Orientalist school; c. 1909.

Orientalist school; c. 1909.
"View of Tetouan".
Watercolor on paper.
Signed.
Measurements: 28.5 x 20 cm.
This work is inscribed at a time when North Africa exerted a powerful fascination on European painters. The city of Tetouan, with its white medina, its walls and its mountainous environment, offered an ideal scene to project that glance that looked for the exotic, the picturesque and the luminous thing.
Orientalism, more than a simple taste for the foreign, was a broad cultural phenomenon that deeply marked the painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artists such as Mariano Fortuny or Eugène Delacroix contributed to consolidate an aesthetic that emphasized chromatic intensity, decorative richness and the representation of everyday scenes from the Islamic world. In the Spanish sphere, this trend was reinforced by the geographical proximity and the historical and political ties with Morocco, especially in the years prior to the establishment of the Protectorate.