In the summer of 1891, Marcel Proust was in Trouville ⛱️ and met the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche.
Translated from French.
In the summer of 1891, Marcel Proust was in Trouville ⛱️ and met the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. Blanche was a man of taste, a painter who moved mainly in high society, and a protégé of Robert de Montesquiou. The two men held each other in high regard. 🫶🏻
Blanche, who was ten years older than Proust, attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where Mallarmé was her English teacher. He socialised with Henri Bergson and André Gide. His father, like Proust’s, was a distinguished doctor 👨🏻⚕️ who died in 1893. Adrien Proust died ten years later.
Blanche is a regular at the salon of Mrs Straus, also known as Genevieve Halévy, also known as the widow Bizet 🎻. She was a close friend of Proust’s and one of his most trusted confidantes.
All these shared traits undoubtedly meant that Jacques-Émile Blanche was destined one day to paint the picture affectionately known as “the Proustians’ Mona Lisa” ✨✨ – that is to say, the famous portrait of Marcel Proust, now housed at the @museeorsay.
In 1891, Blanche produced a sketch ✏️ of Proust’s portrait, which he would paint the following year. Proust was still just a young socialite, not yet a man of letters. He was twenty years old; he had not yet published his first book, nor had he yet begun writing his first novel.
And yet, Blanche manages to capture Proust’s image exactly as one imagines the narrator of “the Search” 🤵🏻♂️: a piercing (or even Persian) gaze, an adolescent face, and ‘fin-de-siècle’ elegance.
💡 Did you recognise this sketch?
#MarcelProust #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #proustagram #LycéeCondorcet #JacquesÉmileBlanche #MuséedOrsay #portrait #LaJocondedesproustiens
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