Beautifully painted watercolour on paper. With mount. The courtyard of a palace. With mount and gilt border. Hand signed lower left. [...] In terms of Orientalism, we must make room for the Moroccan watercolors of Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, diamonds of the same water as those of Delacroix, and completely unknown; like the good man, moreover, a colorful character, trained architect, painter, friend of Cocteau, writer, adventurer, opium addict and homosexual, to make good measure of the scandal. Edmond Maurice Tranchant was the son of a gold digger who went to the United States. He decided to add “de Lunel” to his surname in order to distinguish himself from the other “Tranchant”. As a teenager, he returned to Eton College and then to Oxford. He becomes friends with Rudyard Kipling. In February 1888, he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, architecture section. He was a pupil of Eugène Georges Debrie (1856, Paris-diploma in 1881). In 1896, he entered the Julian Academy. He then became a watercolor painter. Between 1898 and 1899, he traveled to Senegal and Guinea. He participated in the decoration of the pavilion of Senegal at the Colonial and Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900. Between 1900 and 1905, he was an architect in Nice. (...). He is a great traveler. He visits Persia. He also circumnavigated the Mediterranean on the Yacht, Le Saint Alma. In 1902, he was in Fez, Morocco. In 1908, he stayed once again in the Chérifien empire. He went to Tangier, then to Fez and Chaouïa. That same year, he was invited by Sultan Abd-el-Aziz to stay with him in Rabat. In a letter dated October 26, 1909, he requested a free assignment from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts in order to carry out research there on the history of art in the British Indies, in Burma, in Siam, in Indochina and China. [...] (Source: Martian Shaker) Condition is good. Some surface dirt. on mount. Gilt line border.