In search of the authentic French Riviera that captured the imagination of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse
A new exhibition that tells the story of how the Côte d'Azur dazzled modern art's great innovators is now open. Rupert Clague and Nick Trend attempt to follow in their footsteps.
Dear like-minded travellers, are you thinking of heading south — of packing up your notebooks and chasing the same coruscating light that has always drawn dreamers to the Côte d’Azur?
Here, it is easy to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald balanced on the rocks in Antibes, Jean Cocteau drafting angels in Menton or James Baldwin writing late at night at home in Saint Paul-de-Vence. Why don’t you follow them there?
For more than a century, the French Riviera has been more of a story than a coastline — written and rewritten by exiles, novelists and poets who came in search of silence, spectacle or to find themselves reflected in its mirrored sea.
It was not all down to the light. We should not deceive ourselves: luxury, peace and pleasure are tempting indulgences. Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Côte d’Azur for this new generation of modern artists was the sheer hedonism suggested by those blue skies and the warm sunshine.
As the 20th century dawned, the Riviera became a refuge for some of the world’s most famous painters. Renoir built himself a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and was still painting fleshy nudes until his death in 1919. Matisse moved permanently to Nice in the early 1920s, when his favourite subject was painting semi-naked odalisques bathed in sunshine. This was also the era when socialites and writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham were drawn to the Côte d’Azur.
After the Second World War, the reputation of the Rivera for hedonism and creativity was secure. The most famous artist in the world, Picasso, moved to the Golfe-Juan in 1946 and Marc Chagall was also a convert. He spent the last four decades of his life in the area, moving first to Vence in 1949 and then to the hilltop village of St-Paul-de-Vence. His subjects were more whimsical, but suffused nevertheless with the light and colour of the south.
Jean Cocteau was invited to Villa Santo Sospir for a short stay in 1950, by owner Francine Weisweiller. The poet and playwright ended up staying for more than a decade and transformed the interior by covering nearly every surface with charcoal and tempera-milk frescoes.
The Riviera they knew, however, is not quite the one you will find. The bohemian hotels they once frequented have become five-star palaces and their beaches privatised; the cafés curated for Instagram. Today, you’ll find inspiration in the Riviera’s quieter corners: in small hotels scented with orange blossom, in the back rooms of restaurants where menus are scribbled in chalk and in garden cafés where a glass of rosé is poured without performance.
This is a slow journey along the coast towards places that still reward time and attention.
Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso
Where? Antibes
Sunbathers on Plage de Juan-les-Pins in 1889.
Begin in Antibes, as Fitzgerald did before you. The American author arrived with his wife, Zelda, in 1925, in search of respite from the excesses of New York. They rented Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, rechristening it Villa America, where Fitzgerald began work on his semi-autobiographical novel Tender is the Night.
The light remains extraordinary. Stand on Cap d’Antibes as dusk falls and you will see what he saw: the sea wrapped around you like swathes of blue silk; the sky bruised pink and cream.
The difference is, of course, that Fitzgerald stayed on the Riviera when it was surprisingly inexpensive and known more as a winter refuge than a summer playground. Today, his villa masquerades as a hotel, the Belle Rives, where even the sun loungers come at a steep price.
Instead, head further round the cap to La Villa Fabulite, a 12-room hideaway shaded by fragrant pine and lemon trees. After a vermouth cassis cocktail, traverse the coastline on foot to the Musée Picasso. Look at them long enough and you’ll start to see the artist’s Cubist faces in the rock formations on Plage de la Garoupe.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda and daughter Scottie in Antibes.
Pablo Picasso first came to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, but it was his return here 1946 that was to prove a turning point in his life. After enduring the Occupation in Paris, he had emerged from the war with renewed energy and a new lover, the young artist Françoise Gilot. That June, the two of them headed south to the Golfe-Juan and then, in September, he was offered an empty room on the second floor of a medieval château in Antibes.
For two months, he worked feverishly. With artists’ materials still scarce after the war, he improvised with boat paint, asbestos-cement panels and decorators’ brushes.
A succession of exuberant still lifes, nudes and humorous sailors poured from his brush. The masterpiece was La Joie de Vivre, a monumental celebration of peace, sunlight and sensuality, with Gilot dancing naked at its centre.
