An “Exhibition of Old and Modern Dutch Paintings” 🖼️ was held in the Jeu de Paume room (in the gardens of…

An “Exhibition of Old and Modern Dutch Paintings” 🖼️ was held in the Salle du Jeu de Paume (Tuileries Gardens) in Paris in 1921. It opened on 21 April 1921 and was due to close on 31 May, but was extended until 12 June 🕰️.

Marcel Proust, who had visited Holland twenty years earlier, had fallen in love with Vermeer’s paintings, which he referred to as ‘Ver Meer’. Thus, in a letter to the Princess of Chimay in 1907, he wrote:

🖋️ “The painting I liked best in Holland (…) was Vermeer’s View of Delft (…) at the museum in The Hague. Of course, there are three or four Rembrandts in Amsterdam that I like even more. But this ‘View of Delft’ strikes me as one of the five or six most beautiful paintings I know ‘in the whole world’, along with a portrait of a woman by the same Vermeer, also in The Hague (…)”

On 1 May 1921, he confided in Jean-Louis Vaudoyer:

🖋️ “In “Swann's Way”, I couldn’t help but have Swann work on a study of Vermeer.” And we know that Swann never quite manages to finish it, remaining an aesthete, a bachelor of art 🤵🏻‍♂️ rather than an accomplished author or artist.

In December 1920, Vaudoyer had published a scholarly and insightful study on Vermeer in “L’Opinion” 🗞️, which made Proust want to see those Dutch paintings again. Vaudoyer accompanied him to the @jeudepaumeparis between 18 and 24 May 1921, an outing that Proust described as an “incomparable stroll”. He felt unwell 🥴 whilst there, but had his photograph taken three times in (the vicinity of) the Tuileries.

💡Did you know? On the same day, he visited an exhibition dedicated to Ingres, where he particularly admired Ingres’s portrait of François-Marius Granet, which is now housed in the beautiful @museegranet in Aix-en-Provence.

The three photographs of Proust were the first to be taken since the 1910s and would be the last before his death, which occurred on 18 November 1922. 🪦

— Sources:
Jean-Yves Tadié, “Proust, le dossier”, Belfond 1983 and @editions_pocket 2022, pp. 489
Françoise Leriche, “Proust, Lettres”, @editionsplon 2004, revised edition 2022, pp. 1006–1013

#Vermeer #Correspondance #CorrProust #proustagram #MarcelProust #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #Proust