Belle Époque Exhibition

The Villa du Temps retrouvé offers you an immersive experience thanks to a 4D scenography featuring sights, sounds, smells, and interactive objects.

This project was made possible by showcasing more than 350 works and objects of all kinds: Paintings, drawings, furniture, photographs, sculptures, books, authentic clothing, and other various objects from the period borrowed from illustrious cultural institutions and many private collectors.

The greatest names of this golden age – particularly Marcel Proust, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Pierre Bonnard, Eugène Boudin, Antoine Bourdelle, Eugène Carrière, Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Antonio de La Gandara, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Sisley, Kees Van Dongen – accompany you in this enchanting and intimate place.

The selection of artwork make you feel both the origins of the Proustian imagination as well as the culture of the Normandy coast during the Belle Époque: portraits alluding to important social figures in Marcel Proust’s social who stayed in the region. Scenes of beaches, fields, and cities show the social diversity and strong contrasts between the high society and the working-class population.

This season, discover how Marcel Proust, an iconic figure of early 20th-century literary innovation, and the artists of the Belle Époque revolutionised the way we understand and represent the world. Through a rich selection of works on loan from numerous museums and collections, explore the aesthetic upheavals that heralded contemporary modernity.

From landscapes by Boudin, Corot, Pissarro and Sisley, to portraits by Renoir, Sargent, La Gandara, Blanche and Carrière, to the avant-garde works of Picasso, Van Dongen, Dufy and Friesz, the exhibition highlights the modernity and artistic experimentation of the period. Contemporary works by Yan Pie-Ming, Takeshi Shikama, Inès Mélia, David Hockney, Guy Yanai, Jérémie Bennequin and the video performance by Véronique Aubouy, among others, continue this dialogue between literature and the visual arts, showing that Proust continues to inspire and nourish new artistic forms.