The donations of artists, collectors and mondaines offer a glimpse – limited, subjective – of this fantasy era and niçois cosmopolitanism. Presenting carnival scenes as well as portraits of famous foreign composers and princesses, the exhibition particularly highlights talented lyrical and dramatic artists, who, through the global recognition they reach, exercise an unprecedented independence and authority.
The question of representation therefore extends from the scene to the art of portrait, from the show to the projection of oneself, and also reveals the importance of fashion, culminating in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of the garment, an ancestor of the ready-to-wear, and the emergence of haute couture. The portraitists, by immortalizing their models dressed in theatre costumes, disguises, party dresses, matching outfits or at the cutting edge of modernity, offer them on the canvas the place of an ultimate and eternal staging.