As night fell over the Mediterranean, the hundreds of people ferried to this minuscule island offshore France learnt a secret – the country’s late drinks tycoon Paul Ricard was a closet artist.
The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ricard, king of pastis and founder of global drinks giant Pernod Ricard, now the world’s second biggest wine and spirits group after Diageo.
The crowd partied through the night on the family-owned island, where wine from family vineyards flowed along with the licorice-flavored liqueur now a mainstay of French cafe life.
On hand were 46 of his 49 descendants to unveil to the world the passion for art that drove one of the country’s richest and most influential men, from childhood until his death in 1997, aged 88.
“My father painted every spare minute, said his eldest child Danielle, now 70. “He was a born artist who expressed himself in everything he did.
At his death, the family discovered a trove of 1,500 paintings and 3,800 sketches, including works from his early teens portraying the village north of Marseille where he grew up the son of a wine wholesaler. Some 150 went on show on the island this week.
“Painting was his secret garden, grand-daughter Myrna Giron Ricard, who organized this first retrospective of his work, told AFP. “Art meant a lot to him. He liked to say that artists, not warriors, wrote history.
Described by all who knew him as “a man in a hurry and “a man of action , Ricard dabbled in a host of projects while building his drinks empire – farming, tourism, construction, car-racing and cinema – but throughout played patron of the arts while painting in secret.
“I became a captain of industry thinking it would leave me free to dedicate more time to painting and sculpture, he wrote in an autobiography. “But I became caught in my own trap.
The family objected to his childhood dream of being a full-fledged artist. So he briefly went to art school but never gave up business, helping his father and at 23 concocting his famed recipe for pastis.
A born communicator, his eye for art helped inspire clever advertising using the strong colors of Mediterranean France to make it a regular afternoon tipple in the south. To seduce Parisians, he sent camels and robed Africans up the Champs Elysees carrying Ricard pastis.
“Paul Ricard had a new idea every 10 minutes, the company said when he died. “He was a visionary who knew how to live within his time.
He designed his factories with an eye for architectural feature, and when he purchased the island of Bendor, turned the barren rocky windswept place into a miniature Mediterranean paradise that was his own work of art, though some panned it as kitsch.
Ricard had the island landscaped, recreating a Provence-style village of shady squares and cafes, peppered with statues, ironwork and ceramics created by the artist and craftsmen friends he would invite there to work.
He built a theatre, a wine museum and an art gallery to house a Salvador Dali masterpiece (his only known collector’s item), then added hotels and beaches and bars for his poet, sculptor and filmmaker friends.
In the 60s and 70s, the island off Bandol saw the likes of writers Marcel Pagnol and Georges Simenon, directors Roberto Rossellini and Claude Lelouch, and even Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin and explorer-conservationist Jacques Cousteau.
“He was sensitive to all that was beautiful, said grand-daughter Myrna Giron Ricard. “His eye for art and his love of art helped him to build, to communicate, to understand film, to love nature and to love to help others.
This week she re-established the old family tradition of helping artists by holding a sculpture symposium, an event where artists get together to turn out a work in public within a given timeframe.
