Matisse's Olive Tree

Henri Matisse spent the last years of his life a short walk from this hill and asked to be buried on it, under a tree rather than inside a mausoleum. He was laid to rest in 1954 on land adjoining the Cimetière du Monastère de Cimiez, the formal cemetery where painter Raoul Dufy and Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard are also buried, but on ground that had been part of his own property, beneath an olive tree that visitors consistently describe as old rather than newly planted for the occasion. No source gives the tree an individual age, so any figure here is a rough estimate rather than a documented fact, but its presence fits the wider Cimiez hillside, where centuries-old olives are the norm rather than the exception. The grave itself is famously plain, a pale stone slab for Matisse and his wife, a deliberate contrast to the ornate 19th and early 20th century monuments filling the cemetery just beside it. It remains freely visitable, reached on the same path as the cemetery and the Musée Matisse a few minutes further on.