Courtyard, Tétouan, Morocco - John Singer Sargent (ca. 1879–1880)

John Singer Sargent

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This small, luminous oil painting captures an intimate courtyard in Tétouan, a coastal city in northern Morocco, rendered with Sargent's characteristic economy of means and acute sensitivity to light. Painted during his formative journey to Spain and Morocco in 1879–1880, the work exemplifies the series of compact oil sketches Sargent produced on thin wooden supports as he explored the whitewashed architecture and brilliant North African light. Born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents and trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran, Sargent approached these Moroccan subjects with a fresh, proto-modernist eye, concentrating on the geometry of walls, archways, and sunlit surfaces rather than anecdotal or narrative content. The painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exceptional Sargent holdings, donated by his sister Violet Ormond, and stands as a document of one of the most creatively stimulating journeys of the artist's early career.