Painting Paradise The Riviera: A History in Pictures

The 150 miles of coastline between the city of Marseille

and the Italian border, which we now call the French Riviera,

is home to two million people,

but between June and August each summer,

it is host to another six million visitors

drawn by its sunshine and its glamorous reputation.

The Riviera is where the summer holiday

as we know it today was invented.

For most of the 20th century, in both imagination and reality,

it was the world's dream destination.

I've been coming here for half of my life,

for the unbeatable weather and a way of life

which for more than a century has made this a haven

for creativity and culture.

The dazzling light and the azure sea have attracted some of the most

creatively gifted artists who ever picked up a brush,

inspiring them to paint in new ways,

explore new ideas and experiment with colour.

From the moment the Impressionists first discovered this coast,

it was artists who shaped the Riviera in our cultural imagination.

They were the alchemists who turned this inhospitable wilderness

into a realm of beauty,

who conjured up a utopia out of this rural backwater.

Artists came to these shores seeking escape and tranquillity,

a freedom to break the rules and follow their wildest ideas.

The seductive vision of paradise that they painted

put the Riviera at the centre of the story of modern art.

"The distance is short, but the route delicious,

"along a coast of light, of warm breezes,

"and mysterious hazy forests.

"Beneath majestic pines, through valleys of golden fruit.

"In an embarrassment of colours I contemplate the sea and sun.

"I question the people and the stones,

"I listen to the sigh of the wind and the blue water."

So wrote the French poet Stephen Liegeard,

describing the country's Mediterranean coast in 1887.

How could anyone fail to fall in love with such a paradise?

The extraordinary landscape of the Riviera coast

has played muse to modern artists for over a century,

but the origins of this love affair were not on these pine-scented hills

but amid the grey bustle of 19th century Paris.

While the rest of Europe was busy inventing the modern world,

post-revolutionary France had been persistently ravaged

by war and political turmoil.

France is a very big country, and whoever was ruling it,

be they royalty or revolutionaries, did so from Paris.

They tended to ignore everything beyond the southern suburbs.

The vast territory stretching to the Mediterranean coast

seemed empty and irrelevant.

The capital's impressive architecture and wide boulevards

belied the fact that France's infrastructure was poor,

and both its economic and population growth

lagged behind her European neighbours.

Beyond its busy capital lay a relatively inaccessible

and undeveloped countryside.

500 miles to the south,

the Mediterranean coast remained sparsely populated,

a region of fishermen and subsistence farmers,

accessible only by a gruelling journey

that could take a week or more.

The only people prepared to undertake the marathon trek

were British hivernauts, wealthy winter vacationers

heading for the chic resorts of Cannes and Nice,

cities that had grown up specifically to cater

to these aristocratic tourists who sought a haven

from the damp and cold back home.

Parisians, on the other hand, went to Normandy for their holidays,

and where the Parisians went, the Impressionists followed.

In the 1860s, their shockingly modern paintings

reflected the daily lives of the growing metropolitan middle class

who were learning how to enjoy their newly-earned leisure time.

The railways had recently been extended out to Normandy,

but also the amenities there were being built up very quickly

so there were nice hotels in the resorts,

there were quite often casinos, there were nice restaurants to go to.

It became much easier to have that kind of tourist experience,

to get out there, to have a civilised encounter with nature.

Some of the sights also were of real interest to the artists.

So Etretat, which is one of the places

that Monet in particular painted repeatedly, had everything he wanted.

It was a place where he could find dramatic natural motifs,

but also be able to retire in the evening to the comfortable hotel.

But comfort is not a great motivator to artists,

and the innovation that had first got the Impressionists noticed

was no longer so evident in their work.

In 1874, they had held their first exhibition

at 35 Boulevard des Capucines

and seven years later, in 1881, they returned to the same building.

But the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition was very far

from a triumphant celebration of past achievements.

True, there were still big names here

like Degas and Gauguin, but the real stars

that had drawn the public here in great numbers were missing.

Monet and Renoir had declined to get involved,

hoping to gain admittance to the official salon instead.

The novelty value of these artistic revolutionaries was wearing off,

but more than anything, their subject matter

was starting to feel tired and familiar.

Monet painted the Normandy coast many hundred times,

hugely contributing to its popularity,

leading the writer Guy de Maupassant to complain

that there were more people on the footpaths of Normandy

than on the boulevards of Paris.

One of the original artists from the first Impressionist exhibition

took a much more solitary path, though.

Paul Cezanne had been particularly harshly treated by the critics

and he did something very novel indeed.

He went south.

For a French painter in the late 19th century,

leaving Paris was commercial suicide.

You were not only cutting yourself off from the artistic mainstream,

but travelling south was like travelling back in time,

to another country, almost to another age.

In this economic and cultural backwater, the climate was hot

and the people were different too,

a melting pot of mixed Mediterranean blood,

dressing in their own dark clothing and speaking Occitan,

the local tongue that was definitely not the lingua franca.

But none of this would have seemed alien to Paul Cezanne.

He had been born in the south, in Aix-en-Provence,

and had felt something of an outsider

in the smart artistic salons of Paris.

