What a show at the Royal Academy. You go straight into a room of Cézannes and Renoirs and that is how it continues, with one coup de théâtre after another, at the hands of Monet, Signac, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Bonnard and more, all of them in thrall to the astonishing light and colour of the Côte d’Azur.

The completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible

The completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible

It hadn’t always been like that. These artists, Cézanne excepted, came from northern France and knew nothing about the southern coast. What changed it all was the completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway in 1860, which suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible. Cézanne was from neighbouring Provence, and he arrived on the coast before anyone else. In the 1860s he based himself at L’Estaque, at the westernmost edge of the French Riviera, barely 20 miles from his home inland at Aix. Now, with the sea in front and the rocky Provençal hills behind, he developed his distinctive manner of landscape painting, with its planes of geometric forms and aggressive brushwork. A delightful remark by Cézanne reflects how his new surroundings led........

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