Painting the French Riviera • Royal Academy, London: Loan to the museum

For Monet, it was "like swimming in blue air". For Braque, "a joyful revelation". Derain compared the Mediterranean’s blues to "sticks of dynamite… primed to discharge light".

The radiance of the French Riviera left a lasting imprint on artists. It fueled the imagination of the greatest painters of the 19th and 20th centuries — Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir, Klein — as well as writers, filmmakers, and fashion designers whose works helped shape the image of a Côte d’Azur that is carefree, glamorous, and deeply romantic.

Beginning in the 1870s, the Riviera’s azure seas and sapphire skies drew artists, intellectuals, and aristocrats seeking refuge from the gray, crowded industrial cities of Northern Europe. What they found was the landscape of their dreams — a realm of light that propelled Impressionists, Post‑Impressionists, and Modernists to new creative heights.

The exhibition Painting the French Riviera explores how this Mediterranean coastline supported the rise of modern art before becoming, by the mid‑20th century, a travel destination and film setting emblematic of sophistication.

More than 160 works, dating from the 1870s to the 1960s — paintings, sculpture, travel posters, and film — bring this story to life and invite visitors to immerse themselves, as the artists once did, in a true Mediterranean paradise.

Loans from the Galerie de la Présidence

For this exceptional exhibition, the Galerie de la Présidence is pleased to lend two major watercolors by Henri‑Edmond Cross, a leading figure of Neo‑Impressionism and a master interpreter of Mediterranean light:

• • Les Pins, 1906
  • Femme dans les dunes (La Baie à Cavalaire), 1906–1907

These works, emblematic of Cross’s late period, enrich the Royal Academy’s exhibition and underscore the Riviera’s pivotal role in the emergence of modern pictorial language.