To his fellow Impressionists,

he sometimes seemed like a country bumpkin,

and his pictures, with their sharply defined outlines,

were also not at home under the Impressionist umbrella.

An allowance from his father

allowed him to please himself where he worked,

and in the late 1870s, he was spending a great deal of time

at his mother's house in the small town of L'Estaque,

just around the bay from Marseille.

Life in the underdeveloped south had some advantages.

The stagnant economy meant the cost of living was cheap,

and the warm dry weather extended the painting season for artists

through the winter months.

When Cezanne first came down here, this little town

was trying to decide whether it was a fishing village,

a seaside resort or a minor industrial centre.

I still don't think it's made up its mind.

Then as now, the town was in danger of being swallowed up by Marseille,

but its picturesque winding streets still maintain a separate identity.

Cezanne's mother lived in this modest house

in the main square by the church, and this is one of the views

he painted from the terrace, looking out over the harbour

towards the Rio Tinto tile factory.

His remoteness from Paris was liberating.

No-one saw him as an outsider in L'Estaque.

He was by nature a loner, and here he could work unconcerned

by the opinions of his contemporaries, or his father.

But, much as he loved the place, he found it difficult to paint.

He wrote to his great mentor and friend, Camille Pissarro,

complaining that he was terrified of the sun and dazzled by the colours,

the two things that are the great inspirations

for any artists coming out here,

but it changed the way that he painted.

"Cezanne is the father of us all," said Picasso,

and in the shimmering heat of the coast he began to develop

his own way of dealing with these jet black shadows

and luminous, vivid colours.

There was a harshness, a brilliance to the light

that was unlike anything he had seen in the north.

It threw into confusion for him

some of the techniques that he'd worked out as an Impressionist,

so in particular working with broken brushwork,

painting a lot of different nuances of colour in the atmosphere.

Down in the south, he felt all of that was wiped out

by the strength of the sun.

He starts to paint with much brighter colours,

in much larger blocks of unbroken colour,

and in particular he talks about looking at objects

in bright sunlight,

and seeing kind of strange coloured halos around them.

So he starts putting outlines around objects

in his paintings from this time, and that goes against everything

that Impressionism had held to be true of how you saw the world.

When Cezanne found a landscape he liked,

he painted it again and again, at different times of day,

in changing light and weather, trying to understand it completely,

and this view of the bay from the hills to the north of L'Estaque

was one he never seemed to tire of.

In the middle distance is the port of Marseille,

and behind those limestone hills is what we now call the French Riviera.

Back then, Cezanne was up here a bit like Moses on the mountain,

looking across to the promised land, towards the future of modern art.

He never budged from here.

The coastline east of Marseille

was pretty much wild and uncharted territory

and Cezanne had enough to keep himself occupied here in L'Estaque,

but his Joshua was about to appear

and lead art into this paradise, this land of milk and honey.

His name - Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Renoir was one of the original group of Impressionists

but was also suffering something of a crisis

at this point in his career. He was 40 years old,

and like everyone else he was on the trail of something new.

He had been encouraged by his dealer to see travel as the answer

to artistic ennui, and he arrived in L'Estaque in January 1882

at the end of a mammoth trip through Algeria, Spain and Italy

taking in both the landscapes and the art along the way.

Cezanne was keen to show Renoir some of his favourite bits of L'Estaque

and its surrounding landscape, and the pair of them headed up

into the crags on a painting expedition.

Considering where he had just been,

Renoir came to a surprising conclusion about L'Estaque,

writing to his dealer that

"It must surely be the most beautiful place in the world."

Now, I don't want to be rude about this town,

but it does seem rather high praise for L'Estaque.

Who knows? Perhaps Cezanne was a particularly enthusiastic guide,

but Renoir was also amazed by another of the benefits

of this coast, its climate. "What weather!" he wrote.

"Spring with sweet sun, and no wind."

Renoir was still at this point essentially an Impressionist

so he's painting a very pretty scene,

the colours are very nice, the brushwork is feathery.

Cezanne looks at the same crags, the same rocks

and makes something very different out of them.

He's much more aware of the geometry of the rocks,

the kind of the solidity of the rocks,

much less interested in atmosphere and he turns the painting

into a kind of rigorous and somewhat austere image of the landscape.

For Renoir, this short visit was a revelation.

He could see beyond the dark and moody locals

with their bizarre get up and impenetrable speech.

The punishing sun and craggy landscape

that would have had his fellow Parisians

running to stay indoors all day proved to be his inspiration,

and that coastline proved utterly magnetic and irresistible to him,

and hooked him in.

The following winter Renoir was back, this time bringing

another interested party with him, Claude Monet.

At the time, Monet was 43 and moderately successful,

but after the death of his wife, he had taken on responsibility

not just for his own two children but six more belonging to the woman

he would eventually marry, Alice Hoschede.

He may have been an extraordinary painter but he was also

a canny businessman, always on the lookout for original material.

The Riviera was about to get its big break - two painters

in the vanguard of modern art were about to come and check it out.

They had no plan to do any painting,

they just wanted to explore this completely unknown coast,

and to do that with the utmost efficiency, they travelled by train.

