Vista sulla baia di Tangeri

Matisse came to Tangier early in 1912 hoping for African light and got rain instead. For the better part of a month it kept him shut in his room at the Hôtel de France, and what he had to look at was the view from the window, the casbah and the bay below. So he painted that. He flattened the whole scene into a few broad patches, the town, the water, the sky, letting the colour carry the heat he could not go out into. Morocco loosened something in him. When the weather finally broke he went out and painted the city itself, but this early view is the one made from inside, looking down at the bay he was waiting to reach.