Town square in Morocco

In 1882, the year he also painted Regoyos as a guitar player, Van Rysselberghe made a trip to Morocco — then as now a destination for European painters drawn by the intensity of light, colour, and unfamiliar architectural space. This oil depicting a Moroccan town square belongs to an orientalist tradition that had sent French, Spanish, and Belgian painters southward across the Mediterranean since Delacroix's famous 1832 journey. Van Rysselberghe was twenty years old and still in his formative phase when he made this journey, and the exercise in painting strong southern light was a formative experience. The resulting work is now held in the Collection of the Provincial Government of East Flanders, placing a record of exotic travel within a fundamentally Flemish institutional context. The young artist's response to Morocco anticipates his lifelong preoccupation with saturated colour and intense light, qualities he would later pursue systematically through divisionist method.

Oil paint on panel or canvas using a naturalistic technique appropriate to this early period, before Van Rysselberghe adopted divisionism. The strong Moroccan light creates harsh tonal contrasts that challenged his European-trained eye, and the handling shows him working through how to describe white-washed walls, bright textiles, and deep shadow passages simultaneously. The palette is noticeably warmer and more saturated than his Belgian subjects of the same period.