For such a large country, France was very slow to embrace

the obvious advantages of building railway lines,

but in 1860, the Chemin de Fer arrived in L'Estaque.

The journey from Paris, which only a few years previously

was measured in days, now took only 20 hours.

In December 1883, the two artists went on a reconnaissance trip

the like of which would have been quite impossible

before this railway line was built. In two weeks,

they covered the entire coastline between Marseille in the east

all the way to Genoa in Italy.

Albeit brief, the journey convinced both men that this terra incognita

was an absolute gem waiting to be immortalised in paint.

The railway snaked along the coast

with typical 19th century engineering ingenuity,

hugging the shoreline and connecting beaches and coves

that had previously only been accessible by boat.

Their route cut through an uninhabited wilderness

of pine covered hills sloping gently into the sea, punctuated by a string

of picturesque but impoverished fishing villages,

but as they approached the Italian border,

there were several large cosmopolitan towns

where the gentry spoke neither Occitan nor French.

The main beneficiaries of the new railway

were the British gentry who came here

to avoid the lethal Victorian smog.

A trip to the Riviera was a common prescription for consumption

and in the winter months, towns like Nice and Menton

filled up with Les Anglais,

but in Cannes they practically ran the place.

This is the Chateau Eleanore,

former home of the British Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham.

Monet had spent several months in London in 1870

and had a soft spot for the British, but what impressed him most about

the ex-pat community he discovered on the Riviera were their gardens.

Earlier that year, he had moved into the house at Giverny

and begun creating the garden that would become the subject matter

for so many of his later paintings,

and where he lived for the rest of his life.

At this point, he was a green-fingered novice

on the hunt for new ideas, and returned almost immediately,

kitted up for a proper painting expedition.

His twin enthusiasms as both a painter and a gardener

drew him to a little town straddling the border between France and Italy

called Bordighera.

That ubiquitous icon of the Riviera landscape, the palm tree,

is not native to these shores,

and like so many towns and cities along the coast,

Bordighera fancies itself responsible for its introduction.

The town's patron saint, Sant'Ampelio,

is alleged to have brought the seeds from Egypt,

and Bordighera is still the official supplier of palm fronds

to the Vatican on Palm Sunday.

In January 1884, when Monet arrived here,

he found the usual contingent of British gentry

enjoying a bit of winter sunshine.

The Inglese had their own resident British doctor,

and had built the first tennis courts in Italy

in the shade of these palms, but the biggest gardens in the town

belonged to the French consul, Monsieur Moreno.

Monet persuaded the notoriously private consul to allow him

to paint the gardens, and quickly fell under the spell of this place.

He wrote home to Giverny in terms that have become

very familiar in descriptions of the Riviera.

"It's an earthly paradise, this property.

"It's like none other. It is a pure fantasy,

"all the plants in the world grow here."

It's very easy to imagine Monet enjoying himself,

pottering around with his brushes and easel

in these beautiful surroundings,

but like Cezanne and Renoir before him, he was in for a bit of a shock.

These paintings of Bordighera were a struggle for Monet.

He found himself rummaging through his paints looking for colours

he had hardly taken the cap off the tube before,

and his letters home are one long complaint

about how badly it's all going.

Working ferociously on up to four canvases a day,

he was frustrated by the constantly changing light.

It rained frequently,

but when the sun did come out, he was dazzled.

"How beautiful it is here, but how difficult to paint."

Monet struggles in the south

because he's a Northerner through and through.

I mean, he's from Le Havre.

There's a sea that he recognises

but the light on the sea doesn't even look the same

as the light he's known through his childhood.

Something else to remember about Monet is that he's a complainer.

Now, that's just his... That's also his mode.

He works out clearly that complaining is a way of thinking for him,

and as he complains he comes to his solutions.

'It's hard to imagine what Monet could find to complain about

'in these lush semi-tropical surroundings,

'either as a painter or as a gardener.'

What would Monet have found when he first arrived here?

Monet, when he came here to the Riviera,

was seeing something very intense,

something he never would have seen in Northern France,

and which had extraordinarily sculptural shapes for him to paint.

Francesco Moreno, who was an olive oil merchant,

had been travelling all over the world

and he'd been bringing plants back from China, from Japan,

from the Middle East, and introducing plants to the Riviera

that had never been seen here before.

I mean, things like this aloe vera, the yuccas up above us.

That agave over there, for example.

Monet couldn't have grown many of these things in Northern France

because of course the climate is so much colder.

I wonder whether he took a sort of blueprint from this garden.

The idea of planting things so intensely, so close together,

and getting a really lush exuberant effect.

Which is what you have at Giverny now.

Which is what you have at Giverny now, exactly.

Monet had intended to stay for three weeks,

but ended up being here for three months.

He still wasn't happy with his canvases when he left.

"People will exclaim at their untruthfulness, at madness,

"but too bad. All that I do has the shimmering colours of a brandy flame

"or of a pigeon's breast, yet even now I do it only timidly.

"I begin to get it."

He also finished a letter on his way home with a positive thought.

