‘All I thought about was making my colours sing’: how Matisse, Monet, Signac, Bonnard and Picasso fell in love with the Côte d’Azur

‘The sea is blue… bluer than anyone has ever painted it, a colour entirely fantastic and incredible,’ said Henri Matisse of the Mediterranean waters around Nice. ‘It’s the blue of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier and of the kingfisher melted together — and yet it is like none of these, for it shines with the unearthly radiance of Neptune’s kingdom.’

For a man from Bohain-en-Vermandois in north-eastern France, a town known for its grey skies and dull brick houses, the Côte d’Azur was a revelation. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917, when he was in his late forties, and lived there for most of the rest of his life. Not content with observing the Mediterranean from land, he enjoyed swimming, rowing and canoeing in it, too.

Despite suggesting that no artist could capture the sea’s colour, Matisse himself made several attempts in works such as La Vague (circa 1952), his blue and white ‘cut-out’ gouache of a rippling wave.

This is one of 150 exhibits in Painting the French Riviera, a new show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (until 31 January 2027). The exhibition considers the many artists attracted to the Mediterranean coast of France between the 1870s and the 1960s — from Berthe Morisot and Pierre Bonnard to Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Matisse was anything but an exception.

‘The number of major artists who headed south is remarkable,’ says the exhibition’s co-curator, Ann Dumas. ‘The Riviera was transformative upon them and their work, and the art made there offers a powerful lens through which to see the development of modernism.’

Today, the French Riviera is synonymous with sun-drenched allure, but things were very different two centuries ago. It started out as a winter destination frequented by European aristocrats drawn by the mild weather and the health benefits it was believed to bring against conditions such as tuberculosis. By the final quarter of the 19th century, Queen Victoria (of the United Kingdom), Empress Eugénie (of France) and King Leopold II (of Belgium) were all winter-time regulars.

Change, when it came, was thanks in large part to the completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway. From the 1870s, by changing at Marseilles, one could travel from Paris to pretty much any town on the Riviera in less than a day. Among the first artists to visit were Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Monet made two separate trips, each lasting a few months — to the village of Bordighera (just across the border in Italy) in 1884, and to the town of Antibes in 1888. The landscape paintings he produced there are among his best-loved. However, as revealed in a letter from Bordighera to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel back in Paris, Monet struggled with the strength of the southern sunshine. ‘When surrounded with such dazzling light, one finds one’s palette rather poor,’ he wrote. ‘Here, art needs tones of gold and diamonds. In the end, I did all I could.’

It’s thought that Monet travelled to the Mediterranean in the first place upon the personal recommendation of his friend Guy de Maupassant. In the late 1880s, the author would also publish a book called Sur l’eau (‘Afloat’), in which he recounted a sailing trip he had taken along the Riviera, introducing readers to the charms of its many fishing villages, such as Sainte-Maxime and Saint-Tropez.

Other books began to appear, fuelling interest in the area. Most noteworthy is Stéphen Liégeard’s La Côte d’Azur (1887), a guidebook in which the writer coined the French term for the Riviera, even adopting it as his title. (The literal translation, ‘the Azure Coast’, reflects the clear blue colour of the sea and sky that one tends to find there.)

Among the first artists to establish a base by the Mediterranean was Paul Signac. He found himself personally and professionally at a loss after the death of his friend Georges Seurat in 1891. Seeking a change of scenery from Paris, he found Saint-Tropez much to his liking, and hit upon a routine of spending summers there, in a villa he bought called La Hune.

‘I am awash with joy,’ he wrote to his mother, shortly after seeing the village for the first time. ‘Before the golden shores of the bay, blue waves finish their course on a small beach… I’ve everything I need to work with for my entire life.’

Signac was a pioneer of Neo-Impressionism, and many other artists associated with the movement visited him in Saint-Tropez, Henri-Edmond Cross and Théo van Rysselberghe among them. Their pointillist technique, consisting of myriad small dots, was perfectly suited to capturing both the shimmering southern light and the gentle waves of the sea.

A technical point: the Côte d’Azur doesn’t have a strictly defined geography, but it is broadly agreed to stretch 140 or so miles, from the town of Cassis in the west to the Italian border in the east. In other words, it comprises France’s south-eastern coast. With a little creative licence, the curators of Painting the French Riviera have extended their focus to include the country’s entire Mediterranean coastline.

This allows them to cover the birth of Fauvism. In May 1905, Matisse headed to the secluded seaside village of Collioure near the Pyrenees. So struck was he by the enveloping heat, blazing light and vibrant colours that he insisted his friend André Derain join him, forthwith, from Paris.

The pair painted the local landscape with abandon, liberating colour from its ages-old descriptive function — which is to say, they painted high-keyed paintings with no pretence of capturing appearances literally, instead responding to the subjects in front of them in instinctive fashion. ‘All I thought about was making my colours sing,’ said Matisse.

When their Collioure paintings were shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that year, the duo were compared by one critic to fauves (‘wild beasts’), and the name Fauvism was born.

Other members of the movement soon also headed south. Among them was Georges Braque, who — in words that might have been uttered by umpteen other painters — described the ‘blossoming’ he experienced, far from his ‘drab, gloomy Paris studio’. (The French Mediterranean attracted artists from far and wide, though the new exhibition is dominated by those who arrived from the capital.)

In the 1920s, the Côte d’Azur began the association with sunbathing, fast cars, glamour and summer holidays that it maintains today. Important drivers of this shift were wealthy Americans — the likes of Gerald and Sara Murphy, an expatriate couple who acquired a house at Cap d’Antibes that they christened Villa America. There they welcomed a host of creative guests, including Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Jean Cocteau, Cole Porter and Igor Stravinsky. (The Murphys would serve as the inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver, the lead characters in Fitzgerald’s classic novel Tender Is the Night, much of which is set on the Riviera.)

Picasso’s love of the region endured until his death in 1973. He had been born on the Mediterranean, in the city of Málaga, and stays on the Côte d’Azur allowed him a reconnection of sorts with his roots — an experience all the more potent once the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War curtailed access to his homeland.

Picasso settled permanently on the Riviera in the late 1940s. Like a number of artists, he made work there that reflected the region’s Graeco-Roman past — perhaps most memorably his ceramics, which depict a wealth of fauns, nymphs, centaurs and other creatures from classical mythology. ‘Antiquity grabs me by the throat here,’ he said.

Artists are still working in, and responding to, the Côte d’Azur today. The curators of Painting the French Riviera, however, imply that truly radical art stopped being made there some time ago. The show ends with works made between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s — all of them abstract or semi-abstract.

The Fort Carré, Antibes (Landscape) by Nicolas de Staël elegiacally evokes a landmark 16th-century fort in Antibes. The work is painted in broad horizontal bands of blues, whites and greys, its subject just about distinguishable from the sky above and the harbour below.

‘By the 1960s, the French Riviera was growing at a rapid rate and becoming increasingly built up,’ says Dumas. Picasso was no fan of this change, quitting his villa in the hills overlooking Cannes when a new build obstructed his view of the sea.

‘The sense of a peaceful, unspoilt landscape was very much now gone,’ adds Dumas. ‘The region was no longer ripe for discovery. There’s no denying, however, how brilliant that discovery had once been.’

Supported by Christie’s, Painting the French Riviera is at the Royal Academy of Arts in London until 31 January 2027. It then transfers to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, from 14 March to 11 July 2027