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Tangier, one of the oldest, largest cities in Morocco, has the profound ability to bridge unlikely cultural corners, connecting Eugène Delacroix with the Rolling Stones; Islam with flower child mumbo-jumbo; Berber textiles with the Beats; European imperialism with postcolonial solidarity. This is, in part, because Tangier used to be a haven for émigrés and runaways—and, in part, because it still is.

Since the beginning of the modern era, many of the city’s new arrivals have been white Europeans and North Americans, raising some tough questions about voyeurism and racial inequality. As brilliant as some of Tangier’s visiting artists have been, they haven’t always taken the time to immerse themselves in the city’s rich culture, preferring to depict the city as a bright, exotic playground. But more on that in a bit; before we talk about today, we need to understand what came before.

A city of expats

Tangier seems to have always been a city of outsiders. Founded by Phoenician settlers before the 8th century BCE, the city became a jewel in the Carthaginian and then the Roman Empire, before being conquered in the 17th century by the Muslim Alaouite dynasty, which has ruled Morocco ever since. Still, Tangier has been an important outpost for British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonialists.

Over the centuries, the clash of empires has left deep scars on Tangier. But in some ways, it has enriched the city’s art. Tangier’s Museum of Moroccan Art is a triumphant monument to the cross-pollination of cultures. There, you’ll find abstract mosaics influenced by the spread of Islam, marble imported from Greece, and rugs and pots crafted by Berbers.

Delacroix enters scene, for better or worse

The history of great art in Tangier doesn’t begin in 1832 (one look at the contents of the Museum of Moroccan Art can confirm that). But 1832 marked a serious turning point: When Eugène Delacroix, one of the greatest modern painters, visited the city as part of a diplomatic mission from France.

Delacroix wasn’t the first Frenchman to paint Africa—at the time of his voyage, there was a newfound vogue in Europe for exciting, fiery images of Africa and the “Orient.” But Delacroix was one of the first notable European painters to see Tangier firsthand. The results were astonishing: Compared with his contemporaries, like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Delacroix offered a nuanced look at the unpretentious daily life of North African Berbers, Jews, and Muslims.

By 21st-century standards of racial and gender politics, Delacroix’s paintings of Tangier may not sit right. The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), the culmination of Delacroix’s lengthy quest to paint Muslim women without their veils, pulses with silent lust for its subjects. Paintings of the harems of the Orient were all the rage in France at the time, and Delacroix’s contribution, with its misty-eyed models and lazy-afternoon luxuries, was predictably slobbered over. But elsewhere, he deserves credit for portraying the people of Tangier not as exotic “others” but as people, plain and simple—consider Saada, the Wife of Abraham Ben-Chimol (1832).

The essence still eludes Europe

Delacroix didn’t come to Tangier to meet Moroccans. He came because he was fascinated by the bold, hot colors of North Africa and wanted to inject them into European painting. Delacroix established a pattern for European visitors to North Africa: Tangier, as he saw it, wasn’t a city so much as a laboratory, a place for escaping the stylistic strictures of Europe and experimenting with shape and color. We also see this in the paintings by Europeans who came to Tangier after Delacroix. When Henri Matisse arrived in Tangier in 1912, he announced that the vistas were “exactly as they are described in Delacroix’s paintings.” He couldn’t have been looking very closely.

Matisse may not have understood Tangier, but Tangier left its mark on him. His Window at Tangier (1912) is not by any stretch a precise look at the city, but it’s still a gorgeous harmony of warm and cool colors. In his 1895 watercolors of Tangier, John Singer Sargent took a similarly formal view: His impressions of streets and alleyways are undeniably beautiful, but they give no sense of the city as a city. Judging from his and many others’ work, Tangier’s only purpose was to be painted.

Homegrown talent in the 20th century

Although the most famous painters associated with Tangier are European visitors, they’re hardly the only ones, or even the most talented. Antonio Fuentes, who was born in Tangier in 1905 and lived there for most of his life, is criminally unknown today. If he’d grown up in Paris, he might very well be remembered as one of the 20th century’s great painters. (Fuentes was sometimes billed as the “Toulouse-Lautrec of Tangier.”)

Or consider Mohamed Hamri, the artist, writer, and musician who was something like the patron saint of Moroccan culture when he died in 2000. At a glance, Hamri’s paintings, with their thick lines and saturated colors, might be described as childlike, but in fact, they’re mature, ingenious, almost musical interpretations of life in Tangier and other parts of Morocco.

It may be tempting to contrast Hamri with the tradition of Western painting—presenting him as a kind of homegrown alternative to Delacroix, Matisse, and the like. The truth is more complicated. In his formative years, Hamri was mentored by his friend, the English experimental artist Brion Gysin. Through Gysin, Hamri would later attract American Beat writers like William S. Burroughs to Tangier, and in 1968, he brought Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, to Morocco to record a live album. Not for the first or the last time, cultures collided in Tangier, and the results were stunning.