Great Mosque, Morocco 1904

Clarence Gagnon painted this small oil sketch of the Great Mosque in Morocco sometime in the early 20th century. It shows us the minaret rising above a North African market scene. Gagnon was a French-Canadian painter who studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa. His artistic training in Paris, with its academic emphasis on formal technique and its increasing openness to impressionistic styles, prepared him to paint exotic views of the sort he found on his travels. This painting offers a glimpse into the orientalist fascination among Western artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw them travel to societies that Western audiences considered distinctly ‘other’ and bring back idealized or romanticized images of those places. Note how Gagnon’s brushwork gives a sense of spontaneity to this Moroccan scene, but perhaps also flattens out some of the cultural specificity. The social history of art can help us think critically about these kinds of cultural exchanges and how different cultures view one another.