The Carpet Merchant shows the carpet market in Cairo, which Gérôme had recently visited.

While he was in Cairo, Gérôme and his friends went on a carpet shopping spree with "great enthusiasm." If you're a flashy European tourist, it's quite a show of power to have local merchants package and ship your favorite carpets back to France, so that they'd be waiting for you when you returned. Works of Gérôme, like those of Moreau and even Cezanne, fall under the heading "Orientalist." In the spectacular realist mode of David, The Carpet Merchant is photographic in detail, with the goal of transporting you to Cairo. Like minstrelsy in the U.S., the infatuation with the brown and black people of the "Orient" was supposed to give the "Orientals" a fair shake, not degrade them—"at least I'm depicting them!" Gérôme would retort, "I love the Orient!"

But purchasing a painting of an "Oriental" slice of life - a genie in a bottle, an enslaved Arab, African child or Maghrebi Jewess, an Arab slave trader, carpet dealer, a "Negro" eunuch - not only made your living room wall an edgy conversation starter, but it accomplished the double goal of making you look liberal, progressive, and forward-thinking, even as you pursued policies to keep "those types" out of your white provincial nation. 

Gérôme and his many artist and writer friends would traipse around Levantine, Mediterranean and Arab countries, storing up voluminous studies for the extravagantly valuable paintings and books on the "mysterious Orient." Defending Orientalism, one British man writes, recently, of his visit to Grenada, Spain, "I felt like I was riding on a magic carpet." Good for you, sir!

Orientalists force the "Orient" to be a sign for the pleasure industries, with images of nude slaves and concubines, but it also reminds the white Europeans of their favorite and most challenging book, the mysterious King James Version. Praising Gérôme's fanciful images, Thomas Eakins wrote of their ability to capture the "little shops" of the Middle East, "their delicate workmanship & fairy like houses their tending cattle like in the days of Methusaleh & Solomon."