Lavery's fascination with Tangier and the beauty of the landscape resulted in the purchase of Dar-el-Midfah, a small property on a hill outside the city in 1903 and the artist spent the next seventeen winters there with his wife Hazel and her daughter Alice. Tangier Bay was a favourite view and Walter Sparrow Shaw remarked in his biography of the artist 'Lavery's colour as a painter underwent a gradual change after his first visit to Africa ... it was a fattening of tone and a greater breadth of resilience in the effective harmony of his paint'
(W. Sparrow Shaw, John Lavery and his Work, London, 1911, pp.86-87)