A new exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts honours the art, celebrity, and fashion of Nice’s Golden Age
Had it not been for the Belle Époque, Nice might not have become the bustling city we know today. A new temporary exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts turns to that era in art history, one that would prove so influential on the city’s development. Drawing on the museum’s own collections, De la scène à la toile : Artistes et mondaines de la Belle Époque offers a portrait of a world that was at once dazzling and contradictory. The exhibition runs until 4 April 2027.
The 19th century shaped Nice like no other time. By the mid-1850s, it had only recently transformed from a modest fishing village into a pleasant winter resort for visiting nobility – and, of course, it was still Nizza, part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Promenade des Anglais (or rather the section now known as the Quai des États-Unis) had only just been laid out, still little more than an improved footpath running along the beach and through open ground.
Then came the political deal of 1860, which turned the Italian Nizza into the French Nice, changing the city’s ambitions almost overnight. As the city’s status grew, visitors, artists and workers arrived in greater numbers. The European nobility’s annual winter trek to the balmy Riviera also drew more wealthy families from the north who came to stay.
Raoul Dufy , Feu d’artifice à Nice, le Casino de la Jetée-Promenade, 1947, huile sur toile, 65,5 x 54cm, Nice, musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, N.Mba 5616; Legs de Mme Émilienne Dufy en 1962 © Ville de Nice
Housing was needed, and quickly. Hemmed in on three sides by the Mediterranean, the Paillon and the flanks of Castle Hill, Nice spilled across the river. Architects had a vast stretch of undeveloped land before them, right by the shoreline. The result was a construction boom in the 1870s. And seemingly overnight, Nice’s two distinctly different characters were born – the Italianate Old Town, and the post-1860s addition to the west, shaped by the new artistic currents from Paris which were soon to be known as the Belle Époque.
The Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret now brings this gilded world of grand villas, casino nights and an international set that wintered on the Riviera back to life. The works on display – pastels, oils, sculptures – were largely gifted to the museum by the very people they depict: aristocrats, collectors, artists and society women who spent their winters here, left behind a painting or two, and moved on.
What remains is not a comprehensive history, but an intimate and slightly skewed window onto a world that believed, social conflicts aside – that it had perfected the art of living. The exhibition is arranged thematically, and each section opens a different door on the period from 1871 through 1914.
From Stage to Canvas – Artists and Society Women of the Belle Époque
Jules Chéret, Colombine, Pierrot, Polichinelle, 1910, pastel sur toile, 200 x 104,5 cm, Nice, musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, N.Mba 2186. Don du baron Joseph Vitta en 1927 © Ville de Nice
The Third Republic, established in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, was determined to project confidence. France was open for invention, commerce, and spectacle. The automobile, electricity, the first serious experiments in aviation… each arrived with the fanfare of a Universal Exposition.
Beneath that confidence, though, lay a society fractured by inequality and political turbulence. Theatre, cabaret, and the carnival became not merely entertainment, but – in the language of the time – a necessary exorcism of the fears and anxieties that moved the less fortunate.
The Fever for Masked Balls and Costume Fêtes
Masked balls and costume fêtes became one of the defining rituals of the Belle Époque, open to all classes and held in theatres, skating rinks, circus tents and cabarets throughout the year, not only at carnival. The preferred theme was the 18th century: shepherdesses and Marie Antoinette alongside figures from the commedia dell’arte… Harlequin, Colombine and, above all, Pierrot.
That melancholy white-faced clown carried more weight than his costume suggested. In theatre, his buffoonery and physical distortions long served as a quiet challenge to established order, and the courts that repeatedly prosecuted carnival celebrations for obscenity and debauchery only confirmed how much was at stake in the pretense of play.
Jules Chéret, Un verre de chianti, n.d., pastel sur toile, 106,7 x 58 cm, Nice, musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, N.Mba 2183. Don du baron Joseph Vitta en 1927 © Ville de Nice
No one rendered this world with more brilliance than Jules Chéret, the artist after whom the museum is named. A lithographer who had already transformed the poster, he created bold, luminous images of women in motion that became the visual signature of Paris.
In his later years, Chéret turned to pastel, producing some of the era’s most effervescent images. Costumed figures dissolve into artificial light, colours rendered almost phosphorescent by the new electricity transforming urban nightlife. Several of his works anchor this exhibition, and they remain among the most persuasive arguments for why this moment earned its name.
Cosmopolitan Nice – Stars and High Society
The Belle Époque produced another novelty: international celebrities. Sarah Bernhardt was its most luminous example, but she was hardly alone. The operatic careers of sopranos Sophie Cruvelli and Emma Calvé took them around the world at a time when such a life required extraordinary talent and determination in equal measure. Their images circulated through photographs, postcards and advertising posters in a way that would feel familiar to a modern eye.
