The famed painter found both himself and the inspiration he needed in two visits to Tangier in the early 20th century, the effects of which are still very evident.
For the French visual artist Henri Matisse, colour was hugely important, so it was bad timing that in the winter of 1912, as he began his first visit to Morocco, the country’s normally vivid blue skies gave way to leaden dark grey clouds that drenched the land in heavy rain for several days.
As with the East more broadly, Morocco remained steeped in stereotypical Orientalist imagery, fed by historical imagination, yet here he was, forced to stay in his room at the Hotel Villa de France in Tangier, in northern Morocco, looking through the window, waiting for the weather to clear and for the sky to calm.
The city would later embrace him with warmth, opening its doors, cafés, and alleyways, blending the real with the imaginary, the historical with the fantastical. He found the very light he had come in search of (he was also on something of a personal quest to rediscover himself). In Tangier, he was hit by the force of colour and form, offering a kind an alternative vision that would leave a lasting imprint on his artistic journey.
French painter and sculptor Henri Matisse in Nice in December 1949.
Seeing things differently
Matisse visited Tangier twice, in 1912 and 1913, and his time in Morocco rubbed off on the art that he produced, affecting his choices of subject matter, technique, and colours. It helped him understand light, deepening his perception of its intensity. It also helped him re-examine colour, composition, and the concept of space, viewed as a unified fabric in which objects and figures merge within a single chromatic field, free from sharp or defining contour lines.
Unlike the 19th-century French artist Eugène Delacroix, who regarded Morocco’s striking landscapes as ready-made paintings, Matisse recognised the challenge of translating real scenes onto canvas, so whereas Delacroix left Morocco suspended in imagination and untouched inspiration, Matisse sought out a hidden Morocco, one free from Orientalist inclinations.
Neither approached Moroccan nature nor the patterns of the zarbia (carpet or rug) in the same way. In Matisse’s paintings, the zarbia becomes a method of artistic production rather than a product to be replicated. Botanical elements harmonise with the overall composition in the same way that a rug integrates naturally into the furniture and overall space of a home.
Morocco rubbed off on the art that he produced, affecting his choices of subject matter, technique, and colours
Though certain Orientalist features appear in some of Matisse's paintings, such as his later depictions of concubines, his broader modernist practice—as noted by art critic Rémy Labrusse in his essay Tangier as Test—ultimately "surpassed the exotic and picturesque". His work did not aim to reduce or simplify, nor did it seek to portray the marvellous or the fantastical, whether real or imagined.
Lasting impression
Tangier influenced changes in Matisse's colour palette and led him to integrate both Eastern and Moroccan ornamentation. Together with the aforementioned revision of light and spatial composition, these elements shaped the evolution of his artistic style, since he had been captivated by the city's atmosphere and visual richness, with Tangier's markets, for instance, overflowing with radiant pigments and dense colours.
Decorative motifs inspired by the East and Morocco, such as Arabesques, floral designs, and geometric patterns, later filtered into his work, which by now had a new approach to illumination and shadow, with more deliberate contrasts and a stronger sense of vibrancy.
'The Casbah Gate', (Right part of the Moroccan triptych), 1912-1913. Found in the collection of the State A Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Creator: Henri Matisse.
Tangier's architectural forms also influenced his depiction of spatial structures, with sunlit terraces and open windows becoming recurring elements in works such as Odalisque in Red Trousers (1925), produced years after his stay. In general, Matisse's time in Tangier fostered a sense of creative exploration. He embraced a freer, more expressive approach, while his encounters with Islamic and Arab art left a deep and lasting impression, building on his earlier visits to Algeria and Andalusia.
He abandoned depth in favour of flatness, removing all sense of topographical structure and building a continuous visual texture through flat pigment strokes often rendered in monochromatic or bichromatic schemes, giving his art a new existential foundation. This method allowed him to flatten the pictorial surface and discard traditional perspective in favour of a two-dimensional plane. This is evident in works such as Moroccan Café, The Rifian, Hamido, Standing Flower, Flower on the Balcony, and his paintings of windows opening onto cityscapes, shrines or gates leading into the sky.
