The Snake Charmer

Jean-Léon Gérôme painted "The Snake Charmer" around 1879, and it pulls you right into a strange little scene. A young performer stands with their back to us, a huge snake coiled around their body, while an old man sits cross-legged playing a flute. Along the wall, a group of robed men clutch their weapons and stare at the show. Behind them all, the blue tiled wall glows with intricate patterns and lines of Arabic script, painted with the fussy precision that made Gérôme famous. Every fold of cloth and every tiny tile is rendered so sharply it almost looks like a photograph.

The catch is that none of it is real. Gérôme worked in a style called Orientalism, where French and other European painters imagined the Middle East and North Africa as a place of mystery and spectacle. Rather than recording an actual location, he mixed pieces from different countries and eras to build a setting that matched what his audience back home wanted to believe. The painting picked up a whole new life in 1978, when it landed on the cover of Edward Said's book "Orientalism," a sharp critique of exactly this kind of dreamed-up East. The skill on display is real, but the picture works best as a prompt to ask who painted this fantasy, and for whom.