About this work
At the center of *Midday, Tangiers* stands what Tanner returned to again and again during his 1912 Moroccan journey: the gateway entrance to the casbah, the historic city area and fortress.
The canvas — oil on canvas, measuring approximately 61.6 by 51.4 centimetres — depicts Tangier at noon, with a gate as its focal subject. The painting belongs to the same sustained investigation as *Gateway, Tangier* and *Entrance to the Casbah*: attention directed at the gateway entrance into the heart of the Moroccan city, the open rounded archway dominating the canvas, with a figure whose diminutive scale is intended to emphasize the height of the great entranceway. Where Tanner's nocturnal Tangier scenes dissolve into blue-green shadow, here the full weight of the Moroccan midday sun bears down — at midday in Tangier, light splinters into shafts — catching the whitewashed plasterwork and casting hard shadows across the stone paving below. Tanner used his views of the streets, walls, and arcades of the city to explore the phenomena of color and light, not analytically as the Impressionists did, but in harmony with his own romanticism; the Moroccan paintings are vague, shadowy scenes painted in one predominant hue with thick, scumbled passages over rich glazing on a white ground.
In 1912, Tanner spent several months in Morocco, a trip that inspired a great number of works displaying the dramatic handling of light for which he became known.
He traveled to Tangier — a port city on the Strait of Gibraltar — to paint the Moroccan cityscape, and a few days after arrival, Henri Matisse checked into the same hotel for his own stay in Morocco. The two men were working through related formal preoccupations, yet Tanner's approach was his own: curator Adrienne L. Childs notes that Tanner's modernist works of this period "emphasize the picturesque nature of North Africa and focus on secular subjects, such as the play of sunlight on the whitewashed architecture," and that his Moroccan gateways "denote the limits of his incursion into Oriental spaces" — he does not project a conception of private Moroccan interiors in the manner of traditional Orientalists, but instead presents "stylized renderings of public spaces subtly animated by the movements of indistinct figures." The series also marks a turning point in his technique: Tanner had begun experimenting with pigments and glazes around 1907, and it was his renewed acquaintance with the Orient that enabled him to develop the more resonant and colorful painting style characteristic of his art from about 1910
