Lunch among the paintings at La Colombe d’Or

A hillside inn above the Riviera where artists paid their bills in canvases. There are Cézannes, Mirós, Picassos and a Léger mural on the terrace — and you eat lunch underneath them.

Paul Roux opened the place in 1920 and made a habit of feeding the painters who drifted up from the coast between the wars. Some paid in work. The collection that accumulated — Braque, Chagall, Matisse, Modigliani, Calder — is now worth more than the hotel, and it still hangs where it was hung, in the dining room and on the walls of the bar rather than behind glass.

The terrace is shaded by fig trees, with a Calder mobile turning at one end and a Léger ceramic on the wall. The cooking is deliberately unfussy Provençal — the hors d’œuvres basket, grilled fish, a tart — because the room is doing the work.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence itself is a fortified hilltop village fifteen minutes above the coast, and worth an hour before or after: ramparts, one main lane, and the Fondation Maeght just outside with one of the best modern collections in Europe.