Foundation Journal – An evolving legacy

(March 2026)

In La Napoule, spring does not begin only with the first buds or the return of brighter days. It is rooted in a deeper story: that of a place shaped by a vision, Marie Clews’ vision.

Marie Clews, a spring that never fades

If the Château’s gardens seem to awaken naturally with the season today, they are in fact the result of an attentive gaze, constant care, and a vision oriented toward the future.

After Henry Clews’s passing, Marie Clews took up the torch with remarkable determination. In the 1940s, she undertook the steps required to have the Château de La Napoule and its gardens listed in the supplementary inventory of historic monuments, thereby ensuring the preservation of this singular heritage site.

But her work did not stop at preservation. In 1951, she founded La Napoule Art Foundation, laying the groundwork for a living project: to make this place a space for creation, transmission, and hospitality for artists from around the world.

Gardens, memory, and creation

Spring offers a particularly meaningful lens through which to understand Marie Clews’s legacy. The gardens she envisioned are not merely decorative settings: they embody a vision in which art, nature, and time remain in constant dialogue.

Each pathway and each perspective seems designed as an invitation to slow down, observe, and feel. Within these gardens lies a form of quiet continuity, a balance between what has been, what is, and what still remains to be imagined.

The exhibition Les Jardins de Marie, by artist Cynthia Imogen Hammond, which came to a close at the beginning of March, extended this intuition. It reminded us how deeply this place is inhabited, not only by its history, but by a sensibility that remains vividly alive.

A vision of care and transmission

In this month that shines a light on women’s rights, it feels essential to bring renewed attention to the fundamental role played by Marie Clews. Her commitment was not simply rooted in personal attachment, but in a true vision: that of a place to protect, cultivate, and pass on.

Welcoming artists in residence, preserving a heritage site, and creating dialogue between disciplines and generations through art and culture: all of these actions reflect a philosophy of care in its broadest sense.

A care extended to the place itself, to the works it holds, and to the people who pass through it. Even today, each residency, exhibition, and visit is part of this continuity. The Château de La Napoule remains a living place in motion, faithful to the impulse initiated more than seventy years ago.

A living legacy

As spring settles in, it might be tempting to see the renewal of the gardens as a simple metaphor. But in La Napoule, this renewal is very real.

This March, the Château is hosting a new international spring residency. In the studios, works are taking shape, ideas are being explored, and practices are intersecting. Despite the quiet nature of these working moments, something is unfolding, slowly and almost silently, in continuity with what Marie Clews had imagined.

Welcoming artists, offering them a space to experiment, create, and enter into dialogue with the site: this lies at the very heart of the vision she set in motion when founding the La Napoule Art Foundation in 1951.

Today, these gestures, often invisible at first glance, are what bring the Château to life. Moments of research, fragments of works, and artists at work that the public will be able to discover during the Open Studio on March 27.

Marie Clews did not simply preserve a place: she opened a space of possibilities.

And each spring reveals new forms of it.

Discover the artists

More about the residencies