Paul Signac sailed into the Gulf of Saint-Tropez in May 1892 aboard his cutter Olympia, meaning to shelter for a single night, and came back every season for four decades. He arrived by water because water was the sensible way to arrive. The corniche cut through the Esterel massif was a slow, switchbacking afterthought; the harbour was the front door. Anyone crossing on a Cannes to St Tropez boat taxi today is following a line drawn long before the coast road existed. The village he found was a working port of roughly three thousand people, its name taken from a Roman martyr. Torpes of Pisa was beheaded under Nero, the story runs, and his body set adrift in a boat with a cock and a dog until it grounded on this shore. Les Bravades, the armed procession that still fills the streets each May, has been staged since 1558. The Citadelle above the town — hexagonal, squat, built between 1602 and 1607 — was raised to watch the gulf for hostile sail. A modern Cannes to St Tropez boat taxi tour now ties up in the Vieux Port directly beneath those ramparts, where the bronze Bailli de Suffren faces the water. What made the place famous was not the fort but the light. Signac drew Matisse south in 1904; Bonnard, Marquet and Camoin followed. Their canvases hang in the Musée de l'Annonciade, a sixteenth-century chapel converted in 1955 into one of the densest collections of Neo-Impressionist and Fauve painting in France. Colette wrote at La Treille Muscate through the 1930s. In 1956 Roger Vadim filmed Et Dieu créa la femme in the lanes behind the port, and a fishing village became shorthand for the whole Riviera. The passage is its own argument. Boats leave Quai Saint-Pierre in Cannes — the bateau Cannes–Saint-Tropez of local shorthand — pass the Lérins islands, then run southwest along the red porphyry of Cap Roux and the Gulf of Fréjus before turning in past Cap Camarat. Saint-Tropez appears bell tower first, ochre and terracotta, much as Signac painted it. Regular Saint-Tropez ferry crossings and Cannes to St Tropez boat taxi tours have made that approach routine again, yet the sight from the water remains the one the painters chose over the road.