Musée Matisse

Matisse first came to Nice in 1917 for the winter light and never really left, staying on the Riviera through two world wars until his death in 1954. The museum devoted to him sits up the hill in Cimiez, in a red-ochre 17th-century villa surrounded by olive trees and the remains of a Roman town.

The collection follows him across his whole life, from early dark canvases to the loose, radiant work of his Nice years and the cut-paper pieces of his old age, when illness kept him in bed and he made art with scissors and painted paper. His own belongings are here too, the vases and textiles and studio props that turn up again and again in his paintings. Matisse is buried on the same hillside, and the chapel he designed at nearby Vence, all blue and yellow light, is a short trip away.