The museum housing a collection second only to the Louvre of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s paintings is this summer also celebrating the 90th anniversary of the eponymous Grasse perfumery.
It was shortly after the First World War that Eugène Fuchs had the idea of making perfumes in Grasse, so in 1926 the Fragonard perfumery was born, where visitors could tour the workshops and buy scented products. The name was borrowed from the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), one of the region’s most famous sons, whose flowing lines and frivolous colours earned him a place in art history. Installed in the old Hôtel de Villeneuve, an elegant late-17th-century country mansion, Musée Fragonard displays numerous paintings, sketches, drawings and engravings by the classical painter and his family. This summer it also has a big exhibition retracing the history of Parfumerie Fragonard, a family venture now dating back almost a century.
Orange blossom and argan oil
The exhibition, which is simultaneously replicated at the Musée du Parfum in Paris, looks back over the perfumery’s glory days and symbols. The Thirties saw a new generation arrive on the scene. Eugène Fuchs’s daughter, Emilie Costa, had the idea of coating a bottle in aluminium to give the plain industrial container a more feminine look, the genesis of the estagnon, now Fragonard’s signature flacon. In 1946 the perfumery’s emblematic Belle de Nuit fragrance was created. Under the founder’s grandson, Jean-François Costa, the company branched out. Passionate about history and an avid collector of 18th-century artworks and objects, he modernised the brand and instigated the creation of the Fragonard Museums in Grasse and Paris to display the 2500 perfumery exhibits he had collected one by one. Today his daughters Anne, Agnès and Françoise run the business, translating its art of living into fragrance lines along with fashion and household textile products, in a style that gives pride of place to colour.
Côteweb 2021, création de site Internet sur Nice