pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper: 24 x 21,5 cm
stamped ‘Van Dongen’ (lower right), annotated and numbered
‘Proust – La vieilesse de Charlus N° 74 – 74’ (left margin)
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Notes:
Kees van Dongen was a Dutch-born French painter and printmaker who was one of the leading Fauvists and was particularly renowned for his stylized, sensuously rendered portraits of women.
This watercolour is one of the 77 watercolours Van Dongen made for the illustrated edition of Marcel Proust, ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’, Paris (Édition Gallimard) 1947, see part 3, p. 251, ill. no. 71, which was published in memory of the passing of Proust 25 years earlier.
À la recherche du temps perdu, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and later on as In Search of Time, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche (The Search), is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory.
The novel follows the narrator’s recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in late 19th-century and early 20th-century high-society France. Proust began to shape the novel in 1909
Baron de Charlus is a fictional character from the novel, introduced in volume 2 as a haughty, eccentric man in his 40’s. An anonymous critic once wrote: “The Baron de Charlus is one of the most complex characters in literature I have come across. He is both self assured and overbearing to the utmost limit. At times, Proust describes his mannerisms so well I feel as though I just saw the Baron disguise a tinge of hurt or pride in front of me. The immaculate detail Proust uses allows the reader to not hate the character but see that he is a complex being, as us all.”
Provenance
Literature