He had first encountered the aesthetic in Munich during the major Islamic art exhibition of 1910. Later, during his travels to Russia and Spain, he began to reassess decorative arts, long dismissed as secondary, drawing upon their complexity and incorporating motifs from Moroccan carpets, textiles, and miniatures. This led to the recurring vegetal patterns that became a defining feature of his later work.
'Moroccan in Green', 1912. Found in the collection of the State Hermitage, St Petersburg. Creator: Henri Matisse.
Revelation and inspiration
His time in Tangier enabled him to channel emotion into painting, using colour as a primary means of expression. When he arrived, his mental health was suffering, a symptom of which was continuous self-questioning. In the city, he found the serenity and confidence that had eluded him. This breathed new life into his painting. Tangier became a source of revelation and inspiration, present in every corner.
It was where he rediscovered himself and where he encountered profound spiritual insight. This gave rise to a luminous synthesis between the exquisite ornamentation of Islamic aesthetics and the inner beauty of the human self. Through the elimination of detail and the simplification of form, Matisse moved towards the subjective portrayal of his subjects, who now appeared immersed in their surroundings, infused with the emotional and psychological energy.
Eastern art, and Moroccan art in particular, offered Matisse the means to draw upon decorative rhythm not as a cliché or superficial motif, but as a form of repetition that expresses a spiritual impulse to unite the worldly with the divine, culminating in his decorative designs for the stained-glass windows of the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence.
'Zorah on the Terrace', (mid part of the Moroccan triptych), 1912-1913. Found in the collection of the State A Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Creator: Henri Matisse.
Infused with vitality and energy, rhythm speaks directly to the human soul, presenting itself through continuity and sustained motion, in a pattern of endurance and an 'organisation of meaning'. This is what Matisse grasped from the motifs found in carpets, Eastern art and Islamic design, which he began to incorporate. He organised their symbolic references and semantic rhythms into a coherent arrangement of colours and interacting surfaces.
Finding his rhythm
As an admirer of musical structure and movement, including dance, Matisse dedicated several of his works to celebrating rhythm as an art form. Music (1939) stands out among them. In his paintings, repetition became the most fundamental element. Pattern emerged as a composite built from repeated and repurposed forms. Rhythm, in contrast, depended on the spacing and interval between these elements, creating a sense of duration and motion that imbued the painting with vitality and energy.
For Matisse, art did not imitate nature; it reimagined it and became a source of reality in its own right. His turn to rhythmic repetition was never an exercise in mechanical reproduction or monotonous decoration; he painted patterns only to distinguish and reinterpret them. However similar they might seem, each variation possessed its own character and identity. This reflects a deeper understanding of nature's diversity, a truth long recognised by Islamic and Eastern art traditions.
The influence of the East and of Morocco on Matisse extended beyond repetition. He became increasingly absorbed in the play of contrasts and the redefinition of colour. Years after creating The Moroccans (1916), black began to take on a more prominent role in his paintings. It no longer served to erase or absorb light. Instead, it began to reflect it. Black, in his hands, became a means of clarification, not concealment.
'View from the window, Tangier', (left part of the Moroccan triptych), 1912-1913. Found in the collection of the State A Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Creator: Henri Matisse.
He began using black to define patterns, drawing inspiration from Persian and Byzantine art, where this technique had long been employed. Gradually, black assumed a central role in his compositions. It became a key part of his decorative vocabulary. He assigned black an entirely new function, first seen in The French Window (1914). Originally a seascape as seen through the window of his apartment, the painting evolved into a radically abstract composition with a dense layer of black.
In summary, the influence of Tangier on Matisse's art is reflected through a synthesis of vibrant colours, Eastern ornamentation, dynamic treatment of light and a renewed vision of spatial structure. These elements deeply informed his visual language and expanded the scope of his artistic output.
For Henri Matisse, Morocco was not the exploration of an exotic or unfamiliar place. It was an inward journey, where he encountered himself anew, led by the visual rhythms hanging from the rugs that had stunned him at first sight, inspiring images that remained suspended within his aesthetic intuition.
From those first rain-drenched days, the city lifted him into the splendour of blue and the sharpness of emerald green, revealing a new kind of light, reflected and intensified by the very blackness that surrounded his recurring motifs, imbuing them with brilliance and depth across flattened surfaces, and endowing them with life of their own.