The couple then moved to nearby Vallauris and Picasso began to experiment with ceramics, producing thousands of pieces over the next decade, as well as the great murals War and Peace.
However, he was not an easy man to live with. In 1953, the relationship with Gilot failed and she was replaced in his affections by Jacqueline Roque — a 27-year-old girl who worked in the local pottery shop. They moved to Cannes, then, in 1958, the château at Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, which had a view of his hero, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.
After they married in 1961, Picasso spent the rest of his life with Jacqueline and he lies buried in Vauvenargues. Yet, it was the decade in the Golfe-Juan when he was perhaps at his happiest and you can still see the work he made during those golden years in the museums in Antibes and Vallauris.
'Morning at Antibes' (1888) is a luminous Impressionist oil painting by French artist Claude Monet.
Who? Alexandre Dumas and the Impressionists
Where? Nice
In 1841, Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘A beautiful courtesan, softly lying on the edge of her azure mirror, in the shade of her orange trees in bloom, with her long hair abandoned to the sea breezes, and whose waves would come to wet her bare feet, for Nice is the city of sweet laziness and easy pleasures’ — and plus ça change.
If Antibes is the cocktail party, then Nice is the café the morning after: a little battered, but all the more alive because of it. Here, the Belle Époque façades are peeling, charmingly, the Cours Saleya market is a riot of flowers and the smell of socca drifts from wood-fired stoves in Old Town alleys.
In March 1882, Eugène Manet boarded a train from Nice to Paris with a stash of freshly made oil paintings in his baggage. They included a view of the fishing boats in the port at Nice and one especially charming and spontaneous depiction of his daughter Julie playing on the beach. The work of his wife, Berthe Morisot, both pictures were destined for the seventh Impressionist exhibition, which opened the following month on the rue St Honoré.
Morisot, the most prominent female artist of the group, had spent the winter in the Hôtel Richemont with Eugène and Julie. The mild winter climate of the Côte d’Azur had been a boon for an artist who was deeply committed to the new movement, which championed a more spontaneous approach to painting. As did her fellow Impressionists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, she strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere by working en plein air and immersing herself in her subjects.
Such an approach was fine during the summer in the coastal resorts of Normandy, where Impressionism was born during the 1870s, but it was not so alluring when winter came and the weather turned cold and grey. By heading south, Morisot was part of a new geographical trend — the moment when the light of the south began to filter into French painting. Over the next century, the landscapes of Provence and the sunny skies of the Riviera were to become one of the most important themes in modern art.
Nowadays, writers and artists seek out the Hôtel du Couvent, where a resident herbalist blends together teas and tinctures using herbs growing in the cloister garden, to help sharpen thoughts.
Stop by Les Grandes Caves Caprioglio — a family-run institution since 1910 — for a thoughtfully priced selection of local Bellet and Provence wines. Or Pizza Pili, where the montagnarde — crème fraîche, lardons, potatoes, reblochon — can be carried, hot, to the beach and eaten on the stones as the Mediterranean folds itself against the shore.
Who? W. Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau and Princess Grace of Monaco
Where? Cap d’Ail
There are few train journeys lovelier than the one that connects Nice and Cap d’Ail. The train pauses at Villefranche-sur-Mer—a station set directly above the water—where Cap Ferrat juts into view.
W. Somerset Maugham settled on this peninsula for much of his life, although he also described the south of France as ‘a sunny place for shady people’. His choice of guests — Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — suggest otherwise.
Cap d’Ail is a pocket of calm at complete odds to Monaco. It was here that Greta Garbo retreated from Hollywood, where Sir Winston Churchill painted and where Gabrielle Réval lived and wrote about the town’s intimate relationship with the sea. She is buried here, overlooking the sea she so often returned to in her work.
From the train station, a staircase winds its way down, through palms and pines, to Plage Mala, a crescent of sand and stone. It feels like a secret. In this cove, it's not about being seen.
Villa les Camélias: Musée à Cap d'Ail is the only Belle Époque villa in Cap d’Ail open to the public and exhibits objects and countless photographs dating from the late 19th century to the 1950s, capturing the daily life of Cap d’Ail’s visitors and residents (Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Princess Grace of Monaco).