"What a lot of gardening I shall have to do."

Renoir, meanwhile, was experiencing his own fallout from the trip.

Disillusioned with the Impressionist path he had been following,

his visit to the Riviera took his painting in a new direction.

When Renoir returns to Paris,

then the influence of his time with Cezanne really begins

to show itself in his painting.

There's a very interesting image called Umbrellas,

which Renoir had started before the trip.

In the lower right-hand corner,

it's still in his usual Impressionist style,

but the figures over to the left are much more defined,

the outlines are much more clearly indicated,

and that seems to be something that Renoir had picked up

from looking at Cezanne,

also looking at other art that he'd seen on the trip.

Renoir returned to the Riviera frequently in the next few years,

and eventually bought a house

in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer in the hills above Nice,

where he remained mesmerised by the surrounding landscape.

Today, this department of France is called the Alpes-Maritimes,

and just to underline its classical credentials,

it was first given this name by the Roman Emperor Augustus in 14 BC.

Gerard is from the local ramblers' association,

and has come to understand exactly why

the unique combination of climate and geology in this region

make it so captivating to artists.

What attracted painters at first, I think,

-was of course, as you can see, the light.

-Incredible light.

Incredible light, and the colours.

These mountains, the first ones you see, are called the Prealpes.

This is white lime. Those hills are so close to the sea.

Alpes-Maritimes means that the Alps are actually falling into the sea.

The mountain is extremely steep. It was quite an achievement

to build a motorway, whereas these mountains over there

are blue granite, so much harder stones.

Because of these high mountains, Nice will never run out of water.

This is our reservoir, if you like.

We have plenty of water, so it's good for the plants,

-good for the trees and good for the flowers.

-Good for the artists.

Good for the artists to go bathing or to wash their brushes.

Most of the famous paintings made of the area

were painted in the winter, and you can't tell.

You can't tell it's winter.

There's green, look at it.

If you come in the winter, this will be the same colour

because there are very few deciduous trees.

Pine trees, olive trees do not shed their leaves at all,

so it remains green throughout the winter,

and of course you've got the fruit on top.

The orange trees are not the orange trees you are used to.

They are like this one, which is what you call Seville oranges,

and the French for it is bigaratier.

-Bigaratier.

-Don't eat them. Make marmalade with them.

The Parisian art world had its doubts about whether the Riviera

really looked like it did in Monet and Renoir's paintings,

but people were starting to go and see for themselves.

The British continued to show a proprietorial interest

and in 1887, Queen Victoria took her first holiday on the Riviera.

It was the publication that same year of a guidebook to the region

that really changed its fortunes.

A minor French poet, Stephen Liegeard, wrote a travel book whose title

gave this coast its defining identity - the Cote d'Azur.

His gushing Victorian prose promised

that "the cerulean waves would wash away the weakness of men

"and the sadness of things."

It quickly became a bestseller.

The book may have reminded Monet

that he still had a score to settle down here.

In 1888, he returned to this azure coast.

He chose this spot across the bay from the ancient port of Antibes,

framed by twisted pines, and settled down once more

to tackle the changing light that had so profoundly perplexed him

four years earlier.

I think there's a clue to Monet's solution

in the titles of these paintings -

"Morning at Antibes", "Antibes, Afternoon Effect",

and this evening picture, "Antibes, View From Salis".

Conspicuous by its absence is

"Antibes As Seen By Mad Dogs And Englishmen, Out In The Midday Sun."

Even Monet knew when he was beaten.

By painting early or late in the day, Monet skilfully caught

the magical effect the low sun had on this landscape.

The Riviera was giving him the confidence

to try colour combinations that were a new departure for artists,

in particular the juxtaposition of yellow and violet.

This was to become the unmistakeable colour signature of this coast.

It was not something Monet had encountered

when painting the sea in Normandy.

All those greys that he's such a specialist in

will not really serve him very well.

Yellow and violet becomes the great colour story of the south.

You see very little use of yellow and violet

as a colour complement in the north, it's almost never used.

But down here there is something so exotic about

the combination of violet and yellow -

it's kind of sexy and surprising. It adds to this colouristic climatic drama of lighting on the Cote d'Azur.

This time, Monet's letters home were more positive.

"What I'll bring back from here will be softness itself.

"White, pink, blue - all of it wrapped in this fairy air."

The innovative colours and the fairy air received a mixed response

back in the capital, however.

When Monet exhibited the paintings from Antibes in Paris

the public certainly appreciated the beauty of these works.

However, they had a somewhat mixed critical reception.

Some critics thought that he had essentially sold out.

That he was making kind of chocolate box paintings, for a paying public.

Foremost among them was Felix Feneon

who talked very scathingly about Monet's brilliant vulgarity.

Feneon's criticism was not surprising.

He was the most vocal supporter of another group of avant-garde artists

that he had dubbed the Neo-Impressionists.

And it wasn't just their paintings that were revolutionary.

This extraordinary portrait of Feneon, is called "Opus 217...

"Against the Enamel of a Background, Rhythmic with Beats and Angles,

"Tones, and Tints, a Portrait of Monsieur Felix Feneon in 1890".

