Description
| Year: | 1907 |
| Original size: | 167 cm x 189 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France |
The Snake Charmer – a hand-painted reproduction
A woman stands in the thicket, facing the viewer squarely, playing a transverse flute.
Her body is painted as an almost complete silhouette: only the whites of the eyes and a
thin highlight along the hair catch any light. A snake crosses her shoulder and falls down
her torso, a second rises in an S from the grass at her left, a third lies along a branch
above right. At the lower left a large bird with a long flat spatulate bill, a pink body and
a white neck walks among strap-shaped leaves; behind it runs a band of water ruled with fine
horizontal ripples, and above that stands a dark wall of forest. A pale full moon hangs high
at the left in a grey-green sky. On the right rise long sword-shaped leaves in cream and
blue-green, a rounded knobbly flower cluster among them, and blue-grey flower spikes at the
very edge. A small green parrot sits on a branch upper right.
A silhouette carrying the whole scene
What is unusual here is that the main figure has almost no interior drawing. Everything
that defines her is outline – shoulders, hips, the arms raised to the flute – and two bright
points at the eyes. That is why the scene holds from across a room: the silhouette reads as
a sign rather than a portrait. It is a rarity among this painter’s jungle canvases, where
every leaf is normally drawn separately. Set it beside The Dream, where a night scene is
filled with bodies, colours and patterns, and you can see how much is left here to a single
dark outline.
A night jungle, not a day one
The pale moon, the grey-green sky and the water without glitter put the scene at dusk.
That is what separates this canvas from Tiger in a Tropical Storm, where a storm gives the picture its
direction and its light, and from The Equatorial Jungle, where the thicket is lit and open. Here the
planting does not open up – it closes around the figure and holds her in place. The range of
colour is narrower too: dark green, black, cream, and one pink passage at the bird. On a wall
the result reads as calm rather than dramatic, which suits a room where you do not want a
loud motif.
A large canvas, and what that means for a wall
The original measures 167 cm x 189 cm. It is among this painter’s largest works, and that
is one reason the figure survives without interior drawing: at that size the outline is
already large. We do not copy canvases at their original size – you choose the size for your
wall, and with this motif smaller sizes work better than you would expect, because the
structure is so simple. To see how the same process handles a denser, more broken-up scene,
look at In a Tropical Forest: Struggle between Tiger and Bull.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the transitions
inside the dark body, the edges of the leaves and the bright accents of the eyes stay
readable even at smaller sizes. Because this is handwork, two canvases of the same size are
always slightly different; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a
print. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.
