Morocco : What better way to see Tangier than through the eyes of the French Master? During a visit in 1912, he set up his easel in the room of his hotel and was instantly inspired by North Africa’s vivid colors and sharp contrasts of light and shadow (below, “Landscape Viewed From a Window”).

Henri Matisse saw this city as an earthly paradise. The artist visited twice, in 1912

and 1913, in search of a new direction for his art, and found inspiration for his greatest works in the bright African light, vivid colors and languid sensuality of the Moroccan landscape and architecture, the gardens and the people.

So when I visited Morocco’s fabled city on the northwest edge of Africa last year, I decided to follow in the footsteps--or rather the brush strokes--of Matisse.

What better guide than that great artist? I would try to see Tangier through his eyes.

An added inducement was the “Matisse in Morocco” exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through June 3 (it moves to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City June 20 through Sept. 4).

More than half of the paintings are on loan from the Pushkin and Hermitage museums in the Soviet Union; some have never been seen outside that country.

The exhibition comprises the largest group of Matisse’s Moroccan works ever to be shown. That alone seemed reason enough to look for Matisse’s Tangier.

Matisse did most of his paintings in Tangier’s casbah, or fortress, and in the medina, or medieval walled city.

“He found what he wanted there,” said Jack Cowart, curator of 20th-Century art at the National Gallery. “Besides, Matisse really didn’t like to travel farther than a 400-yard radius from his hotel. He always had so much baggage to move about: canvases, stretchers, paints.”

Often, Matisse simply stayed in his hotel room to paint. When he arrived in Tangier in January, 1912, bad weather kept him inside. He sent a grumpy post card to Gertrude Stein informing her that for five days “it had rained incessantly.”

So he set a vase on his hotel dresser and painted “Vase of Irises.” That work anticipated the many hotel interiors he later painted in Nice, France.

But it was the view painted from his hotel in his famous “Landscape Viewed From a Window” that I wanted to see.

During both of his visits of several months here, Matisse stayed at the Grand Hotel Villa de France. I found my way across the Grand Socco, the bazaar area, and up the hill above the medina, through crowded streets lined with small, open-front shops, to the old hotel.

It sits apart on a promontory high above the modern center of town, with its wide boulevards and smart shops.

“Guests book their rooms here a year in advance,” the desk clerk told me. And the frayed luxury of its portrait-lined lounges, blue-tiled courtyards, fountains, swimming pool, long terraces and gardens thick with pink hibiscus, white trumpet flowers and spiky green cactus coiling up the dark trunks of palm trees, all seemed wildly romantic to me. No wonder Matisse stayed here.

In lofty comfort he looked down on the bright white city with its deep blue bay. I had to see his room.

But No. 35 was taken, I was told, by an artist from Japan who had reserved it for one month.

“Then I’m sure she won’t mind if I knock on her door.” A most reluctant clerk led the way.

Maria Takakuwa smiled at my request and showed me into the rather small, simple room. It was sparsely furnished in hard, square 1930s style, certainly not the decor of Matisse’s time. But the same tall shutters stood open, and palettes, brushes and tubes of oil littered the room and covered the bed.

She motioned me into the large, old-fashioned bathroom. There, on two straight-backed chairs, Takakuwa had propped the big canvas she was working on.

“This,” she said, pointing out the bathroom window, “was Matisse’s view.” Together we leaned on the sill and looked out.

Below we saw what Matisse painted in the “Landscape Viewed From a Window”: the green tiled roofs and square white steeple of St. Andrew’s English church, now nearly hidden by date palms and evergreens; the white city; the tall, square, tiled minaret; the casbah on the distant hill, and the sapphire Mediterranean Sea beyond. It was a magic moment.

Later, a small boy led me through a maze of alleyways in the medina, up a narrow, steep street of shallow steps to the casbah. We entered through the Bab el Aassa or lookout gate.

Here Matisse set up his easel to paint the distant view of Tangier. He used the gate as a frame--foreshortening, rearranging and adding elements to suit his composition until all that remained the same as the real setting was the typical shape of the gate and the distinctively Moroccan mood in his magnificent painting, “Casbah Gate.”

Next to the Bab el Aassa is the wall fountain, dry now, but its brightly colored patterned tiles that appear so often in Matisse’s paintings are still in place.

In the casbah is Dar el Maghzen, a former royal palace, now a museum, where Matisse presumably studied the beautiful tile work, wandered in the garden and absorbed the Islamic atmosphere.

It was a new, exotic world. Its impact, according to Cowart, was “the hinge” between Matisse’s earlier European Fauve style and his more original, powerful later work.

“The Moroccan Cafe” Matisse painted has changed, however. Although men still are the predominent cafe patrons in this orthodox Muslim country, only a few continue to wear turbans or red fezes with long black tassles.

