La Côte d’Azur

Abstract

This interdisciplinary article explores aesthetic and medical conceptions of the Côte d’Azur during the nineteenth century, discussing texts and images by French writers, invalids, tourists, physicians and artists. Through words and images, medico-tourist guides perpetuated a myth of the Côte d’Azur as the privileged site of beauty and health, especially to its visiting invalids, who sought in the climate a miraculous natural cure. Poetic descriptions of the landscape’s naturally regenerative potential pervade these works, not only by physicians and tourist writers but by the invalids themselves experiencing a pleasurable recovery on the coast. This article argues that such descriptions were, consciously or not, couched in a medical rhetoric, where the landscape’s typical topographic elements were understood as both beautiful and healing. In exploring these diverse visual and literary texts, the article shows how art and medicine intertwined in common French perceptions and imaginations of this landscape, c. 1860—1900.