Rabat. Terrasses de la casbah (Bou Regreb)

Albert Marquet's 1935 canvas of the Casbah terraces in Rabat, now at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, belongs to his major Moroccan campaign of the mid-1930s when he made extended visits to the Moroccan capital on the Atlantic. The Casbah des Oudaias, the ancient fortified citadel at the mouth of the Bou Regreg overlooking both the estuary and the ocean, provided Marquet with a subject that combined stratified Moorish architecture, whitewashed terrace surfaces, and spectacular light conditions. The title's parenthetical reference to the Bou Regreg estuary indicates that Marquet was painting the casbah from a position looking across the river mouth, with the terraced citadel walls providing a cascade of warm white and ochre forms. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which also holds works by Le Sidaner and other French Post-Impressionists, situates this Moroccan subject within a broad survey of European painting of the period that acknowledges the role of North African travel in shaping late Post-Impressionist practice.

Moroccan light on white kasbah surfaces creates an intense, near-overexposed tonal situation that Marquet manages through the careful placement of shadow zones. Whitewashed terrace walls are rendered in warm off-white tones that modulate through pale cream to warm grey in the shaded sections. The ochre and pink of older rendered surfaces adds warmth to the otherwise high-key composition.