Yet most Moroccan women remain veiled, dressed in drab gray or black, their mouths covered with white cloths. Matisse probably found his colorfully dressed models, both male and female, in the souks or markets.

Today, Riffian tribesmen stride through those crowded lanes in their striped djellabas, and Berber tribal women in wide-brimmed, conical straw hats topped with pompons carry babies on their backs.

Matisse painted his “Acanthus,” “Periwinkles” (Moroccan Garden) and “The Palm” in the garden of a private villa owned by an Englishman. Then as now, life went on behind high walls.

For the outsider wandering through Tangier’s streets of flat facades, it is like being on the desert looking at blank walls one knows enclose lush oases. Hidden by monochrome exteriors are richly decorated interiors. Plain outside, patterned inside.

Hotels attempt to create the atmosphere of Arab palaces with thick carpets, mirrored walls, brass pots and tiled courtyards. Their rooms are large and public, however, conveying none of the secretiveness of Arab architecture.

But at a rambling 30-room palace in the medina, visitors can get a true sense of an Arab palace. The Tangier American Legation building, given to the United States by the Sultan of Morocco 169 years ago, is the oldest diplomatic property to be continuously owned, and is open to the public.

I rounded the corner of the Rue d’Amerique in the old Jewish Quarter, and saw above me on the building spanning the narrow street the Great Seal of the United States. I pushed the bell and, stepping over the threshold, found myself in a little courtyard complete with fountain.

The museum is a honeycomb of rooms great and small: reception rooms, secret rooms, courtyards, massive fireplaces, Portuguese grill ironwork, carved wooden ceilings and a Moroccan pavilion.

But there is more than architecture to delight the senses. Besides many historic documents, there are fine 18th-, 19th- and 20th-Century engravings, drawings and paintings.

I admired a huge oil painting of a sultan with his splendid horse, a portrait of Maxwell Blake (who served as American consul general in Tangier in the early 1900s) and fascinating old photographs of the legation reception rooms when they were in diplomatic use.

I was fascinated with the works of John McBey, a Scot who lived in Tangier from the 1930s through the 1950s and who executed many etchings and watercolors of Moroccan scenes. Expertly done, they are almost photographic in their realism.

As the museum’s director pointed out, it is only in the context of such works that one can fully appreciate the stunning originality of Matisse’s paintings.

Outside the museum I walked through the gate of the medina and up the hill toward the Anglican church whose roof and steeple Matisse had painted.

The churchyard with its pleasant, slightly overgrown cemetery sits at the foot of the Grand Hotel Villa de France’s promontory. There I found mostly English graves bearing such evocative inscriptions as “Lost at sea” or “In the Zulu wars.”

The church is an artful collaboration of Christian tradition and Arab architecture. The Moorish archway so loved by Matisse is the design of the chancel arch. Carved around it in Arabic script is the “Lord’s Prayer.”

As I left the church and walked down the winding path, hedged by huge hibiscus bushes, I noticed a small structure inside the churchyard wall near the gate. It was a cubbyhole, really, just large enough to accommodate the white-bearded, robed and turbaned man who reclined in it, writing on some papers in his lap.

Another Moroccan, dressed in European trousers and sweater, sat crosslegged on the ground in front of the scribe. Altogether an incongruous sight in an Anglican churchyard. As the American composer and writer Paul Bowles once remarked: In Morocco, “everything that is not medieval is new.”

It was a stunning reminder of the contrasting images that make up Tangier.

Through Matisse’s eyes I saw a fabulous city filled with sharp contrasts of light and shadow accented by the luminous blues of sea and sky.

But always there was a background cacophony of drums beating, roosters crowing, church bells ringing and the muezzins’ calls to the faithful for prayers, to remind me that Tangier is an ancient city, a marvelous mixture of things medieval and modern, Moroccan and European, with much left to explore.

Where to Stay in Tangier

Where to stay: The Grand Hotel de France is usually fully booked a year in advance. It is above the medina, some distance from the city center. Address: Rue de Hollande, Tangier, Morocco.

Rooms are much simpler than the El Minzah, and the atmosphere quieter. Prices then to fluctuate, but are generally less expensive than the El Minzah.

The El Minzah Hotel, 85 Rue de la Liberte, is a modern hotel in the heart of town, surrounded by its own gardens. The hotel overlooks the Strait of Gibraltar.

Doubles range from 600 to 740 dirham a night ($69-$80 U.S.; the dirham is trading at about 8.7 to the dollar.) It’s the preferred hotel for most travelers, what with amenities that include TV, air conditioning and lively public rooms. Daily rates: May/June, $71; July/August, $87; beginning Sept. 15, $60.

How to get there: Royal Air Maroc offers twice-weekly round-trip flights (three times during summer months) from Los Angeles to New York City, than on to Casablanca, starting at $828.

What to do: The Tangier American, Legation Museum, 8 Zankat America, Tangier, is open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.