Paul Klee and August Macke painted watercolors in the house of the Swiss physician Dr. Jaeggi, who removed the walls of a room to create a studio.

While Klee was painting the figures of two Arabs, a man and a woman, Macke made sketches of orange baskets and of a black donkey and of people with red fetters in the background.

The watercolor shows a dark-skinned rider in a blue robe with a red cap, in front of the almost abstract fortress wall of Tunis, consisting of square surfaces in the flat background that takes the depth of the painting.

Even before the trip, Macke had experimented with abstract forms, inspired by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay, but without completely ignoring the figurative and representational.

On April 10, 1914, he wrote to his wife that he felt a great joy in work, as he had never known before, and that he got excited with the thousands of motifs he had found in the African landscape, which he considered "even more beautiful" than Provence.