Riviera on Canvas

Impressionists

Claude Monet visited the South of France for the first time with Renoir in 1883. The “glaring festive light” was so strong that Monet feared the critics, who had not seen it for themselves, would be angered by his bright palette, even though he pitched his tones somewhat below the intensity of the real thing.  In 1888 he returned, staying in Antibes and Juan-les-Pinnes and painting local beauty spots, which also made his work more saleable, as collectors liked to buy paintings of familiar places, rather like buying up-market postcards. He exhibited his Antibes painting at Theo van Gogh’s gallery in the early summer of 1889, causing his friend, the poet Stephane Mallarme, to wire to him in admiration, saying: “this is your finest hour.”

Auguste Renoir was almost 50 and was suffering attacks of rheumatoid arthritis which forced him to spend the winter months in the south. He first settled in the Grasse region in 1899 and then moved to Le Cannet in 1902.  Hearing that a venerable old olive grove overlooking Cagnes sur Mer was to be demolished, Renoir saved it from the developers to use as an outdoor studio. Finally in 1905, he decided to live there and had a modern house built for himself and his large family. He lived here for the rest of his life but not without disturbance – hotel porters suggested his house as one of the sights to tourists and he was often disturbed by businessmen wanting him to paint their wives and children. Illness and old age took their toll. By 1904 he weighed only 48 kg and found it difficult to sit. He used crutches to get about but by 1910 onwards even this was too painful and he became a prisoner of his wheelchair, his hands deformed and bandaged. His paintbrush had to be wedged in between his fingers and yet day after day, he continued to paint. In his lifetime he painted more than 6000 pictures, making him almost as prolific as Picasso. Even in the last two painful decades he still painted Arcadian wonderland of light and color, naked girls bathing in shallow ponds, washed by the Mediterranean light. “I am still making progress”, he said a few days before his death. On 3 December 1919 as an assistant arranged a still life for him, he uttered his last word: “Flowers”.

 Post-Impressionists

Pierre Bonnard first discovered the Midi when he took a villa in St. Tropez. From then he returned practically every year, staying in st. Tropez, Grasse, Antibes, Cannes or Le Cannet. In 1925, shortly after marrying his model, Maria Boursin, with whom he lived for the previous 30 years, he moved to Le Cannet permanently. There Bonnard bought a small pink house called Le Bosquet, with a mountainside above it, covered with olive trees where herdsmen tended their flocks of goats. He delighted in his garden which was filled with birds and plants – mimosa in January, the flowering almond tree in spring and the fig tree in October. He made more than 200 paintings, his subjects including every inch of the interior of the house and the views from its window out across the red-tiled roofs and palm trees of the Le Cannet to the bay and surrounding mountains.

Henri Matisse was fist captivated by the south when he visited Corsica with his wife in 1898.  In 1904, he spent the summer in St. Tropez, where he met Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Gross, the strict adherents of the pointillism technique. Matisse tried it, but he did not respond well to such systematic approach to painting. Instead he let the rainbow palette set himself free from the formal constraints of outline and into the realm of pure color. He gave up Pointilism and went on to create his own distinctive style. Matisse and his friends Derain, Vlaminck, manguin and Luis Valtat all exhibited together in Room VII of the Salon d’Automne in 1905. The critics were aghast and dubbed them “Fauves”, wild beasts, and proclaimed Matisse their leader.  After the negative publicity, Matisse became well known and collectors such as Sergei Shchukin and Leo and Gertrude Stein were bidding to acquire his works. Matisee moved to Nice when he was 48 and decided to stay for the rest of his life. “Most people came here for the light and the picturesque quality. As for me I come from the north. What made me stay are the great colored reflections of January, the luminosity of daylight”.   First staying at various hotels in Nice, he took to painting landscapes and dawns. “Ah, Nice is a beautiful place! What a gentle and soft light in spite of brightness!” From the year 1920, he took a flat on Place Charles Felix overlooking the old market (Cours Saleya). From his windows, he had uninterrupted views of the sea, the Promenade des Anglais curving round westward with its elegant rows of palms and the rooftops of old Nice.  He stayed in this building until 1938 until he finally moved to the Hotel Regina in Cimiez, having met Lydia Delectorskaya, his muse, model and assistant for the rest of his life Lydia, a daughter of white Russian emigrees who came to France at the age of 12, was the artists “rare find”, his  inspiration, his secretary, his friend and companion and made the last 22 years of the artist ‘palatable’. In Cimiez, being too disabled by arthritis to paint, Matisse began to work seriously with cut-outs.  After working in the media for 14 years, he made it his own. Matisse died in Cimiez in 1954 .Today, the Matisse museum in Cimiez, Nice is a required stop on every art lover’s itinerary of the Riviera.