It was painted by Paul Signac,

who, in collaboration with his great friend Georges Seurat,

had developed the painstakingly complex Neo-Impressionist technique.

While Monet was refining his palette in Antibes,

these guys were conducting

some really radical experiments with colour.

This is Seurat's great masterpiece,

"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte".

The Neo-Impressionists were more popularly known as Pointillists

because their pictures were made up of thousands of tiny dots of paint.

The innovation of Neo-Impressionist colour theory

was the idea of optical mixing,

that rather than allowing colours to be mixed by the artist on the palette,

colours would be separated on the canvas, juxtaposed to each other

and then the eye - at least this was the theory -

the eye would then mix them in a more vivid fashion.

Does this really happen? Probably not.

Whether it worked or not,

it was certainly a very difficult technique to master effectively.

It took Seurat over two years to paint "La Grande Jatte".

But it wasn't just colour theory

that united Feneon and the Neo-Impressionist painters.

They shared the same political outlook - they were all anarchists.

In Paris towards the end of the 19th century,

anarchism was a significant political force.

But it meant something very different

from what we tend to associate with the word today.

The idea was essentially that if you removed the control of the state,

and of the church and of the military and so forth,

human beings would live together naturally in harmony

and work out their own rules,

in harmony with each other and also in harmony with nature.

This little cell of anarchist painters suffered a tragic blow

when Seurat, who was only 31 years old, died unexpectedly in 1891.

For Paul Signac, it now became more important than ever

to continue the work he and Seurat had begun,

and he worked obsessively to refine the Pointillist technique,

but his most successful paintings would not be made in Paris.

To console himself after the death of his friend,

he set sail for the Cote d'Azur.

Not only did Signac feel completely at home in the south,

but so did his Neo-Impressionist dots of paint.

Signac was one of those people whom the Riviera snared,

Medusa-like, the moment he set eyes on her.

In 1892, he navigated his way along this coast -

utterly enchanted.

Rounding the Maures mountains, he discovered a small fishing village

inaccessible by road, bypassed by the railway,

lying in splendid isolation, cut off from the world.

He wrote to his mother and declared, "I have found happiness."

The village was Saint-Tropez.

Signac was from a wealthy family who supplied saddles

and leather goods to the Parisian gentry.

Young Paul, an only child,

had wanted to paint from a very early age.

He was thrown out of the fifth Impressionist exhibition

for bringing in his sketchbook to copy a Degas.

One reason he was so pleased to have discovered Saint-Tropez

was his belief that it would make the ideal place

to lead an anarchist life, remote from the prying eyes of the state,

where he could live and paint as he pleased.

Try to ignore for a moment the rampant commercialism

and consumerism that characterises Saint-Tropez today,

and imagine a tiny, remote, impoverished fishing village.

A few buildings along the harbour,

a group of fishermen cleaning their nets.

This was the scene that greeted Paul Signac in 1892.

Would it make anyone think of setting up an anarchist colony(?)

The little fishing harbour is empty today. The fishermen are all gone,

and the beach that once sheltered their boats has found other users.

When Signac planted his anarchist flag on the hillside at Saint-Tropez

he soon discovered that the Riviera suited his painting technique

just as much as his politics.

What was evident was that,

as much as the Pointillists loved this landscape, it loved them back.

It wasn't Seurat or Signac who invented Pointillism,

it was Mother Nature. The ripples of sunlight on the water,

the dappled light on the leaves through the woods

lent themselves to this exacting and fragmented application of paint.

OPERA ARIA

Unlike the struggles of Monet and Renoir,

there was no grumbling from these boys

about the problems of capturing the light on canvas.

They had just the technique to deal with it.

Though he certainly became very accomplished

at capturing the light of Saint-Tropez,

Signac also wanted to express his political ideas in his pictures.

If the Riviera was to be the location

where he could gather together like-minded people

and create a future utopia,

he wanted to show what it would look like.

In 1894, he began work on his magnum opus, "In Time of Harmony",

bringing together his love for this landscape

and his anarchist ideals in one gigantic canvas.

Strangely, today this Mediterranean arcadia

finds itself in a busy suburb of Paris.

When Signac died, his widow

didn't want his most significant painting to go to an art gallery,

but somewhere where it would be seen by ordinary citizens.

It was gifted to the staunchly communist town hall at Montreuil

in the beating red heart of the capital.

This monumental work

refines the yellow and violet palette that Monet employed.

But, for Signac, the Riviera was far more than a beautiful scene -

it had a powerful symbolic importance too.

Whilst it has all the qualities

of a traditional pastoral landscape painting,

its figures - whether at work or at play -

are leading an anarchist life,

enjoying a freedom from the control of the state.

In harmony with nature,

they are pursuing healthy activities like swimming and playing games,

reading and painting, dancing under the spreading branches

of a Saint-Tropez pine tree,

whilst the march of progress

represented by the modern farm machinery

makes their lives less arduous.

Signac was not the only Neo-Impressionist

who sought refuge on the Riviera.

A few miles away at Cavalaire, the painter Henri-Edmond Cross

was exploring his own vision of paradise in little dots of paint.

