BOME

The Days After Delacroix: Jean Leon Gerome

The Snake Charmer 1870

After the more influential years of Eugene Delacroix's wonderful work, a flood of admiring painters followed in his footsteps and traveled down a path towards his unique style. Some painters like Courbet and Renoir used his vibrant color and technique to display movement and emotion, but one painter truly characterized Delacroix's movement on Orientalism: Jean-Leon Gerome. This famous French painter in the late 19th century followed Delacroix precisely while adding his own individual touch. In one of his most well known pieces, "The Snake Charmer" Gerome shows a boy playing with a large snake as darkened figures line up against a wall and watch. The childish but even sexual inuendos depicted in this painting scream out at the viewer through the boys naked back wrapped in a snake as the darkened figures watch in childlike awe. The defining mood of the painting is mystery, once again unrealistically dep icting the daIly life of the Eastern people, who seem devoid of time or change. However, at the time Gerome was popularized on the fact that he was so objective and clean with his interpretations in his paintings. An American critic said "Gerome has the reputation of being one of the most studious and conscienciously accurate painters of our time." The Western world believed so much in Gerome's paintings that they saw him as an honest interpreter, even specific as if he were taking a photograph. But, these acknowldgements just come to show how the European Society and the rest of the Western world believed in the true inferiority of the Orient because they saw that world through a distorted and foggy view, which only the painter was able to exemplify. The Snake Charmer is a perfect example of Orientalist paintings, one of the reason why it is the cover of Edward Said's Orientalism book, for the quintissential exotic, sexual, lazy and barabaric traits represented on Gerome's canvas.

~Colonialism and Imperialism ~ The Romantic Movement

~How the Orient Came To Be ~

~ Orientalism: An Artistic Movement ~Delacroix's Pre Orient Work~

< a href="Postorient.html">Delacroix's Post Orient Work ~ The Days After Delacroix ~

~ Bibliography ~

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