Túnez, paisaje costero I

Kandinsky landed at Tunis on Christmas Day 1904 and stayed until the first week of April. He was 38, had walked away from a law career in Moscow only eight years earlier, and was travelling with the painter Gabriele Münter. They took rooms in two hotels near the central market and worked in the streets and on the beaches of Tunis, Sousse and Kairouan. Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881, so the coast they were painting was administered from Paris and filling up with Europeans who came for the winter. This is a small piece of cardboard, 24 by 33 centimetres, the format he used for outdoor work all through those travelling years. It came to the museum in Paris in 1981, left by his widow Nina Kandinsky.