While living in France, Hilda Rix Nicholas visited Morocco twice, first in early 1912 with American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner and his wife, and again in 1914 with her sister Elsie. Rix Nicholas’s Moroccan works brought her critical recognition, with the French government purchasing a drawing for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, a great honour for the young artist. Morocco, market-place with pile of oranges is extraordinarily modern in its tight compression of space and interest in decorative patterning, as well as the loose and expressive application of bright, unmodulated colour.