About this work
*Moroccan Man* places a single robed figure at its centre — unhurried, self-contained, absorbed in his own interior world rather than performing for the viewer. The composition is spare and close, with Tanner directing full attention to the figure's bearing and the quality of light falling across draped fabric. True to the palette Tanner had been developing since his Paris years, the canvas works in cooled, muted tones — blues, blue-greens, and soft ochres — applied with the loose, layered brushwork that distinguished his mature hand. The Moroccan paintings are all vague, shadowy scenes painted in one predominant hue with thick, scumbled passages over rich glazing on a white ground. The result is a figure that feels simultaneously specific and luminous, anchored in place yet suffused with an almost meditative stillness.
Beginning around 1910, Tanner embarked on trips to North Africa where he was especially drawn to the sights and sounds of the markets in Morocco and the architecture of Tangiers.
Tanner visited Morocco in 1912; previous trips to the Middle East had included Palestine and Egypt in 1897 and 1898–99, and Algeria in 1908. These journeys were never touristic. While fascinated by the Middle East, Tanner never subscribed to the sense of the exotic or the thinly-veiled thirst for sensuality that was a major component of the genre now referred to as Orientalism. Where contemporaries painted North Africa as spectacle, Tanner painted it with the same gravity he brought to his biblical subjects — seeking the human measure of a place rather than its picturesque surface. Perhaps it was his renewed acquaintance with the Orient that enabled Tanner to develop the more resonant and colorful painting style characteristic of his art from about 1910 until his death in 1937.
As wall art, *Moroccan Man* asks for room to breathe — a quieter wall in a study, library, or bedroom where its restrained palette and unhurried presence can register fully. It suits natural light that shifts through the day, since Tanner's layered glazes reward different lighting conditions. The viewer it speaks to most directly is one drawn to portraiture that refuses sentimentality: this is a figure painted with dignity and without distance, the work of an artist who understood, from his own life, what it meant to be seen on one's own terms.
