About five years ago, I was in London while a curious exhibition called “The Orientalists” was on at the Royal Academy. There were a few rather fine Delacroixs at the start, and then room upon room of veiled women, fierce warriors, picturesque streetscapes, and naughty glimpses—certainly imaginary—into the seraglio. Except for the Delacroixs and a very few others, the pictures were florid, highly polished, and loaded with oddly unconvincing detail. Most of the show was pretty second-rate and since almost nothing had much to do with the North Africa that I knew, it wasn’t even enjoyable at the level of the travel poster. But in the last room, everything changed: three miraculous landscapes by Matisse seemed effortlessly to distill the light, the colors, even the smells of North Africa.

Yet, especially in the context of the exhibition, the Matisse landscapes were surprising. There was none of the self-conscious exoticism of the work in the preceding rooms. Give or take a palm or two, the conception wasn’t wildly different from Matisse’s paintings of Collioure, in the south of France. The main emphasis was not on subject but on painting, yet the three landscapes were undeniably suffused with the atmosphere of a particular place. The luminous rose and blue-violet of Les Acanthes (1912, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) perfectly evoked Moroccan twilight without the painting’s being in any way literal, while the transparent viridian green and ocher, the schematic tree trunks and explosive “fan” of La Palme(1912, National Gallery of