The painting depicts a naked boy standing on a small carpet in the center of a room with blue-tiled walls, facing away from the viewer, holding a python which coils around his waist and over his shoulder, while an older man sits to his right playing a fipple flute.

Sarah Lees' catalogue essay for the painting examines the setting as a conflation of Ottoman Turkey and Egypt, and also explains the young snake charmer's nudity, not as an erotic display, but "to obviate charges of fraud" in his performance:The Snake Charmer…brings together widely disparate, even incompatible, elements to create a scene that, as is the case with much of his oeuvre, the artist could not possibly have witnessed.

Maxime du Camp, for example, described witnessing a snake charmer in Cairo during his 1849–51 trip with Gustave Flaubert in terms that are comparable to Gérôme’s depiction, including mention of the young male disrobing in order to obviate charges of fraud.

[3] The blue tiles are inspired by İznik panels in the Altınyol (Golden Passage) and Baghdad Kiosk of Topkapı Palace in Ottoman-era Constantinople.

It is the famous Koranic verse 256 from Surah II, al-Baqara, The Cow, written in thuluth script, and readsThere is no compulsion in religion—the right way is indeed clearly distinct from error.

"[3] A detail of the painting is also used as part of the cover design of Peter Lamborn Wilson's book Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, as published by Autonomedia.

[9]Linda Nochlin in her influential 1983 essay "The Imaginary Orient" points out that the seemingly photorealistic quality of the painting allows Gérôme to present an unrealistic scene as if it were a true representation of the east.

Nochlin calls The Snake Charmer "a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology" in whichthe watchers huddled against the ferociously detailed tiled wall in the background of Gérôme's painting are resolutely alienated from us, as is the act they watch with such childish, trancelike concentration.