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This remarkable cruise offers extraordinary riches. The journey - some fifteen hundred miles with only a fraction of the distance by road - begins in Málaga, where Picasso was born, and ends in Nice, where Matisse died. Apart from a digression to Palma de Mallorca, it hugs the Mediterranean coasts of mainland Spain and France. At all ports of call, whether in the town itself or in the hills of the hinterland, there are visits to a sequence of art collections which collectively constitute the richest seam of art of the period to be found anywhere in the world.

Monographic museums are a special feature. Three are devoted to Picasso, two to Miró and one each to Matisse, Chagall, Léger and Vasarely. There are also the studios of Renoir and Cézanne and the chapels decorated by Matisse and Picasso. The anthology museums range from major municipal galleries to small private collections, some in the collector's home. Benefactors in the region have been unusually numerous and generous – artists, artists' families, dealers and collectors, with civic and state authorities playing an important role as well.

The location of these collections is not extraneous to the nature of the art itself. Much of what we see was produced here and bears the imprint of southern manufacture. For many artists the flight to the south from the dreary industrial north was a liberating, vitalising and transforming experience. The intensity of the light, the brightness of the colours and the raw beauty of the countryside purified palettes, dissolved form and changed the course of western art.

The southward drift began as a trickle in the last years of the nineteenth century. Monet visited Antibes in 1884, Van Gogh and Gauguin sojourned in Arles in 1889, Signac discovered St-Tropez in 1892, Matisse honeymooned in Corsica in 1898. The trend gathered force during the first decade of the twentieth century: Matisse was enticed to St-Tropez by Signac in 1904 and started visiting Collioure regularly from 1905, the year of his decisive breakthrough to a ‘modern’ style.

Fellow Fauves and other modernisers, including Derain, Manguin, Marquet, Camoin, Dufy, Bonnard and Braque, set up in productive propinquity in little fishing villages along the coast. From 1911 Picasso and his coterie also found refuge from Parisian pressures in Céret in the hills of French Catalonia. The Mediterranean sun became a catalyst in overturning the four-hundred-year hegemony of Renaissance precepts of representation.

Most of the early visitors came for a holiday, albeit a working one, but increasingly they began to settle. Cézanne moved from Paris to Aix-en-Provence in 1886 but he was an exception because this was a return to his birthplace. Renoir had no such connections when in 1895 he settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer and remained for the rest of his life. From 1918 Matisse spent more time on the Côte d’Azur than in Paris and, after the Second World War, Léger, Chagall and Picasso were merely among the most illustrious of the artists who chose to live in the Midi year round. The trickle had become a flood.

As another southerner – Andalucía is as southern as Europe gets – Picasso was also an exception. Born in Málaga, for ten formative years he lived mainly in Barcelona where he was a member of a flourishing avant-garde led by Ramón Casas, Isidre Nonell and Santiago Rusiñol; there was similar fertility in architecture (Gaudí etc.). After forty years based in Paris he could resist the lure of the south no longer and, excluded from Fascist Spain, he spent the rest of his long and stupendously creative life in Provence.

For calibre of speaker you could hardly do better. Hilary Spurling’s two-volume biography of Matisse has been highly acclaimed and has revolutionised appraisal of the artist. Professor Christopher Green has taught at the Courtauld Institute for over thirty years and has written the standard Yale/Penguin text on classic modernism. Gijs van Hensbergen has a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of Spanish culture and is author of books on Gaudí and Picasso. Vivien Hamilton is a specialist in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and contemporary art. Monica Bohm-Duchen, author of a Phaidon monograph on Chagall, has been leading art tours to the south of France for over twenty years.