Hammamet is a small town in Tunisia that Paul Klee visited in April 1914 in the company of his artist friends August Macke and Louis Moilliet. The limpid light of North Africa awakened Klee's sense of color. This work, one of a group of twelve watercolors that he painted in Tunisia, provides a textbook demonstration of Klee's path to abstraction. The lower section of the watercolor is made up of abstract translucent color planes influenced by the work of Robert Delaunay, which he had seen two years before in Paris, and by that of his traveling companion Macke, whereas the upper part shows the mosque surrounded by two towers and gardens. The impact of this trip was so strong that references to North Africa would crop up in the artist's work for the rest of his life.

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