For these women, fame translated into something still relatively rare for their sex: genuine financial independence, and with it a freedom of movement and manner that contemporaries were quick to read as excess.
Walter Spindler, Portrait de Sarah Bernhardt, 1894, pastel, sanguine et crayon sur toile, 62,2 x 51,5 cm, Nice, musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, N.Mba 2345. Legs de Pauline Duval-Lorrain en 1928 © Ville de Nice
Nice was a natural stage for the creatives of their time. Composers, writers, painters and performers spent time here, crossed paths in one another’s salons, and shared concert programmes and exhibition walls. The exhibition draws on it to telling effect. Alongside the celebrated performers hang portraits of women who moved through the same glamourous world under far greater constraints, their stories less remembered but no less interesting.
Society Portraits – Elegance and Style
The portrait had always been an instrument of power. The Belle Époque made it a little less elitist. The traditional clientele of sovereigns and aristocrats was joined by the upper bourgeoisie, then by artists, performers and figures from the world of fashion. To sit for a major portraitist became a statement of arrival, and the great portraitists understood exactly what that meant. Some lived as extravagantly as their sitters, their studios becoming social destinations in their own right.
For painter and subject alike, clothing was never incidental. A sitter’s dress announced status, taste and aspiration, sometimes all three at once. For the painter, the challenge and the pleasure lay in rendering silk, velvet, lace and jewels with a conviction that went beyond technical skill.
The great portraitists of the era understood that they were not merely recording appearances, but constructing them, collaborating with their subjects in the making of a lasting image. On the canvas, the costume of the theatre and the costume of society became, in the end, versions of the same thing: a performance fixed for posterity.
Plumes, Fruit and Flowers – The Golden Age of the Hat
Jules Chéret, Fagette, 1901, pastel sur toile 110 x 63 cm, Nice, musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, N.Mba 2125. Don du baron Joseph Vitta en 1927 © Ville de Nice
If there is a single object that captures the spirit of the Belle Époque, it may well be the hat. Between 1890 and 1920, no respectable woman appeared in public without one… and respectable, in this context, was always a matter of degree, and pedigree.
As silhouettes grew slimmer and more vertical, hats grew in the opposite direction, spreading outward to diameters that could approach a full metre. They were architectural objects, built from felt, silk and wire, then decorated with everything the natural world could offer: fruit, flowers, ribbons, feathers, and sometimes entire birds, stuffed and mounted as though mid-flight.
This was also the golden age of the great milliners, women who built genuine empires from needle and thread, and whose influence quietly shaped the emerging world of haute couture. The hat, after all, was where fashion most visibly announced itself, and where a woman’s personality could be most freely expressed within the considerable limits of the era.
Indoors, in the privacy of a salon or a painter’s studio, those limits relaxed. Hair unpinned, head uncovered, a woman sitting for a portrait entered a different register of self-presentation. The exhibition is attentive to that distinction, and the paintings reward a closer look.
Courtesy Ville de Nice
A City That Wears Its Grandeur on Its Sleeve
When Nice was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site In 2021, was not least due to the clear architectural signature of the Golden Age. The Belle Époque had not simply passed through Nice, it had built the city. The elegant bourgeois ensembles on the west side of the Paillon along avenue Félix Faure, the grand hotels and palaces of Cimiez, the ornate apartment façades of the Quartier des Musiciens, the villas exuberantly decorated with mosaics… all were raised by and for that same cosmopolitan society whose portraits now hang in the museum. The influence is everywhere.
What those architects built, it turned out, was irresistible to artists. The blue of the Mediterranean and the golden Niçois light are often cited as the reason, but it was the cream-coloured sandstone and the pastel villas that made the colours of sea and sky truly sing. Matisse, Dufy, Renoir, Picasso… they all came, and many never really left.
Photo © RIVIERA BUZZ, all rights reserved
The exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts does not tell that later story. It deliberately stops at 1914, at the moment the world the Belle Époque had built began to come apart. Instead, it offers something rarer: a portrait of the moment before, intimate and partial, and alive with the particular energy of people who believed, not entirely without reason, that they were living at the centre of things.
VISITOR INFORMATION
De la scène à la toile : Artistes et mondaines de la Belle Époque
Through 4 April 2027
Click here for opening hours and ticket information
Guided visits available
VENUE DETAILS
Musée des Beaux-Arts Julet Chéret
33, avenue des Baumettes
06000 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 92 15 28 28
Web: https://www.musee-beaux-arts-nice.org/
PHOTO DETAILS
- Lead image by Miniwark – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
- All other images and photos courtesy Ville de Nice unless otherwise credited
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