Although he shared Signac's political views,

being an equally ardent anarchist,

Cross was not dreaming of the future, but of the past.

Set in a landscape of warm woodlands on a sunlit shore,

this was the coast the Romans had known,

populated with the nymphs and naiads of classical mythology.

In the dappled sunlight,

filtered through the luminous dots of Neo-Impressionism,

his bathers were living in the Garden of Eden.

Cross first came to the Mediterranean coast

because he suffered from debilitating arthritis

which the climate seemed to alleviate.

But once he was here it was the landscape

and the way of life that fired his artistic imagination.

For Cross, the Riviera was both a muse and a nurse,

sort of like an arty Florence Nightingale,

encouraging him to embrace the life-enhancing air and continue to paint.

The image of the bather became a key motif in paintings of the south.

This is a place that one immersed oneself in a kind of raw nature,

one felt the sun on one's skin, one rejuvenated oneself.

But it's also, I think, that the southern coast had,

for many French people, associations with the classical tradition,

the idea that this was where France's Latin heritage was most keenly felt.

The successors to this Latin heritage,

the local population, had a rather more commercial attitude, however.

Although this area was indeed still largely wilderness,

rather than preserving it as an inspiration to painters

they were only too keen to encourage more tourists.

They had seen other fishing villages

transformed into wealthy cosmopolitan resorts in a few years,

and small hotels were already opening

in these coastal communities.

When Henri Cross sought permission to build himself a painting hut

right on the beach, his unusual request was approved

with the full support of the local council.

If paintings of their little village

were to be exhibited in the art galleries of Paris,

it might just help to fill up these new hotel rooms.

Cross didn't disappoint.

When he painted the view from the beach here at Saint-Clair,

it's the striking simplicity of the picture that impresses...

The grain of the sand, the dancing pinpoints of light on the water

and the almost evanescent shadow of the off-shore islands,

cooling in the sea - all perfectly realised with tiny dots of paint.

70 years later,

in a faint echo of the nymphs that had populated Cross's landscapes,

the beaches of the Riviera filled up with topless sunbathers.

But this was not the fulfilment of Cross's dream

of a Mediterranean arcadia from the mythological past.

The crowds of scantily-clad bathers were here for all the wrong reasons.

They were not the native inhabitants living in harmony

in a state of prelapsarian bliss, but wealthy incomers

who were here because Saint-Tropez had become fashionable.

Signac never managed to establish his anarchist utopia either,

though his paintings and his writing

did attract a string of young artists to Saint-Tropez to pay homage.

The resorts of the Riviera

had always had a reputation for slightly loose morals,

but now these young painters

were to give the whole coast a raffish bohemian air

that made it even more attractive to society's outsiders.

Signac's disciples were also at the vanguard

of a significant change in the culture of the Riviera.

They were some of the first visitors

who chose to come here in the summer.

Throughout the 19th century, no-one considered staying on the coast

during the hottest months from May to September.

Consequently, when Signac's impecunious admirers arrived,

they found these villages were deserted and cheap.

They became the Riviera's first summer holiday-makers.

Amongst this generation of summer pioneers

was someone who would become

very strongly associated with art on the Riviera.

But, in 1904, when Henri Matisse arrived by boat from Saint-Raphael

with his young family, this was his first sight of the Cote d'Azur.

Matisse was 34, and still finding his way as a painter.

He had seen the Neo-Impressionists' work in Paris

and swung an invitation to visit Signac,

who was now living in a large house he had built for himself

above the beach to the north of the town, the Villa La Hune.

Signac arranged lodgings for Matisse

in a little cottage just below his villa

and looked forward to a profitable collaboration. But it wasn't to be.

The two painters argued about art all summer.

The truth is that Signac had become rather set in his ways

with regard to Pointillism.

Matisse loved the dots, but he was determined to do it in his way,

and as the summer progressed

his pictures became less like his host's, not more so.

When Matisse painted this picture of his wife Amelie on the terrace

of Signac's house, dots were conspicuously absent.

He was genuinely interested in the way Signac painted,

and had made several experiments

with the Neo-Impressionist technique,

but Matisse was looking for ideas, not tuition,

and he struggled to keep relations cordial.

Signac got progressively more exasperated.

He told Cross that Matisse was one of those painters who,

while painting a cloud that changed its shape, is rendered helpless.

Matisse himself recognised it was not going well.

"He gives me the impression I'm a sorry soul with no willpower,

"with no idea where I'm going and no means to get there."

After a particularly bruising discussion one evening,

he walked down to the beach to nurse his wounded pride

and conceived the idea for his own vision of a Mediterranean paradise.

It would turn out to be

a breakthrough moment in the history of art.

Matisse did create one of the great works of art of the 20th century

while he was here, combining the magical light of Saint-Tropez

with a classical setting, painted in little dots of colour,

almost in the approved Neo-Impressionist manner.

"Luxe, Calme et Volupte" - Luxury, Tranquillity and Pleasure -

ought to have made Signac very happy.

Matisse is exploring the Pointillist technique,

but he has dramatically moved things on.

