Paisagem marroquina (Acanto)

Matisse reached Tangier in the winter of 1912 and it rained for weeks. Shut indoors, he grew impatient, and then the sky cleared and handed him the light he had come to Morocco to find. He painted this in the lush garden of a rented villa, its ground blue over pink and overgrown with the broad leaves of flowering acanthus. He had been drawn south partly by a huge exhibition of Islamic art he saw in Munich in 1910, and here he let colour carry the damp, growing force of the place rather than describe it exactly. It is one of three canvases of the same size he began in that garden, meant to be seen together as a group.