Rich in its history with the greatest photographers throughout the century, Deauville created in 2010 the Festival of photographic creations Contact Board (s), the only festival in France to rely on public commissions and therefore an artistic production specific to Deauville. This creative space allows the City today to have a vast contemporary collection including images of Massimo Vitali, Paolo Roversi, David Amstrong, Philippe Ramette, Sarah Moon or Kishin Shinoyama. She also continues to acquire prints of photographs taken in Deauville by the most significant photographers of the century: Robert Capa, Gisèle Freund, the Seeberger Brothers, Jacques-Henri Lartigue…

Founding collection, it motivated the museum project of the city, when Nicole Hambourg proposed, in 2011, a large donation of paintings by her husband. The collection includes more than 4000 donated works, including 539 paintings and a few thousand drawings by André Hambourg (1909-1999), a marine painter very attached to Deauville and the Côte Fleurie. This donation also contains more than 500 works by Marie Laurencin, Foujita, Van Dongen or Derain, collected by the couple over the years. Since 2011, the City of Deauville has been pursuing a parallel acquisition policy, favoring figurative painting from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. Works by Eugène Boudin, Paul Signac, André Lhote, Moïse Kisling, Raoul Dufy have joined this collection.

Les Franciscaines is also the custodian of the "Peindre en Normandie" collection. This exceptional collection brings together nearly 200 Impressionist works from 1750 to 1950, around the representation of Normandy by illustrious or unknown painters seduced by its colors, its clouds, thus producing the most beautiful works at the time of Impressionism and Fauvism. . This collection has been exhibited in France, notably in the salons of the National Assembly. She is also France's messenger abroad. It was exhibited in Deauville at Point de Vue in 2018.

Horse is a fundamental element of the identity of Deauville. Racing, breeding, polo and equestrian sports have marked the history of the city since its creation. Validating the quality, rarity and level of expertise of the media library collection, the National Library of France granted Franciscans in 2020 the label of "associated horse pole". Donations from Isabel and Louis Romanet, Jean-Louis Gouraud and Guy Thibault, racing historian, have enriched the horse fund.

Le “Deauville memory” fund owes a lot to the passion of local collectors. It is Gilbert Hamel's motivation that gives the city its accumulated treasures which bring the Deauville of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents back to life. This base of donations by amateur historians is enriched by acquisitions, in particular "Deauville", this incredible collaborative work published in 1931 where the texts of Paul Poiret are illustrated by Van Dongen. Isabel and Louis Romanet's donation also presents a selection of pieces directly linked to the Deauville heritage.