The Irish poet and playwright, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, spent his last flagging months in a first-floor room overlooking the sea. He came to the Riviera for his health and, like D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield before him, had trekked the Mediterranean coast – Spain, Italy and France – in search of the elusive cure.

Matisse first came to Nice in 1917 at the age of 48 to recuperate from bronchitis he had caught whilst visiting his eldest son Jean, posted as an aeroplane mechanic to the airfield at Istres on windswept salt marshes thirty miles west of Marseilles. Matisse had left Paris in mid-December, catching the overnight train down. It was a long journey which left him physically ill.

After waiting four days in Marseilles with his patience close to breaking point, he finally managed to obtain permission to see his son. He was shocked by what he found. The young conscripts were cold, hungry and dirty, living ankle-deep in mud without latrines or anywhere to wash, except an icy stream once a week. He took Jean back with him to Marseilles on a 24-hour pass and treated him to the pleasures of shops, cafés and an evening out. The next day Matisse sent him back to camp, repleted with good food, wearing clean clothes and a warm army greatcoat.

The literary history of Hyères is written in its street names: rues Voltaire and Simenon; avenue Edith Wharton. But its most famous Hyères-ophile, Robert Louis Stevenson, remains streetless. The author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped discovered the Côte d’Azur in 1863 when, at the age of 12, he visited with his parents. Consumptive from an early age, he returned at ten-year intervals.

Like so many artists before him, Nicolas de Staël was enchanted by the light and colours of the Côte d'Azur. Antibes, its harbour and beaches, its Fort Carré and its incessant marine traffic featured prominently in his later works, but he brought to them his own unique style.