Fenster in Tanger

Early in 1912 Matisse traveled to Tangier looking for strong light, and it rained for weeks. When the weather finally broke he painted the view straight out of his window at the Hotel de France, looking over rooftops to the tower of an English church in the distance. Almost the whole picture is drenched in one deep blue, the sky, the buildings and the foreground flattened into zones of colour with only a few notes of pink and green. It is the left-hand panel of three he painted in Morocco that are meant to hang as a set. The Moscow textile magnate Ivan Morozov bought it more or less straight off Matisse's easel, which is why a window in Tangier now opens in a museum in Moscow.