This unassuming book is in fact a valuable addition to the Proust bibliography. The author, himself a painter, has had the apparently simple idea of extracting all references to works of art in the great novel in an attempt to demonstrate Proust’s knowledge of, and reliance on, paintings to give resonance to his characters and to present them to his readers in an indelible physical form. The exercise proves both seductive and enlightening.
Proust was a translator of Ruskin, yet he rejected Ruskin’s message that art has a moral foundation. For Proust art was a self-explanatory and self-sustaining exercise which excluded praise and condemnation. His work is filled with characters who are undoubtedly venal. Only the Narrator’s mother, his grandmother, and the creative artists — Elstir the painter, Vinteuil the composer, Bergotte the writer and Swann the aesthete — escape the narrator’s fascinated yet impassive gaze.
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