Viewing Painting the French Riviera

Paint the town blue.

The Royal Academy is bringing the Côte d’Azur to Piccadilly this autumn. ‘Painting the French Riviera’ follows almost 90 years of artists heading south in search of brighter skies and a different way of seeing, from the first Impressionist encounters with the Mediterranean to the saturated blues of Yves Klein.

Claude Monet was among those quickly won over by the Côte d’Azur. Arriving on the Riviera in the 1880s, he found a landscape so luminous that he described it as “swimming in blue air”. Paintings made around Bordighera, Cap Martin and Antibes show him working out how to capture light that behaved very differently from the grey skies of northern France. Cézanne, Renoir and Berthe Morisot were also drawn south, while the Neo-Impressionists Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross and Théo van Rysselberghe pushed colour further through their pointillist experiments.

By the early twentieth century, things get considerably brighter. Henri Matisse spent the summer of 1904 in Saint-Tropez before working at Collioure with André Derain the following year, while Georges Braque later headed to L’Estaque. Their experiments with southern light and liberated colour helped define Fauvism. Henry Matisse would return repeatedly, eventually settling in Nice, where hotel rooms, open windows and views towards the sea became some of the defining images of his later career. Pierre Bonnard found his own corner of the Riviera at Le Cannet above Cannes, painting its gardens and terraces until his death in 1947. Picasso’s relationship with the coast also stretched across decades. The exhibition displays his brighter, more decorative work of the 1920s to ceramics made at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris and the iconic artist’s 1958 painting ‘The Bay of Cannes’.

By then, the Riviera had become much more than an artists’ retreat. Travel posters sold its sunshine abroad, while books and films helped turn it into a shorthand for mid-century glamour. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief bring that wider mythology into the galleries.

The final rooms strip the Mediterranean back towards pure colour: Nicolas de Staël reduces Antibes to bold planes, while Yves Klein takes the blue that had captivated generations of artists and makes it a subject in itself. From Monet struggling to paint unfamiliar light to Klein making blue his signature, the Riviera proved remarkably good at changing the way artists saw. If October has already started to look grey, consider this your colour correction.