Pablo Picasso’s love affair with the Riviera first began in 1920’s when he spent the summer at Juan-les-Pins. In 1923 he painted the harlequins in Cap d’Antibes. And a few years later, while living in Antibes he created “Night Fishing in Antibes” a very large work (2x3m) a format he used only for important objects, that sums up his feeling about the Mediterranean. In 1946, Picasso leaves Paris to settle in the Riviera permanently.  Here was the same intense light and warm Mediterranean lifestyle as his native Spain, to which he could not return while Franco was still in power. He responded to the clear silhouettes of the mountains, the hard shadows and bright luminous colors. He felt at home and remained in the region for the rest of his life, leaving only for short visits.  Upon arrival in 1946, Picasso with his companion Francoise Gilot was given the keys to the Grimaldi Chateau in Antibes to use as a studio. He and Gilot then moved to “La Galloise” Vallauris and Picasso began experimenting with ceramics, single-handedly reviving the town’s fortunes. After the break up with Gillot, he lived along in the villa, was very prolific in his works and finally in 1955 he moved to La Californie, a large ornate mansion overlooking Cannes. In 1958 he acquired the huge Chateau Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence  but he was back in Mas Notre-dame-de-Vie near Mougins only 3 year later. He remained prolific to the end. During his last 5 yers, he created over 1000 works of art. His Riviera period was perhaps the most obsessional; he would take a theme or a new medium and work at it until it was exhausted. Picasso died in his last house in Mougins at the age of 91. Today Picasso is a constant theme on the Cote d’Azur. Antibes has a major museum in the Chateau Grimaldi. Mougins has an exhibition of photographs of the artist. Vallauris’s chateau displays some of his works in its museum. Sometimes it feels as if every town or village is anxious to claim some connection to the master.

II. Literary Visitors

Writers began visiting the Riviera for obvious reasons – beauty, the sea, solitude or camaraderie with other writers – as far back as the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, John Milton and Michel Nostradamus were just some of the earlier ‘man of letters” that came to these shores to create their timeless works.

Writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century flocked to the area for a “cure” for tuberculosis. The list of writers is legendary and impressive: D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Colette,  Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Show, Victor Hugo, Hans Christian Andersen, H.G. Wells, Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, A.P. Chehov, Andre Gide, Maupassant, Somerset Maugham, Prosper Merimee, Albert Camus, Saint Exupery, Marcel Proust, Bertold Brecht, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Dumas – a veritable World Literary Encyclopedia!!!  It seems that almost all the biggest names of literature of at least the twentieth century spent some time in this idyllic, romantic corner of the world. Nietzsche said that he was never happier then when he lived in this corner of the world. He strolled along Eze’s old donkey tracks pondering how to conclude ‘And Thus Spake Zarathustra”. Of course, his compatriot Karl Marx had his own interpretation of the “superhuman” when he spent months in Monte Carlo reviewing the effect winning or losing too much ‘capital’ on once psyche.

 “It is hot, the sun is shining, the windows of my bedroom are wide open — and those of my soul,” strikes a more Russian note. Chekhov wrote this when he was living in Nice and finishing “The Three Sisters”. Virginia Woolf, staying with her sister at Cassis, found inspiration for one of her finest works, “The Moths”, as she watched them fluttering around an oil-lamp at dusk. Kipling, less elegantly, penned a limerick about the young ladies of Nice. All too many writers descended on the Riviera to seek pulmonary cures (Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats, Katherine Mansfield), badly misjudging the supposed benefits of the climate. Others came to seek local colour, to gamble, to escape taxes or social ostracism. Somerset Maugham felt that Riviera was “a sunny place for shady people”. Both Agatha Christie and George Simenon later used many of these ‘shady people’ as subjects for hundreds of his detective stories

Vladimir  Nabo kov was first drawn to the Riviera by a belief it would help his lung trouble but remained a regular visitor to Menton on account of "the variety of its butterflies" (he was an avid butterfly collector). Graham Greene remained a regular of Chez Félix in Antibes for over 30 years,  not on account of its unremarkable cuisine but "because Félix keeps any wine that I leave in the bottle for my next visit”.

In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald brought the jazz age to the Riviera and gave a name to this frivolity, hedonism and arrogance of the rich young people who arrived daily in the Blue Train – people like Dick Diver in “Tender is the Night”. “- I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where ther’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”  

To experience the literary Riviera one must go back to the books of these great authors and re-read them. Camus was quite eloquent when he said: “writers come here for the easy life but the beauty of the Cote inspires them to new literary heights!”.