Saint-Tropez Harbour
— the light that pulled the painters south.
Not only on a wall.
“A row of pastel houses along the Quai Jean-Jaurès, ochre and pink and the soft yellow Provence keeps for late afternoons. The harbour was a small fishing port until Paul Signac sailed in one summer in 1892 and stayed; Matisse and Bonnard followed for the light. Now the boats are mostly white and very large. The light is the same.
Saint-Tropez Harbour, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Saint-Tropez sits on the Côte d'Azur, on a small peninsula on the southern coast of the Var department in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. The harbour, the Vieux Port, opens north onto the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, looking across to the village of Sainte-Maxime and toward the Massif des Maures behind it. The town is about 100 kilometres east of Marseille and 60 kilometres west of Cannes; the closest airport is Toulon-Hyères, about an hour by road. Saint-Tropez takes its name from Saint Torpes of Pisa, a Roman martyr whose body, by tradition, washed ashore here in the first century. The permanent population is roughly 4,000 and swells in summer.
Paul Signac sailed into Saint-Tropez in 1892 on his cutter Olympia and stayed; the light was unlike anything on the Channel coast he had been painting. Within a decade he had brought Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, and André Derain south to paint the same harbour and the same hills. The collected work now hangs in the Musée de l'Annonciade, a former 16th-century chapel a hundred metres from the Quai Jean-Jaurès, holding one of the finest small collections of Pointillist and Fauvist painting in France. The light the painters came for has not moved.
The harbour is open and free to walk at any hour. The Vieux Port is busiest from mid-June through August, when the megayachts berth four-deep along the Quai Jean-Jaurès and the morning market spills off the Place aux Herbes. The shoulder months (May, early June, late September) are quieter and the light is at its best. The Citadelle de Saint-Tropez, the 17th-century hilltop fort, opens daily and gives the cleanest view of the harbour from above. Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, the late-September regatta of classic and modern sailing yachts, is the one week the harbour belongs to sailors again.