Proust and Whistler
“In my intentionally naked room there is only one reproduction of a work of art: an excellent photograph of Whistler’s ‘Carlyle’ in a serpentine overcoat like the dress in his portrait of his mother.”
– Marcel Proust
It’s no secret that Proust is what we might call a ‘painterly writer’. As a teenager, he would wander the halls of the Louvre absorbing what he discovered there. This first-hand experience was supplemented by the boom in reproductions, which made the history of Western art available to the everyday reader. Much of what he loved found its way into his great novel, In Search of Lost Time, which is a book full of references to art and artists. Three painters are mentioned more than any other. The first is Vermeer. The second is Rembrandt. The third is James McNeill Whistler.
With Tate Britain’s exhibition on Whistler having recently opened in London, it seemed the ideal time to explore the connections between these two great artists.
Whistler’s Carlyle
Here it is. The only picture Proust had on his wall, according to a letter written in 1905 to his friend, Marie Nordlinger. Thus, the room in question must have been at 45 rue de Courcelles, which was where he lived with his parents during their final years. His father died in 1903; his mother in 1905. Proust stayed for a while, but eventually found the memories too painful and left for an apartment on Boulevard Haussmann, which was where he wrote the majority of The Search.
Three years later, he sent another friend, Reynaldo Hahn, a playful sketch in his own hand of the same picture, labelled ‘Karlilch Par Wisthlerch’. But we know Proust was aware of Whistler from at least as early as 1891, when he was just 19 years old. Articles written by him in the magazine Le Mensuel reference the artist. Proust and Nordlinger shared their mutual appreciation of the American when they first met in 1896, and she later sent him (in English) a copy of Whistler’s famous Ten O’Clock lecture, in which he set out his aesthetic credo – art for art’s sake – in full.
The meeting
In 1897, the two men met for the only time. This was at the salon of Méry Laurent, a Parisian socialite known for her affair with Manet, and one of the possible models for Proust’s character, Odette de Crécy. By all accounts the meeting went well. Proust was green, Whistler grey. The eager younger man was keen to discuss the artist’s sworn enemy (and Proust’s great influence), the English polymath and critic John Ruskin, whom Whistler declared “knew absolutely nothing about pictures”. For Proust, the two men represented opposing ideas about art, which were in certain respects synthesised into his own evolving theory. “The more I think of the theories of Ruskin and Whistler the more I believe they are not irreconcilable,” he wrote to Nordlinger. That night, Whistler left behind a pair of gloves, which Proust took home as a keepsake and then later misplaced himself.
Whistler vs. Ruskin
Interesting, that Proust was so drawn to these two giants of Anglo-American culture. Much has been written about the 1878 court case which pitched them against one another, and I draw your attention to this piece by Dr. Rebecca Marks if you’d like to find out more. But the short story is that Ruskin slagged off a painting by Whistler, and Whistler sued him for libel. Looking over his account of the trial, one is struck by the jocular tone of the proceedings, with Whistler offering a barrage of witty retorts and epigrams during his cross-examination, as the barristers enquired into the precise nature (and value) of his art. Here’s the painting that caused all the fuss:
Buried in the broadsides was the idea that Whistler’s paintings had something ‘unfinished’ about them, certainly according to the ‘expert witnesses’ called by Ruskin’s legal team, among them the Pre-Raphaelite inspired artist, Edward Burne-Jones. Through today’s eyes, this unfinishedness is perhaps what lends Whistler’s art its ‘modernity’. It doesn’t attempt to capture a fixed reality, but show somehow that the world – and meaning along with it – is always fluid, always in motion. It’s this quality that Proust was most drawn to, just as he was equally drawn to Ruskin’s moral faith and meticulous eye, until such time as he decided that the latter was guilty of aesthetic idolatry, and Whistler’s less sententious view prevailed.
What is ‘painterly writing’?
To Proust then, Whistler was clearly a transitional figure. One who helped him transit certain ideas about art from the old to the new. For Proust, art’s power dwelt in its capacity to transform experience. Ruskin remained too tied to art’s materiality, to its ethical imperatives, whereas Proust’s morality was never didactic, and certainly never dogmatic. It was drawn from a metaphysical source, from a feeling that nothing is ever what it seems and thus, that doubt itself might, in some way, function as a moral spur.
You might say that art, in Proust’s eyes, represented a way to reach a reality un-blighted by habit, to prize open the numinous poetry of Nature, Being, and the mysterious interrelation between them. His technique was thus analogous to Whistler’s – with an emphasis on a certain visual instability, a shifting and somewhat amorphous rendering of the world through the use of metaphor, multiple perspectives, densely layered description, intentional discursiveness, and a kind of notional ekphrasis. This is ‘painterly writing’ and it finds its fictive embodiment in the character of Elstir.
