The Collections
The collections of the Musée des Franciscaines reflect the City of Deauville’s ambition to build, over time, a coherent, vibrant, and constantly evolving cultural heritage collection. While the exceptional donation made in 2011 by Nicole Hambourg, widow of the painter André Hambourg, marked the beginning of this museum venture, the collections have since been significantly expanded thanks to a proactive policy of acquisitions, donations, and loans.
This policy is structured around several themes closely linked to the region’s identity: the history of Deauville and the Côte Fleurie, the world of horses, Norman landscapes, Impressionism and its legacy, as well as the major movements in modern art of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In just a few years, several thousand works have thus been added to the municipal collections, bringing together major artists such as Eugène Boudin, Paul Signac, Raoul Dufy, Maurice Denis, Maurice de Vlaminck, Moïse Kisling, Marie Laurencin, Maurice Utrillo, and Léonard Foujita. Added to this collection is the prestigious “Peindre en Normandie” collection on loan, comprising 187 works by artists such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Gustave Courbet, illustrating the evolution of the depiction of the Norman landscape from the 19th to the early 20th century.
Photography is also one of the defining features of the Franciscaines’ identity. The museum currently holds more than 2,000 prints that trace the history of this medium, from the great masters of humanist photography and photojournalism to contemporary art. The collections notably include works by Jacques Henri Lartigue, Peter Lindbergh, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as Bettina Rheims and Martin Parr.
The collections are expanded each year thanks to the Planches Contact Festival, whose creative residencies in Normandy ensure a steady influx of new works into the collections. David Armstrong, Sarah Moon, Massimo Vitali, Paolo Roversi, as well as Max Pam, Omar Victor Diop, SMITH, Isabel Muñoz, and Arno Rafael Minkkinen are among the artists represented.
Through this policy of constant expansion, Les Franciscaines reaffirms its mission: to preserve, study, promote, and share an artistic heritage that resonates with the history, landscapes, and way of life that shape Deauville’s identity.
Five themes brought together in one place
Five themes, in keeping with Deauville’s identity, organize the media library and museum collections into five distinct worlds: These themes unfold over two floors around the Cloister, taking the form of a ribbon of knowledge whose loops house spaces for reading, individual work and research, screenings, listening, and discussion. Each theme is thus paired with its own distinct world, defined within the space through a specific approach to colors and scenographic elements.
Discover the worlds associated with the collections
Deauville Universe Horse Universe PerformingArts Universe Lifestyle Universe Youth Universe
Discover the Hamburg Donation
Donated by Nicole Hambourg, the artist’s wife, to the City of Deauville in 2011, the Nicole and André Hambourg Collection comprises approximately 4,500 works, including 538 paintings by the artist, more than 3,000 drawings, and a large portion of the couple’s private collection.
Explore the collections online
The museum’s Collections Portal offers a selection of works from the City of Deauville’s collections. This portal, which is regularly updated, reflects the ongoing research and documentation efforts carried out by the museum’s teams to make the works housed at Les Franciscaines accessible to as many people as possible.
