Gérôme painted this in his Paris studio at the same time as Sargent was working on his own painting. It was Jean-Léon Gérôme's Le charmeur des serpentes (The Snake Charmer, 1880) - above. I can imagine Edward Said walking through the gallery, looking at the Sargent, sniffing at the caption, wondering about the Mark Twain quote, thinking about his own frustration with the way it had become so easy to make the 'Orient' so exotic - and erotic.Īcross the doorway, I was stopped by the next painting. Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one'. But behold, they were not wild enough - they were not fanciful enough - they have not told half the story. The pictures used to seem exaggerations - they seem too weird and fanciful for reality. He had seen the Orientalist art, and it was about this art and his eyes that he wrote, 'Here is not the slightest thing that ever we have seen save in pictures - and we always mistrusted the pictures before. The spirit is captured in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), where he writes of his time in Tangier (Morocco). Sargent, Fumee d'Amre Gris (Smoke of Ambergris), 1880. It is dream-like, a cliché of Orientalist paintings of this period.

The painting depicts a woman perfuming her clothes.

He sketched her and then finished the painting in his Paris studio.

Sargent hired a model to stand in the patio of his rented house. He began this painting in Tétouan (Morocco). It is based on a trip that Sargent - the American painter - took to North Africa in the winter of 1879-80. Turning into the main room, one is struck by a very moving painting by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) from 1880 called Fumée d'ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris). It is a collection of wealth - where what was bought was purchased because there was money on the table, not necessarily ideas to guide the curation. There is no overarching character to the collection - impressionists here and there, modernists here and there, tea pots and silver platters in another room. It is an odd museum, the collection of the heirs of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. A week ago, I was at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Orientalism edward said publisher