The light, the sea, the mountains: the enduring appeal of the French Riviera

Henri Matisse was still a young artist searching for his direction when he first travelled south to the Mediterranean with his wife, Amélie, on their honeymoon in 1898. What he encountered was radically different from the grey northern light he knew: stronger colour, sharper contrasts, a landscape in which light itself seemed to alter what could be seen. He felt transformed.

Matisse returned repeatedly, travelling to Saint-Tropez in 1904, where he experimented with Paul Signac’s Pointillism, and to Collioure the following summer with André Derain. There, in nine extraordinary weeks, the two artists abandoned descriptive colour to paint what they felt rather than simply what they saw. Fauvism was born. As Derain later recalled: “Colour became sticks of dynamite. They were primed to discharge light.”

When Matisse arrived in Nice in December 1917, aged 47, the young painter searching for a visual language had become one of the most celebrated artists of the European avant-garde. Yet the Riviera was about to change his work again. “When I realised that every morning I would see this light again, I could not describe my joy,” Matisse said. He would remain bound to Nice for the rest of his life.

As the author of the novel Madame Matisse, I spent years writing about Matisse and the women around him, and became fascinated by this long relationship with the South. For Matisse, as for generations of artists who preceded and followed him, the Riviera was never simply a beautiful place to live. It offered the possibility of seeing differently.

That creative relationship is the subject of Painting the French Riviera, a major new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, bringing together Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Nice-born Yves Klein, who famously claimed the blue Nice sky as his first artwork: “I wrote my name on the back of the sky,” he recalled in 1961.

The exhibition’s exciting proposition goes beyond the familiar image of artists seduced by sunshine: the Riviera itself helped shape modern art. “The brilliance of the light in the South dazzled artists,” says the exhibition’s assistant curator Colm Guo-lin Peare. Many arrived accustomed to the muted, tonal qualities of northern skies. Monet believed that capturing the region’s saturated beauty would require “a palette of diamonds and precious stones”.

“The region carried the seductive, mythic weight of history,” adds Guo-lin Peare. Cézanne, too, found his visual language altered. Writing to Pissarro from L’Estaque in 1876, he noted: “The sun here is so vivid that it seems to me that objects are always outlined, not only white or black, but blue, red, brown, violet.”

More than a century later, the Riviera has changed almost beyond recognition. The quiet fishing villages and relatively inexpensive enclaves that once attracted penniless avant-garde painters have become some of Europe’s most coveted addresses. Yet something fundamental remains. “Today’s artists still come here because the light hasn’t changed,” says Alex Balkin, executive director at Savills French Riviera and French Alps, who has lived on the Riviera for over three decades. “The sea is the same.”

There is a pleasing circularity to the fact that Balkin is currently marketing properties in the region, including part of Matisse’s former home in Nice. The artist moved into the grand former Hôtel Régina in Cimiez in the late 1930s, establishing his home and studio there during some of the most inventive years of his later life. It was here that he died, aged 84, in 1954.

Matisse’s rooms have long since been divided and transformed, so Balkin felt no ghostly artistic presence when he entered the apartment. Yet its history confers something less tangible than square footage. “In a space where a lot of creation has taken place there must be positive energy,” he says.

Its provenance gives the eventual owner quite a story to tell. Would someone mention over dinner that Matisse once lived and worked here? “I think everybody would drop it into conversation,” Balkin laughs. “Not necessarily because they want to show off. It’s just a great thing.”

After all, he says, “story is everything”.

What people flock to the Riviera seeking today is evolving, too. Twenty-five years ago, Balkin recalls selling Provençal homes to northern Europeans approaching retirement. They imagined cross-generational holiday homes where children and grandchildren would gather to “have fun, play pétanque and drink rosé”.

Today’s international buyers are often younger and still working. “The properties that sell well today are turnkey and furnished,” Balkin says. “They want somewhere easy to get to, they don’t want to do renovation works, and they want to be close to centres of entertainment.”

Nice itself has benefited, transformed from somewhere international visitors might pass through on their way to Cannes or Monaco into a cosmopolitan, year-round destination in its own right.

Yet perhaps the deeper fantasy has barely changed. In the upcoming exhibition, one painting not to miss, says the curator, is Paul Signac’s In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Is Not in the Past, It Is in the Future (1896). Set on the sun-drenched coast of Saint-Tropez, the monumental canvas depicts an idyll where people read, dance, pick fruit and play boules. It stands as a testament to the Riviera’s true legacy: not just a backdrop for leisure, but a crucible for rewriting the rules of human expression.

More than a century later, that dream has acquired better airports, smarter restaurants and considerably more expensive real estate. But its essential promise survives: that life might somehow be lived better here. “I’ve been here for 32 years,” Balkin says. “There are other places that I love to visit, but I always come back.”

Artists such as Matisse shared that gravitational pull. When northern skies threatened to dull his canvas, the memory of the southern coast pulled him back, reminding him that as long as the Mediterranean sun rose, there would be a reason to paint, to see and to feel that indescribable joy.

Painting the French Riviera is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from October 2026. Discover the azure seas and sapphire skies that beckoned artists searching for an escape through more than 160 works, including Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Klein.

ALEX BALKIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SAVILLS FRENCH RIVIERA AND FRENCH ALPS
ABalkin@savills.com