Tanner may have felt that he, as a Christian, did not quite belong in Tangier, but seeing as he would never deny being black in his life (Boime 418), Tanner certainly would not compromise his strong Christian beliefs in Tangier. In fact, Tanner seemed to subconsciously turn to his religion when he felt that perhaps he could not avoid being singled out in Tangier any more than in 
America or Europe. Like the other works in the Tangier series, Entrance to the Casbah (1912) has a plain title and does not make any explicit religious references, yet Dewey Mosby, curator of two Tanner exhibitions, says that the “donkey and the green-clad figure in the foreground… evoke the Holy Family arriving in Egypt” (Mosby Tanner 226). Mosby’s comment may remind of Edwards’ claim about North Africa simply being a new setting for Tanner’s Biblical stories, but again, the religious reference is not strong enough for us to infer that Tanner painted Entrance to the Casbah with the intention of making it religious painting. This painting does, however, illustrates a growing distance between the main donkey-mounted figure and the entrance to the casbah, going a step further than the great, yet stationary distance from the main figure and the gate in Sunlight, Tangier. As Entrance to the Casbah is the final part of the progression toward the work that conveys the greatest detachment from the gate, there might be a reason why a latent religious reference would exist in this painting; the weaker Tanner’s sense of belonging in Tangier became, the more his desire to return to his old comfort of Christianity grew. It seems as though Tanner left Tangier having realized that he could not simply travel to exotic lands to escape from the social problems that bothered him in Western civilization.
Looking back at the curious, almost hopeful figure standing under the gate in Gate to the Casbah, we can see that Tanner may have been expecting too much from Tangier in seeking a place where he could simply be himself without being made to feel singular, as he felt in the West. When re-examining the painting in this light, we see that the figure is not in the act of passing through the gate, but caught by an inability to enter. Perhaps Tanner’s rather naïve expectations explain the artistic experiments during his brief stay in Tangier, which resulted in a series of oil paintings and prints that stands stylistically apart from his previous paintings. The failure to find that exotic haven free of societal labels meant that the artist would not revisit this style he discovered while in Morocco, isolating the Tangier from the rest of his body of work. Rather than searching for another faraway escape after Tangier, Tanner seemed to have more success finding relief from prejudice in Christianity. Soon he reverted to almost exclusively painting his favorite Biblical stories, and was reported as saying in 1924, “My effort has been not only to put the Biblical incident in the original setting, but at the same time to give the human touch which makes the whole world kin” (qtd Mosby Tanner 268). His race in America and Europe and his religion in Muslim North Africa apparently prevented Tanner from finding that world-uniting “human touch”, so he did the best he could to produce it through painting familiar Bible scenes. Given the renown of his Biblical paintings and the relative obscurity of his Tangier works, Tanner seemed to find more success doing the latter.
Image:
Tanner, Henry Ossawa. Entrance to the Casbah, 1912. Greater Lafayette Museum of Art, Lafayette, IN.