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The present view, painted in
Side, a town established during Greek antiquity and situated on Turkey’s
Mediterranean coast, shows the ancient temple ruins of a theatre complex, the
largest in Asia Minor. Painted looking towards the raised seating of the
theatre, seen in the top right-hand corner of the background, Morris focuses
the viewer’s attention on the surrounding rubble of classical structures,
caused by the decaying stone monoliths and crumbling colonnades.

Throughout his career, Morris
was consistently drawn to particular locations displaying a degree of exoticism
and unfamiliarity. Nowhere is this more the case than in his travel works, of
which there are numerous examples that exhibit his ability to exploit the
natural topography of a place and reinterpret it as a new visual expression. In
both his flower paintings and those he executed abroad, Morris maintains a
balance between that which is founded in reality and that which is derived from
his own imaginative licence as an artist. In his catalogue to the 1984 Tate
retrospective of Morris’s paintings, the art historian Richard Morphet
described this aspect of Morris’s artistic outlook as ‘realism but not
reality’. There is always an underlying tension between the descriptive
representation of what Morris saw directly in front of him and the overall
directedness with which he executed his own interpretation of reality. His
flower paintings are fastidious in their attention to anatomical clarity and
yet Morris’s aesthetic remains highly individualised and recognisable for its
apparent departure from reality. This is equally true of the present view.

The ruinous antiquities shown
here could be said to confirm to a pre-existing notion of the ancient stone
remains of classical Greece. The engaged colonnade, topped by what would appear
to be Corinthian capitals, is one of the most striking emblems within the work
of this period in Western civilisation. In an otherwise chaotic composition of
strewn debris and crumbling rubble, this classical feature provides a sense of
stability and order. It also establishes a link between Morris’s distinctly
modern aesthetic and the ancient origins to which all Western art is, in part,
indebted.