There is a particular quality of light in the gardens of the Château Sainte-Hélène on a June afternoon — the kind that falls through mature canopies and settles on stone paths in slow, shifting pools. The château itself, once the private residence of perfumer François Coty, sits back from the Avenue de Fabron with the composure of a building that has never needed to announce itself. Today it houses the Musée International d'Art Naïf Anatole Jakovsky, and on Saturday, 6 June 2026, its garden becomes a working studio.
The occasion is a live painting session titled 'J'irai peindre au musée' — a performance that began during the European Night of Museums and now returns to its conclusion. The artist Aline Maia, who started the work during that earlier evening, will come back to the garden to finish her piece in front of visitors. Alongside her, Julie Sonhalder — who has spent time interpreting the museum's living herbarium in colour — will also be present in the garden to paint and to talk with those who stop to watch. The event begins at 14h00.
The Art That Refused to Be Sophisticated
To understand why this setting matters, it helps to know what the museum holds inside. The Jakovsky collection traces the history of naïve painting from the eighteenth century to the present day — a lineage that includes Henri Rousseau, Séraphine Louis, Camille Bombois, and Grandma Moses, among many others. The collection was donated in 1982 by the critic and collector Anatole Jakovsky and his wife Renée, and it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of its kind anywhere in the world. A deposit from the Centre Pompidou further deepens the holdings.
Naïve art is sometimes misread as simple. In fact, its defining quality is something more deliberate: it privileges the painter's inner vision over academic convention, resisting the learned distortions of perspective and proportion in favour of something more direct. Watching a painter work in this context — outdoors, in real time, with the finished result still uncertain — is a way of seeing that instinct at its most exposed.
'Un cadre intime et familier pour accueillir un art peu connu' — the museum's own words for a place that has always understood the value of the unhurried.
What the Afternoon Holds
Guests arriving at 23 avenue de Fabron will find both artists at work in the garden, the park's rare botanical specimens providing a backdrop that Sonhalder has already been in conversation with through her herbarium paintings. The format is open: there is no barrier between audience and process. Visitors are invited to exchange with the painters directly — to ask questions, to stand close, to watch a painting become itself in real time.
For those who want to extend the visit, the museum's permanent collection offers its own rewards. Works by Ivan and Josip Généralic, Ligabue, Vivancos, and the Douanier Rousseau line walls that once enclosed Coty's private life. The park itself — planted with some of the rarest botanical species on the Côte d'Azur — is worth a slow circuit before or after the painting session.
Nice in early June occupies a particular register: the summer crowds have not yet arrived in full, the light lasts well into the evening, and the city retains a certain ease that the height of the season sometimes displaces. An afternoon in a garden watching paint meet canvas, in a château that has been quietly collecting beauty for over four decades, is entirely in keeping with that mood.
The garden gate, the smell of cut grass and old stone, two painters at work — some afternoons arrange themselves better than others.
