With a rich history of working with the greatest photographers over the course of the century, in 2010 Deauville created the Planche(s) Contact Festival of photographic creations, the only festival in France to be based on public commissions and therefore on Deauville's own artistic production. As a result of this creative space, the town now boasts a vast contemporary collection including images by Massimo Vitali, Paolo Roversi, David Armstrong, Philippe Ramette, Sarah Moon and Kishin Shinoyama. It also continues to acquire prints of photographs taken in Deauville by some of the century's most influential photographers: Robert Capa, Gisèle Freund, the Seeberger brothers, Jacques-Henri Lartigue...

A founding collection, it motivated the town's museum project when, in 2011, Nicole Hambourg proposed a major donation of her husband's paintings. The collection comprises over 4,000 donated works, including 539 paintings and several thousand drawings by André Hambourg (1909-1999), a marine painter with a strong attachment to Deauville and the Côte Fleurie. The donation also includes over 500 works by Marie Laurencin, Foujita, Van Dongen and Derain, collected by the couple over the years. Since 2011, the Ville de Deauville has been pursuing a parallel acquisition policy, focusing on figurative painting of the 19th and 20th centuries. Works by Eugène Boudin, Paul Signac, André Lhote, Moïse Kisling and Raoul Dufy have joined the collection.

Les Franciscaines is also home to the "Peindre en Normandie" collection. This exceptional collection brings together nearly 200 Impressionist works from 1750 to 1950, depicting Normandy by illustrious and lesser-known painters seduced by its colors and clouds, producing some of the finest works of the Impressionist and Fauvist eras. This collection has been exhibited in France, notably in the salons of the Assemblée Nationale. It is also France's messenger abroad. It was exhibited in Deauville at Point de Vue in 2018.

The horse is a fundamental part of Deauville's identity. Racing, breeding, polo and equestrian sports have marked the town's history since its foundation. Validating the quality, rarity and level of expertise of the media library's collection, in 2020 the Bibliothèque nationale de France awarded the Franciscaines the "pôle associé cheval" label. Donations from Isabel and Louis Romanet, Jean-Louis Gouraud and racing historian Guy Thibault have enriched the horse collection.

The "mémoire de Deauville" collection owes much to the passion of local collectors. This is the motivation behind Gilbert Hamel's gift to the town of his accumulated treasures, which bring to life the Deauville of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. This foundation of donations by amateur historians is enriched by acquisitions, notably "Deauville", that incredible collaborative work published in 1931 in which Paul Poiret's texts are illustrated by Van Dongen. The donation from Isabel and Louis Romanet also presents a selection of pieces directly linked to Deauville's heritage.