The famous painting 🤵🏻♂️, currently on display at the @museeorsay, was painted in 1892, based on a sketch dated 1 October…
Translated from French.
The famous painting 🤵🏻♂️, currently on display at the @museeorsay, was painted in 1892, following a sketch dated 1 October 1891, produced in Normandy and held at the @labnf. The artist behind “the Proustians’ Mona Lisa” is Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942), a society painter and portraitist, who also painted André Gide, François Mauriac and Jean Cocteau. 🎨
He was a leading painter of the turn of the century and a key observer of the society that inspired Proust when he published “In Search of Lost Time” twenty years later. 🛌🕰️📚
Blanche had a wonderful brushstroke, but also a fine writing style. And in a short but valuable anthology entitled “Portrait of Marcel Proust as a Young Man” – the title of which seems to have been inspired by James Joyce – here is what he writes about what must surely be regarded as his masterpiece:
🖋️ “The dreadful portrait I painted of him was very lifelike; I had torn up that canvas. Proust recognised the face, but not the hands or the lower half of the body, which would be of such interest today. The destruction of the painting gave rise to letters, visits, and communications via dowager ladies, an ambassador’s wife, a famous demi-mondaine, and one of those beautiful Jewish baronesses of whom Marcel was the cherub. Suspicions, complications, wild conjectures—habitually dismantling his own feelings as if they were the parts of a machine, and viewing people through the coloured mirror of his imagination—he dealt with his friends just as the novelist would later deal with the characters he would create.” 🪞🎈
📓 @editionsbartillat 2021
#MarcelProust #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #proustagram #JacquesÉmileBlanche #LaJocondedesproustiens #Orsay #BNF #portrait
From Thursday 19 June to Sunday 12 October 2025.