In the first of the two days of this whirlwind visit to Morocco, in north-west Africa, I showed the pioneering paintings of Delacroix, and the first of those made during the 1860s by the Spanish artist Marià Fortuny. In 1866, he met the young Ricardo de Madrazo, another aspiring painter, and shortly afterwards they visited the country together.
Fortuny’s watercolour sketch of an African Beach from about 1867 may well have been painted during that later visit to Morocco.
Twenty years later, in late 1887, Théo van Rysselberghe visited Morocco for the third time.
That year the theme of Les XX had been Neo-Impressionism, and brought van Rysselberghe into his lasting friendship with Paul Signac. Although still painting in Impressionist style, he started breaking down his colours and his marks grew smaller in readiness for a more Divisionist approach that he embraced fully during his visit to Morocco. This is shown in his painting of Morocco (The Great Souq) from that year.
Following that, Enrique Simonet visited North Africa on several occasions. His Smoking Shisha in the Tearoom (1892) shows Arab men drinking tea and smoking shisha tobacco (not hashish) in a brilliant expression of his developing Orientalism. In 1893-4 Simonet worked in Morocco as a war correspondent for a Spanish magazine.
In The Barber at the Souk (1897) he maintained his highly detailed realism.
Simonet returned to Morocco, painting several works there including Tangier Market in 1913.
Simonet was still there the following year, when he painted these Terraces of Tangier. The two large birds are probably white storks, which overwinter in Morocco and cross the Strait of Gibraltar during their migration.
In his Tangier at Dusk, also from 1914, his style has changed towards using flatter areas of less intense colour, giving this oil painting the look of a watercolour.
The American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner visited Morocco in the same period, shortly before the First World War.
The keyhole-like Gateway, Tangier (c 1910) shows Tanner’s fascination with the shape of such entrances in north African architecture, which in turn may allude to Christ’s teachings.
An apparently identical location appeared a couple of years later in Tanner’s Entrance to the Casbah. In spite of its similarity with the earlier Gateway, Tangier, it’s presumed that he painted this during his return visit to Tangier and other parts of Morocco two years later, in 1912.