The French Orientalist paintings can be loosely seperated in two broad stylistic categories: the Romantic and the Realist. Eugene Delcroix (1798-1863) represents the Romantic, and Jean-Léon Gérome's (1824-1904) typifies the Realist style of painting in 19th century French art.

The romantic style is characterized by the artist's free interpretation of the Orient through myths and fantasies. The paintings depict the "Oriental" women awash in overt sexuality and the "Oriental" male involved in violence of one sort or the other. The artist may never actually visit the "Orient" to paint, instead utilizing the vast fictional landscape of characters and events available to the Western male imagination through travelogues and sensational "autobiographies" of harem dwellers. The Orient becomes a "project of the imagination, a fantasy space or screen onto which strong desires--erotic, sadistic, or both--could be projected with impunity" (Nochlin, p.41). Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (1827) is a prime example of the artist using the Orient as a canvas onto which his fantasies of sex and violence are played out. The painting refers to an ancient Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus who, upon perceiving defeat in battle, destroyed all his possessions and had all his wives and mistresses killed so that they will not fall into the hands of the enemy. The women in this painting are just that-possessions. Delacroix expressed "an overt statement of the most explosive, hence the most carefully repressed, corollary of the ideology of male domination: the connection between sexual possession and murder as an assertion of pure enjoyment" (Nochlin, p.43). The image of women as a possession is ever present in Orientalist painting. The slave girl who is shown terrified and numb is always naked and being examined by Oriental male. Two examples are Circone's Examining Slaves and Rosati's Inspecting New Arrivals. In both these paintings, the fair-skinned, naked women is standing exposed to the gaze of the darker male who is there to purchase her . But above them is the gaze of the horrified, yet titillated, observor who can only shake his head at such barbarity. The Orient in the Romantic paintings does not portray the powerlessness of the Orient itself but rather the powerlessness of women. It is the Frenchman's claim over a woman's body that is evident in these paintings. Delacroix, and the other artists, have merely succeeded in placing it at a "safe" distance in the exotic Orient. The gaze of the observor is the gaze of a man enjoying the sight of women being violently put to death or being sold at an auction block.

The realist style is characterized by seemingly close depiction of "real life and places" in the Orient. There is minute depiction of ceramics, tiles, architectural styles, dress etc. The emphasis seems to be on 'representing' the Orient as faithfully and truthfully as possible. Once the viewer is lost in amazement at the architectural accuracy in the painting, the content is easily assumed to be "true" as well. Gérome is considered to be the leading artist in this style of painting. He "tries to make us forget that his art is really art, both by concealing the evidence of his touch, and, at the same time, by insisting on a plethora of authenticating details, especially on what might be called unnecessary ones" (Nochlin, p. 38). The cover of Said's Orientalism depicts Gérome's Snake Charmer which shows intricate tilework and, what appears to be Arabic calligraphy, on the wall. However, the writing is indecipherable and their is a general sense of decay and imminent ruination in the architecture. Another example is Trouvillebert's (1874)Servante du Harem which depicts calligraphy and architectural detail to balance the portrayl of a semi-naked servant. A nice way of combining architectural accuracy and nude Oriental women is to depict the interior of bath houses. If the idea of "hijab" in Islamic societies is to "hide" from intrusive gaze than these paintings are the ultimate symbols of imperialism because they strip away all veils and provide the Oriental women sans "hijab" for the Western gaze. Gérome painted many bath scenes . There may be noticable architectural details but the focal point of the paintings are the fair-skinned woman being bathed by a darker-skinned servant. Images that resolve to, literally, strip the mysteries of the East and, in doing so, titillate the viewer with hints to the "deviant" sexual practices that are commonplace in all harems. As Linda Nochlin states:

We are, of course, familiar with the notion that the black servant somehow enhances the pearly beauty of her white mistress--a strategy employed by Manet's Olympia, in which the black figure seems to be an indicator of sexual naughtiness. But in the purest distillations of the bath scene--like Gérome's Steam Bath , Moorish Bath and Great Bath, or Debat-Ponson's The Massage- and Bouchad's After the Bath-the very passivity of the lovely white figure as opposed to the vigorous activity of the worn, unfeminine ugly black one, suggests that the passive nude beauty is explicitly being prepared for service in the sultan's bed. This sense of erotic availability is spiced with still more forbidden overtones, for the conjunction of black and white, or dark and light female bodies, whether naked or in the guise of mistress and maidservant, has traditionally signified lesbianism (Nochlin, p. 49).

In conclusion, the following are some of the main themes present in Orientalist art:

• Violence and sex
• Signs that the Oriental civilization is on the decline, portrayed through depiction of crumbling architecture etc.
• Justifications for colonialism: only the White Man can "save" this civilization