Living with Art

For Eugenia, a painting is meant to be inhabited, contemplated and rediscovered across a lifetime. Every work holds the micro and the macro at once. Personal stories are woven into historical narratives. Paintings are mirrors, and they have a life of their own, one that should be cherished from its creation in the artist’s studio, through its destinations, to the hands that will pass it down next.

For Alexandre, art is also a remarkable asset. In his years of studying the market, he has seen the finest works deliver very competitive returns over the long term. Art shows a low correlation with financial markets, and collectors turn to it in uncertain times. Of all passion investments, it is perhaps the most versatile: it can be sold, borrowed against, passed on within a family or given to a museum, and all the while enjoyed every day.

Our family’s estate in Normandy has been home to the family for more than four centuries. We grew up among its family portraits and memorabilia, a collection passed down through generations, which we care for today and will pass on in turn.

The estate’s cultural programme has included exhibitions of contemporary artists. Today, it regularly welcomes international patrons of the arts and culture, and we continue to develop it as a place of exchange between artists, museums and collectors.

Our family descends from Michel-Étienne Turgot, who, as mayor of Paris, modernised the city: he had its great sewer vaulted and commissioned the celebrated bird’s-eye map known today as the Plan Turgot. Drawn street by street from the ground, decades before the first balloon flight, it shows Paris and its royal squares as they were before the Revolution and Haussmann’s transformations, and remains one of the most admired and collected maps of the city.

His son Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Controller-General of Finances under Louis XVI, was one of the great economists of the Enlightenment and a forerunner of Adam Smith and modern economics. In tribute to him, one of the Louvre’s pavilions bears his name, the Pavillon Turgot.