The Royal Academy opens Painting the French Riviera in London on Friday 2 October. More than 160 works, from the 1870s to the 1960s, fill the Main Galleries of Burlington House until 31 January: paintings, sculpture, travel posters and film, from Monet’s mornings at Antibes to Matisse’s rooms in Nice, Bonnard’s villa at Le Cannet and Yves Klein’s blue. The RA’s own presentation puts the light first. For Monet, it recalls, the coast was like “swimming in blue air”, and Derain compared its colours to “sticks of dynamite”. The show was made with the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it travels next spring, and it tells the story of a coast as much as a school of painting. For anyone who knows the Côte d’Azur, it is a chance to see familiar places through the eyes that made them famous.
From Cézanne’s bathers to Klein’s blue
The rooms follow the coast and the century in order, according to the first accounts of the show. The early galleries bring Cézanne, with his Bathers of 1890 to 1892 from the Saint Louis Art Museum, Renoir and Berthe Morisot. Monet has a room of his own, with Bordighera, Cap Martin and Antibes, including Morning at Antibes of 1888, lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Signac, Cross and Théo van Rysselberghe follow, with Cross’s Les Îles d’or from the Musée d’Orsay and Signac’s Le Pin de Bertaud of 1900. A small Fauve room gathers Matisse, Derain and Braque, among them Matisse’s 1904 study for Luxe, calme et volupté. Bonnard has a whole gallery, from 1904 to 1947. Picasso runs from a 1924 still life with a mandolin, lent by the National Gallery of Ireland, to The Bay of Cannes of 1958 and a terracotta vase of 1961. The finale belongs to Nicolas de Staël and to Yves Klein, whose ANT 84 of 1960 comes from the MAMAC in Nice.
Posters, Hitchcock and the Train Bleu
The show widens in its last rooms. A dedicated gallery gathers travel posters, books and film, with clips from Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, according to Artlyst, and the Cleveland Museum lists reproductions of vintage posters, maps, first editions of travel guides, memoirs and novels set on the Riviera, and clips from Hollywood films of the 1920s to the 1960s. The Ballets Russes are there too. The backcloth for Le Train Bleu, an enlarged copy made by a scene painter after Picasso’s small 1922 painting of two women running on the beach, hangs in the show, The Guardian reports. It is the Riviera as a destination, the coast that, in the RA’s words, “became a travel destination and film location that epitomised midcentury sophistication”.
“In this view from Hotel Beau-Rivage, which still exists today, you can almost feel the breeze from the sea coming into the room.” Ann Dumas, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, on Matisse’s Interior at Nice, January 2026.
Where the pictures were painted
Much of the show can still be walked. Matisse arrived in Nice on 25 December 1917 and rented a room with a large window over the sea, where he painted his first Nice interiors, the Musée Matisse records; the museum in the Villa des Arènes at Cimiez opened in 1963, and Matisse is buried in the cemetery of the Cimiez monastery. At Vence, the Chapelle du Rosaire he designed was consecrated on 25 June 1951. In Antibes, Picasso was offered part of the Château Grimaldi as a studio in 1946 and left 23 paintings and 44 drawings on deposit with the town, which made the castle the Musée Picasso in 1966. Renoir bought the Domaine des Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and lived there from 1908 until his death in 1919; the town bought it in 1960 to make a museum. Monet spent four months in Antibes in 1888 and completed nearly 40 works, according to the Cleveland Museum. At Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the Fondation Maeght opened on 28 July 1964, and La Colombe d’Or, which began in 1920 as Chez Robinson, still has walls hung with paintings that, in its own words, “often were exchanged for a stay or a few meals”. For hotels further along the coast, see our guide to Monaco.
From London to Cleveland
The exhibition was organised with the Cleveland Museum of Art, and its curators are Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy and Heather Lemonedes Brown of the Cleveland Museum, with Colm Guo-Lin Peare. After London it travels to Cleveland, where it runs from 14 March to 11 July 2027. In London it is open from Tuesday to Sunday, until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays, with tickets from £24, and Friends of the RA go free; Ann Dumas gives a curator’s talk on 9 October. The rest of the city’s autumn art season, with Frieze Masters in Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October, is in our guide to the October fairs.
Why the Riviera, and why now
The RA’s own text sets out the argument. From the 1870s, it says, “the azure seas and sapphire skies of the French Riviera beckoned artists, writers, intellectuals and aristocrats searching for an escape from their drab and crowded industrial cities”, and what they found was “the landscape of their dreams”. Heather Lemonedes Brown of the Cleveland Museum adds the other motives: to rejuvenate, to recover from illness, to socialise and to paint. That double story, art and leisure, makes the show unusual. A museum exhibition usually stops at the frame. This one follows the light into the posters, the novels and the films, and shows how the coast that changed modern painting became, within a few decades, one of Europe’s great holiday shores.
The Luxury.it perspective
Exhibitions about places are usually about pictures. This one is about a place that still exists, and that is the reason to see it before the next trip south. Monet’s Antibes is the same old town across the bay, under the same Alps. Matisse’s Nice is the window of a hotel on the seafront. Renoir’s house at Les Collettes is a museum. The best way to use the show is as an itinerary: see it in London this autumn, then follow it on the coast, from the Musée Picasso in the Château Grimaldi to the Musée Matisse at Cimiez, the chapel at Vence, the Fondation Maeght and lunch under the paintings of La Colombe d’Or. The Riviera has sold itself on its light for 150 years. At Burlington House, for once, the light comes with its evidence.
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The Cannes Yachting Festival and the Riviera season · The Monaco Yacht Show 2026 · Europe’s three-Key hotels · Turner’s Rome, from Mount Aventine
