The Art Of Perfume.

Byline: Catherine Piercy. editor: Sarah Brown

With a little help from painter Sophie Matisse, rising fragrance star Kilian Hennessy reimagines the perfume bottle.

On a Thursday afternoon in a sunlit Tribeca studio, artist Sophie Matisse is elbow deep in her latest oeuvre: hand-painting 50 strikingly original perfume bottles for Kilian Hennessy's self-titled fragrance line.

Channeling the brightly colored conceptual canvases nearby, Matisse--the granddaughter of French Fauvist Henri and a buzz-worthy contemporary artist in her own right--transforms each clear glass flacon into a miniature 3-D art piece. Nearby, a dozen untouched bottles wait patiently for the spotlight amid heaps of brushes and pots of high-gloss lemon-yellow, fluorescent-orange, and fiery-red paint.

The exclusive limited-edition collection, which goes global on October 15, is the first collaboration between Matisse and Hennessy--who, as the grandson of the LVMH cofounder and Cognac legend of the same name, shoulders an impressive family legacy of his own.

"Sophie liked the idea of using the glass as canvas," says Hennessy

Since founding his luxe year-old fragrance line, By Kilian, Hennessy has been longing to commission something special, in the spirit of Rene Lalique's creations for Francois Coty and Jacques Guerlain in the early 1900s. When a mutual friend invited Matisse to a party honoring Hennessy's darkly feminine scents, he didn't hesitate.