This weekend we’re seeking refuge from the winter in Saint-Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, in the company of some of the artists who painted its warm light. By 1897 it had good connections by express trains to Paris, and Paul Signac had just bought a house in the old port and moved there with his wife. Although Théo van Rysselberghe didn’t move to the coast until he retired in 1911, he was a frequent visitor.

Their friend Maximilien Luce had first visited Saint-Tropez in 1892 with Signac, and continued to travel south despite remaining based in Paris until his death there in 1941.

Luce became skilled in colour lithography. His finest print is this of Saint-Tropez from 1897. Here he substitutes dashes of colour for the small dots of Pointillist painting, with the aim of getting adjacent colours to interact and generate a glow of colour. This is taken from Divisionist theory as first developed by Seurat, then later by Signac.

That year, Paul Signac painted this unusual view of Saint-Tropez. Route de la Foux, also known as Golfe Juan, (1897). This looks back at Saint-Tropez from the main road running west towards Port Cogolin at the end of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Visible to the left is Saint-Tropez lighthouse, and its bell tower in the centre.

Signac started painting Saint-Tropez. The Terrace on 16 August 1898, aiming to complete it about ten days later. It shows his wife Berthe on the Italianate terrace that they had built at their house La Hune. It looks north, over vineyards and the old town of Saint-Tropez with its distinctive bell tower, the small bay beyond, to the Maures hills in the distance. The artist envisaged the lone figure being a young woman in the sunset of her life as one of the many victims of tuberculosis.

Although Signac started work on this view of the port of Saint-Tropez in 1901, he didn’t complete it until early the following year. At its centre is the bell tower, and the citadel looks down from its upper right. Its Tartane sailing vessels are being loaded with their cargo of barrels. Although its Divisionist technique and colours are thoroughly contemporary, it harks back to a tradition of port views by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet.

The Harbour Entrance, Saint-Tropez from about 1902 appears to be one of Signac’s oil sketches with some colour tiling in the water.

Saint-Tropez, Tartanes in the Port from 1905 is one of the many watercolours Signac painted of these distinctive Tartanes in the harbour of Saint-Tropez, with its prominent lighthouse in the background.

Maximilien Luce continued to visit the Mediterranean coast of France, where he painted these Bathers at Saint-Tropez in about 1909. His colours are considerably less brash and dazzling than other former Neo-Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe.

Signac’s Saint-Tropez, Boat being Careened from 1920 is an unusual watercolour of a boat that has been deliberately grounded alongside the quay, to allow maintenance to be performed on its hull. As a longstanding yachtsman he had considerable insight into this procedure.

Pierre Bonnard began to visit the Côte d’Azur long before he started moving to Le Cannet in 1924, and went sailing in the Mediterranean with Paul Signac. Bonnard painted this view of an almost deserted Port of Saint-Tropez on a breezy day, with small wavelets forming on the water surface. The mole at the right ends in a lighthouse, which merges visually with the sailing ship’s superstructure.

Paul Signac painted this view of boats at low tide alongside Saint-Tropez, the Pier on 21 December 1923. Even with Spring tides, the tidal range at Saint-Tropez is little more than 30 cm (1 foot), suggesting these boats have been deliberately beached alongside the pier.

During the 1920s Saint-Tropez became the most fashionable resort in Europe when it drew Coco Chanel and a host of other celebrities. Later in the twentieth century it attained fame again as a ‘topless’ beach resort despite its mayor ordering its police helicopter to check that sunbathers were correctly dressed, and ‘clothing fights’ broke out with the police. I hope you have enjoyed this weekend, whatever you were not wearing in Saint-Tropez.

This weekend, I invite you to join me in the fishing village of Saint-Tropez, where we’ll escape the winter blues in the warm light of paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. With today’s super-yachts and tourists it might not seem much of a village now, but its population has changed little over the last two hundred years and remains around four thousand.

Saint-Tropez is unusual for a port on the north coast of the Mediterranean as it faces north, being on the south side of a deep bay, the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, and lies midway between Toulon and Cannes. Towering above the east of the old port with its sheltered harbour is its Citadel. There never was a Saint Tropez, but the village owes its name to a legendary martyr Saint Torpes of Pisa whose body is supposed to have reached this location in a rotten boat.

Like much of the coast around here, Saint-Tropez had a generally quiet life supporting its small fishing fleet until the railway came in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The main line to Marseille was completed in 1856, and by the 1880s regular express services transported folk from Paris at speed and in comfort. Like most of the better resorts along this section of the Côte d’Azur, Saint-Tropez requires you to travel an extra few miles from the nearest railway station, but that proved no deterrent to artists fleeing Paris for the summer.

Among the first was Paul Signac, who spent early May 1892 in Saint-Tropez, where he rented a cottage in the old town, and announced his intended marriage to Berthe Roblès.

Sunset over the Town is an oil study Signac painted on wood in 1892, which appears Fauvist in the intensity of its colours. It shows a view of Saint-Tropez that he turned into a finished Divisionist painting, as well as producing another sketch in Conté crayon, and an unusual drawing in watercolour and ink that is reminiscent of van Gogh, and prescient of his later watercolours.

During this short stay in Saint-Tropez, Signac painted its harbour from several different angles. The Port at Sunset, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez) (1892) is one of the most successful of these, with its echoes of his earlier paintings of Concarneau.

While exploring Saint-Tropez during his return the following year, Signac came across a huge umbrella pine tree by the villa of a certain Monsieur Bonaventure, which he painted as The Bonaventure Pine.

Signac’s original title for this painting is Tartanes pavoisées, which translates loosely as Fishing Boats Dressed Overall. He painted three studies for this, to get its triangular composition right, and seems to have been pleased with the result, exhibiting it regularly. Two years later, he traded it for a bicycle, and in 1910 it became his first painting to enter a public collection, in Wuppertal, Germany.

Tartanes are vernacular fishing boats from this section of the Mediterranean coast, with a single mast bearing a lateen sail.

Later that year, and continuing his theme of trees, he painted these Plane Trees in the Place des Lices in the centre of Saint-Tropez. Instead of showing the boules players who frequented this area, he shows an old man sitting on a bench in great serenity.

Harbour (1894) is another of Signac’s many views of the harbour that he painted while he stayed there, leading to finished oil paintings such as his Red Buoy below.

Signac recorded in his journal that he started painting Saint-Tropez. The Red Buoy on 22 August 1895. It shows the Quai Jean-Jaurès behind the richly coloured reflections of those buildings, with a colour scheme dominated by the blue of the water, its complementary vermilion sail and buoy, and the pale orange of the buildings and their reflections. Signac developed the composition and colour harmonies during the summer of 1895 before starting this final version, which was exhibited to acclaim over the following two years.

At the end of 1897, Signac and his wife bought a house in Saint-Tropez and took up residence there. In the same year, his friend Théo van Rysselberghe moved to Paris, but had already started visiting the Côte d’Azur.

In Pointe Saint-Pierre, Saint-Tropez (1896) van Rysselberghe uses traditional anatomical technique to model these pines in the hot light of the Mediterranean coast. Their structure is explicit, each tree assembled from its hundreds of small marks laid along branches, then giving rise to foliage. This point is to the east of the old port.

The following year, van Rysselberghe was one of the first to depict bathers near Saint-Tropez in his aptly named Glowing Hour (Provence).