The story
Before Saint-Tropez was a resort it was a quiet fishing port, and in 1892 the painter Paul Signac sailed in, fell for the light, and bought a house. Fellow artists followed him down, Matisse spent a summer here that pushed him toward pure colour, and the little town became a laboratory for modern French painting.
That story is told in a former chapel on the harbour, the Annonciade, built in 1548 and turned into a museum in the 1920s. Much of what hangs there came from a single donor, the industrialist Georges Grammont, who gave his collection in 1955.
The walls follow the movements that passed through the town, the dotted canvases of the pointillists Signac and Seurat, the softer interiors of the Nabis like Bonnard, and the hot Fauve landscapes of Derain and Marquet, many of them painting the same stretch of coast just outside the door.