On this Riviera beach, he moves away from representation

and uses colour to convey emotion,

leading modern art towards abstraction.

He is going to freely choose colour

which will convey the sense of intensity

whether or not it imitates what the world looks like.

After all, there had been many, many artists

who had done a remarkable job of giving us a vision

of the world as it looks, but perhaps they were not always as successful

at giving us the excitement of the world as we feel it.

Matisse is an important shift in the direction of artistic licence.

He can convey the excitement of a landscape

in a new and what we now call abstract way.

Like Signac's "Time of Harmony",

the setting is the Saint-Tropez landscape.

"Luxe, Calme et Volupte"

is a quotation from a poem by Baudelaire,

"L'invitation au voyage",

a description of a journey to an imaginary village,

an earthly paradise

every bit as tempting as the one Signac had painted.

The fully clothed woman at the picnic

changes the message of the painting,

for she is strangely but unmistakeably

a tourist in this utopia.

Matisse couldn't know it, but he was painting the future,

showing us a vision of the crowds to come,

who would turn this coast into a dystopia.

It's the bathers in the picture that make it look so modern.

Swimming in the Mediterranean was a relatively new idea in 1904,

but the figure on the right, combing her wet hair,

has become a ubiquitous image on the Riviera to this day.

It was Matisse's "Pleasure" that was to come to pass,

rather than Signac's "Harmony".

But there were no hard feelings.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of the garish colours,

and the not-quite-perfect Pointillist technique,

Signac bought Matisse's painting, hung it in his dining room

where it remained for the rest of his life.

The following year, the painting was exhibited at the Salon des Independants,

where it met with almost universal agreement.

The critics detested it, almost to a man. It was very, very unpopular.

It was seen as a betrayal of the way that he'd been painting beforehand,

so they didn't like the fact that it looked somewhat Neo-Impressionist,

but they also thought it looked too chaotic, too wild,

just not a sophisticated painting in any way.

Sophisticated or not, Matisse's work on the Riviera

was being talked about

at a time when there was plenty of competition.

At the Salon d'Automne,

a Cezanne retrospective was drawing the crowds,

focusing attention on his vision of the south,

and including his paintings of L'Estaque.

The Cote d'Azur was becoming firmly established

as part of the artistic landscape.

Meanwhile, the PLM railway company

was heavily promoting the destination.

In 1900, the Gare de Lyon had been revamped,

and the Art Nouveau maidens on the new station facade

lured the tourists south.

The dramatic combination of yellow and violet

that Monet and Renoir had established

as the trademark colours of the south

was now being used to brand the region.

And elegant advertisements

employed the city's finest commercial designers

to portray the Cote d'Azur as a balmy paradise

just a train ride away.

If you were young and fit and really wanted to save

the not inconsiderable train fare, there was an alternative.

In 1908, a young artist called Georges Braque

parcelled up his painting kit, sent it off ahead by post

and set off for the coast on his bicycle.

The Cezanne retrospective had a powerful effect on Braque

and he headed for L'Estaque.

He decisively moved away from the concentration on colour

that had characterised the work that Matisse had made in the south.

And with "Houses at L'Estaque"

he begins to explore the shape of things.

Once more, the Riviera was providing the setting

for a powerful artistic idea

to inspire a new movement in modern art.

Georges was already a very accomplished painter of houses -

he was the decorator for the family firm

and had recently achieved his house painter's certificate,

but after he'd painted "Houses of L'Estaque" that summer

there was no going back to his old career.

The paintings he made on the coast that year

marked Braque out as someone with

his own singular way of looking at the world.

It's at L'Estaque on the hillsides,

those houses stacked against the hillside,

that he suddenly sees the world through Cezanne's eyes,

under the light of the south.

Instead of a world of colour and light,

it's going to become a world of pure geometry,

dictated by the brilliance of the light,

which therefore creates deep shadows and strong geometric forms.

When Matisse saw "Houses at L'Estaque",

he recognised it as a profound step forward.

"This was the first picture that constituted the origins of Cubism," he later said.

The great experimenter was never tempted to explore

this particular "ism" in his own work.

Braque submitted the picture to the Salon d'Automne in Paris,

along with several others in a similar style.

They were all rejected by the four-man jury after much discussion.

The main opposition seems to have come from the jury member

who had many of his own works on show that year -

a certain Henri Matisse.

Where Matisse saw Braque as a threat,

the other man creating a stir in Paris at that time, Pablo Picasso,

saw an idea to be explored and understood,

and began to paint alongside Braque.

During a period of intense collaboration,

their pictures became focused solely on form, drained of colour,

and lost any connection with

the sun-baked houses of the Riviera coast

that had provided their original inspiration.

But though Braque and Picasso's Cubism led them elsewhere,

the relationship between the movement

and the Riviera was not yet played out.

Cubism did, eventually, come home again,

but it was in very unexpected circumstances.

In 1864, the Tsar of all the Russians, Alexander II,

was one of the first people to step off a train

at the newly-opened railway station in Nice,

and an enduring love affair between Russia and the Riviera began.

This is the largest Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe,

the most visible sign of the Russian presence,

rather less discreet than the Anglican churches the British had built in the city.