The Nietzsche Path, a steep mountain trail that starts here and ends in Èze, takes about 1½ hours to climb. The philosopher from which it takes its name was inspired to complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra when braving it. (‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,’ he once wrote.)
Èze, a medieval village, clings to the mountain like a mirage and is sometimes referred to as ‘the eagle’s nest’. Stay at Les Terrasses d’Èze, a hotel and spa in which you can partake in a form of float therapy. Lying in near silence, weightless, in saltwater, your imagination slowly starts to drift.
Who? James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall
Where? Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence
Henri Matisse in the serene 20th-century religious sanctuary he created.
James Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for 17 years and his house, Chez Baldwin, was a meeting space for intellectuals, artists and exiles. The Provencal landscape, he said, ‘demanded contemplation’. La Colombe d’Or, a historic restaurant with rooms, is Saint Paul’s calling card — its walls hung with Picassos and Braques, left behind in lieu of payment. Alternatively, there is Orion Treehouses, which sits in the middle of a cedarwood forest just around the corner from the Fondation Maeght.
The market town of Vence, Saint Paul’s larger and more authentic sibling, was the first resting place of D.H. Lawrence — before his wife, Frieda, had his remains exhumed and moved, five years after his death.
It was here that Henri Matisse found a second wind: Chapelle du Rosaire was, in his own words, ‘the culmination of a whole life of work and the flowering of a tremendous, sincere, and difficult effort’. Bathed in cobalt blue, lemon yellow and emerald green, the chapel is one of the most spiritual spaces on the Riviera. Pared back and radiant, it is a reminder that simplicity boasts its own kind of grandeur.
If Nietzsche hasn’t made you feel Human, All Too Human, climb to the peak of Baou de Saint-Jeannet, an enormous cliff whose viewpoint attracted Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall. It’s a lesson in perspective: climb higher, see further.
(St Tropez: Best left to the superyachts and paparazzi. A writer will find little here but distraction.)
Who? Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith and Anthony Bourdain
Where? Marseille
Marseille, France's second-most populous city (above), is all too often dismissed as being rough around the edges, but it’s never felt more vibrant. Novelist Blaise Cendrars described it as ‘a mess after my own heart’; Patti Smith performed at the Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles; Anthony Bourdain wanted to retire here. ‘Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseille,’ observed Jean-Claude Izzo, the author of the Fabio Montale hard-boiled detective novels. He was right.
The city is raw, restless and constantly being refashioned. There is, right now, a new wave of chefs determined to do more than bouillabaisse and looking to its migrant population, past and present, for inspiration.
At La Friche la Belle de Mai — a multifaceted public space that’s part restaurant, part Arts centre, part market, part skatepark — enjoy a glass of pastis with panisses (chickpea fritters), then slip into Atelier Renata, an exclusive supper club venue without a menu, where dinner is whatever the chef picked up that day. In the morning, browse the sap green Librairie Mazette for something to read before moving east along the coast.
Who? Frédéric Mistral and the Fauvist painters
Where? Cassis
Fjord-like inlets flushed with crystal-clear waters adorn Calanques National Park, along the coast south of Marseille.
‘He who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has seen nothing’ wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral. The colourful fishing port, with its limestone cliffs, terracotta houses and sheltered, fjord-like inlets known as calanques, once drew in the Fauvist painters — André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — who captured its magic on canvas, in bold and vivid tones. Linger here.
At Le Petit Oyster Bar, work your way through oysters, razor clams, shrimps, and moules gratinées, washed down with bone-dry Cassis AOC whites. And then onto the Calanques, where the water is so clear that boats look like they’re suspended in mid air. The Calanque d'En-Vau, a narrow limestone cove backed by sheer cliffs, can be reached by boat or a steep, two hour-long trail that’s worth every uphill step.
For writers and artists, this fabled coastline has long offered lessons in how life is best lived. Good writing, like sculpture, removes excess to reveal essence. Inspiration is found not in the opulence of hotel lobbies, but in winding, cliffside paths with the promise of a view at the top. Carry a notebook, and let the landscape do the rest.
Nick Trend’s new book, ‘France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists’, is out now (Thames & Hudson, £50).
‘Painting the French Riviera’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until January 31, 2027.
