray different things (Finkel, 2010). Research shows that this scene is fabricated even with photographs that were taken from the palace of Topkabi in Istanbul. In the same year of the painting, Gerome’s father, Adolphe Goupil sold the painting to Albert Spencer, a New York collector at 75, 000 francs. Spencer sold the snake charmer to Alfred Cornic Clark, who loaned it for exhibitions at the Columbian World exhibitions in Chicago. Later it was sold to Schaus art gallery in New York. Through the transactions, the snake charmer ended up in Getty Villa.

One may ask how the snake charmer is related to the orient and colonialism. The orient is depicted by Jean-Leon Gerome as a barbaric place and one which is not progressive (7^thCentury Generation, 2008). This is the view that was upheld by the scholars that studied the concept of the Occident and the orient. The painting is deeply detailed and is rich in scenery and environment. Because of this, the paintings of Jean-Leon Gerome were not taken as fiction, but as arts, so is the snake charmer. Disputes too were few about Gerome’s snake charmer because of its detail. People believed that the artist had a deep understanding of what he was painting. The people of the orient’s barbarity are well portrayed. All the forms of life of the people of the orient and their timeless nature is kind of barbarity that Gerome explores through the snake charmer. The attitude of timelessness and mystery to the people of the orient is depicted.

The way the snake charmer depicts the Occident’s view of the orient is well described by Edward Said as quoted by the 7^th Century Generation (2008). The idea was that the western peoples would dominate, while the people of the orient would be dominated. The occidentals ingrained this idea into their minds until they put it into practice. The idea of the west dominating the east is significant of the orient people’s considered themselves as being of lower human dignity. This explains why Gerome in his work of the snake charmer linked the Orient to a lace of barbarity.

The snake charmer is a piece of Gerome’s art that depicts his work to the greatest thought. It is done with oil in the canvas.  It is charming indeed that Penguin books chose it to be the cover of Edward Said’s book (7^th Century Generation, 2008). This seems a calculated choice. It is a famous representation of the Occident’s thinking about the orient. The painting well depicts the mystery and the timelessness characteristic of the orient. The crumbling of the Ottoman Empire which was the glory of the orient is depicted. The boy with the python is being watched intently by people of different generations. There are both old and young men. The old man is charming the snake keeps the deadly python focused by playing the flute so that the boy can continue holding the snake without disturbance. The environment shows walls and floors that are old and some parts are worn out. Some of them are repaired. This is representative of the mystery of the orient. There is Arab writing and Islamic flower motifs in the blue, vivid walls. These depict the truth, authenticity and the reality of the situations of the orient as related with the Occident.

The detail in the Snake charmer makes it to taken as a fact (Jones, 2013). It legitimizes the work of Jean-Leon Gerome. Research shows that Gerome did studies about his subjects patiently before embarking on the actual work. The 1889 eighth International conference of orientalists had invited four delegates from Egypt. These delegates spent some days in Paris before they headed to Stockholm. Coincidentally, this visit was exhibitory of the things of Egyptian Orient. This is how Egypt was put in a display and all were able to see. This representation that was created by the French was seen as the real Orient (7^th Century Generation, 2008). Therefore, the Orient’s mystery is well placed in the snake charmer. This mystery aroused curiosity in travelers like Gerome to visit the Empire of the Ottoman. The mystery is portrayed by the way the artist positions his characters. For example, the boy holding the snake has his back towards the audience. To conceal the obvious masculinity of the boy, Gerome denies the audience what the young and old men in the portrait are seeing.

The snake charmer scene also depicts the sexual desire of the Orient. This is because, by the time of the painting, the people of the Orient were subjected to the stuffiness of the Victorian rule. Such curiosity is aroused by the nakedness of the boy. Same-sex love seems to have been depicted in the painting. Only the audience in the painting is sure of the reality of what is happening.

References

Finkel, J. (2010). Jean-Leon Gerome’s ‘The Snake Charmer’: A twisted history. New York: The Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2010.

Gerome, L.J. (1870). The snake charmer: Orientalism. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

1. Paul Getty Museum. (2010). The spectacular art of Jean-Leon Gerome. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum.

Jones, J. (2013). Jean-Leon Gerome: Orientalist fantasy among the impressionists. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com

The 7^th Century Generation. (2008). Colonialism in question: Orientalism: In images. The 7^th Century Generation. Retrieved from http://www.7cgen.com