The Russian upper crust loved the Riviera

every bit as much as the British

and were far less ashamed to show it.

Roubles had been supporting French art for years.

There was a ready market for modernism in Moscow.

Sergei Shchukin, a Russian textile merchant,

owned 50 Picassos and 38 Matisses,

and it would be Russian artists who brought Cubism back to the Riviera.

On 1st August 1914, Germany declared war on France

and began to march on Paris.

Those that could, fled the city,

many travelling south to the Mediterranean coast.

Amongst them was Alexander Archipenko,

a Cubist sculptor from Kiev

who had been working in Paris for five years when the war intervened.

As a Russian, Archipenko inevitably headed for Nice

where there was a community of fellow compatriots ready to make him feel at home.

This enforced relocation would work wonders for his art,

introducing him to a subject that he would explore for the rest of his life.

Archipenko was part of this new kind of involvement with

the shoreline, and he particularly likes the bather theme.

He makes what he calls sculpto-paintings,

what we might call relief sculpture.

He makes use of paper and he makes use of metal and other materials.

He combines materials in an interesting way,

so he'll juxtapose a kind of shiny aluminium

with a kind of deep cerulean blue so you get a sense of sky and sea.

And he does something kind of interesting and almost

kind of pop...pop art version of the local bathers in Nice.

Archipenko's Cubist bather is unashamedly modern,

not only in style but also in its subject matter.

When Matisse painted "Luxe, Calme et Volupte" only ten years earlier

his bathers were figures from the mythological past,

but now Archipenko's bather

has come prepared for a swim in the sea. She has a towel.

By this time, swimming in the Mediterranean would have been

a fairly common pastime.

Archipenko is updating a subject that has been a staple

of Western art for centuries, and the column,

drawn in pencil on the edge of the sculpto-painting,

is there to remind us of her classical past

and that Archipenko is the inheritor of this rich tradition.

Following closely on Archipenko's heels that autumn of 1914

was another Russian Cubist, Leopold Survage.

The Survage family business was pianos, but Leopold

rejected his father's offer of an apprenticeship in the factory

and moved to Paris to learn to paint,

tuning pianos to support himself.

The landscapes he painted after his move to Nice

are the very essence of the city,

dissected into its constituent parts

and laid out in a new Cubist arrangement.

Survage comes to Nice

and he creates a kind of curious, mysterious Cubism.

He's got this little kind of wandering man,

these little black silhouettes

who make their way throughout his Cubist art.

Is this some version of his own sense of foreignness in the south

or perhaps displacement as a non-combatant in World War I?

Perhaps it's all those things.

Remember, the Riviera itself is a place of foreigners,

is a place of outsiders,

so I think this character he invents,

that he takes on a little trip in his paintings through the south,

expresses some of this excitement

of this strange, peculiar and mysterious world.

A Cubism unlike anyone else's.

Survage's Nice is yet another vision of paradise, with pink washed walls

and dark afternoon shadows.

And floating through the celestial blue of the sky,

the fruit and vegetables that grew in such abundance.

Survage and his Russian compatriots

were welcomed in France in the early years of the war.

Russia had the largest army in the world at the time,

and in 1915 she was still a staunch ally of France.

But the Russians suffered a series of early defeats, and Survage

was certainly safer in Nice than on the battlefields of East Prussia.

As a young man from Moscow he must indeed have

believed he'd found paradise, but it wasn't to last.

Even at this remove, la Grande Guerre would make its presence felt.

The Riviera's reputation as an escapist paradise

came into its own in the first years of the war.

For now there really was something to escape from.

Far from the trenches in the north,

cities like Nice actually experienced something of a boom.

Now it wasn't just the British

and the Russians who filled the hotel rooms and boarding houses,

the towns were flooded with people fleeing the fighting.

Bizarre as it may seem,

the First World War was to mark the beginning of the Riviera's heyday.

It had the great advantage at this time that it was as far as it was possible to get from the trenches

without leaving the country, which might have seemed unpatriotic.

But the tentacles of war eventually began to stretch even to this distant shore.

As the casualties began to mount,

the wounded were sent to recover on the Riviera coast.

The promenaders on the seafront in Nice were no longer "les Anglais"

but the maimed, the halt and the blind.

Once more the Riviera was nursing the sick,

and not just those escaping the winter.

A guidebook described the soldiers as

"brooding like wounded birds, blinking at the alien glitter".

It was no longer appropriate to continue to paint a vision of paradise.

Merci bien. Thank you very much.

In the next programme, in the aftermath of the Great War,

the magnetic pull of this coast is greater than ever,

as the world's foremost painters, like Henri Matisse

and Pablo Picasso, make the south their home.

Artists respond to a call to order, and became fascinated

with the Riviera's classical heritage, whilst at the same time

a lost generation embrace a hedonistic lifestyle with new-found enthusiasm.

The headlong pace of development accelerates

and a new breed of rich Americans completely transform

the character of the Cote d'Azur, making it the world's first

international tourist destination, ushering in a golden age

when art and the art of living are celebrated in equal measure.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd