La porta della Casbah

Matisse reached Tangier at the end of January 1912 and it rained for a fortnight. When the weather finally broke he painted the city in a rush, and this view through an arched gateway into the casbah, the old fortified quarter above the port, came out of that sunlit stretch. A buyer was already waiting. Ivan Morozov, a Moscow textile manufacturer, had been buying Matisse steadily, and he took three of the Tangier canvases and hung them as one group in his house, this one on the right. After the revolution the Soviet state took the house and the collection with it. The three panels were never separated, and the Pushkin Museum still shows them in the order Matisse set for a merchant who did not get them back.