Considering that this careful collection of sunny seascapes and villa vistas contains some of the twentieth century’s greatest hits, this Riviera review makes its art history look somewhat samey. Despite giving ample consideration to Cezanne and the Impressionists, Seurat and the Fauvists, Neo-Impressionists and Monet, the show’s opening rooms — stuffed with visitors like the paint points on a Signac — leave one longing for some profound, unspecified difference.

This feeling intensifies retrospectively, after Bonnard and a pivotal section that the show anachronistically labels “the 1920s”. Art history then finally gives way to Picasso’s beach antics, before — again disruptively and with insufficient narration — ending in de Staël and Klein’s blues.

Many of the pictures in this chronology are stunning, granted — even the here relatively minor output of Henri-Edmond Cross, André Derain, and Raoul Dufy earns attention — but the assembly’s myth-making legacy is puzzling. What base mimesis was at play at Cap Ferrat and Sanit-Tropez that has us on the hook still? What moral utility comes for the present from so venerating the stylistic minutiae of the French bourgeoisie? Answers, one assumes, lie in the disjuncture.