Lavery paid his first visit to Morocco in October 1890, after finishing his painting of the state visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888. His journey was probably influenced by his Glasgow contemporaries, Arthur Melville and Joseph Crawhall, both of whom had visited the Middle East, Melville in 1881 and Crawhall by 1884. Attracted by the country, Lavery established a winter home in Tangier c.1903 and became a regular visitor. His experience of the area had a liberating effect on his palette; thereafter, when painting Arab scenes, he used a loaded brush and free and spontaneous brushwork, in the manner of Crawhall’s Tangier watercolours of the period. The painting shows two robed figures conversing in a Moorish garden.