Elstir
The Search famously features a trio of artists who function as a way to articulate Proust’s ideas about the nature of art. Bergotte, the writer. Vinteuil, the composer. And Elstir, the painter. All are composites (as are most of his characters), and Elstir is typically regarded as a mix of Monet, Helleu, Moreau… and Whistler. Hence the almost anagrammatic name.
It’s noteworthy that early in the novel (and far earlier in the narrative) Elstir’s art is first described through the eyes of the conservative M. and Mme Cottard, as if “the painter simply flung colours at random on his canvases”. Proust is lampooning the couple’s lack of imagination. Of course, the remark is not dissimilar to Ruskin’s own description of Whistler “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.
Back then, Elstir went by the sobriquet ‘M. Biche’ and was a member of the snobbish Verdurin clique. Often the name is dropped entirely and he is referred to as simply “the painter” or “the painter who was then in favour”. It’s at the Verdurin’s salon that he first meets Charles Swann, who at this time is madly in love with the famed courtesan, Odette de Crécy. It is implied that Odette and Biche/Elstir were once lovers.
When we meet him much later, in the second volume, he is an older man and a famous artist. Proust’s narrator describes him as having “a profound influence on my way of seeing things”. Invited to Elstir’s studio – which “appeared to me like the laboratory of a sort of new creation of the world” – he discovers the artist’s seascapes, in which the boundary between land and sea and sky is almost indistinguishable.
“Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir had created them anew.”
Elstir – much like Whistler – trades in the visual equivalent of semantic substitution, which for Proust carried a greater ‘truth’ because it captured the protean, perspectival nature of perception, and formed the basis of his epistemology. Thus, churches are rendered as marine phenomena, ranks of sailing boats as urban infrastructure. The sea becomes the land, the land becomes the sea. Even in the here and now, things are never quite what they seem, let alone when time and memory intercede.
Miss Sacripant
This brings us to another painting in Elstir’s studio, this time of a young, coquettish woman, titled Miss Sacripant, October 1872. The narrator is struck by this portrait from the age just before he was born, which Elstir quickly hides away when his wife enters the room. It’s only later that the narrator inadvertently stumbles upon who the subject is: Odette, now Mme Swann, the mother of his own first crush, Gilberte.
“And this, Elstir’s earliest manner, was the most devastating of birth certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as did her photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of various well-known courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary with the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to history.”
For the narrator, this realisation soon prompts a second. If he had painted this, could it be that the great Elstir and the gauche M. Biche, ‘the painter then in favour’, are one and the same person? Indeed they are – yet further proof of the difference between what we think we see and what is really there, which is the territory, and tension, that Proust’s great novel explores time and time again.
“There is no man,” Elstir says, “however wise, who has not at some period in his youth, said things or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.”
In this way, Proust often revealed his characters in reverse, which is something he learnt in part from Dostoyevsky. And he has Elstir paint in a similar fashion, which is something he learnt in part from Whistler. Late in the novel, he knowingly inserts this method into the voice of the narrator, who while talking to Gilberte about the inscrutability of war, says: “… it would be right to paint it as Elstir painted the sea, by reversing the real and the apparent, starting from illusions and beliefs which one then slowly brings into line with the truth, which is the manner in which Dostoyevsky tells the story of a life.”
It’s also worth noting that it is Elstir who introduces the Narrator to Albertine, which drives much of the second half of the novel. She too is a character told backwards, or more properly, a character endlessly deferred, whose true nature is always in question, seen through the haze of the narrator’s perception, prejudice and suffering.
Mothers
It only struck me as I was writing this that both Whistler and Proust are known for presenting enduring portraits of their mothers. Coincidence? Probably. Whistler’s mother was by all accounts a stabilising force on her son, who was known for his flamboyant, bohemian lifestyle. The portrait of her, which for him was an exercise in artistic composition, became for the rest of the world an icon of motherhood. A meme.
Meanwhile, Proust’s mother was one of the great catalysts for his literary endeavours. She helped him with his translations of Ruskin and inhabited the emotional, intellectual, and moral centre of his life and work. Along with the madeleine, the ‘bedtime kiss’ is a key part of the early narrative of The Search. It’s what many readers remember and recognise – that profound craving for the love and attention of the person who brought us into the world.
A final word
Proust on Whistler: “If the man who painted those Venices in turquoise, those Amsterdams in topaz, those Brittanies in opal, if the portraitist of Miss Alexander, the painter of the room with the rose-strewn curtains and above all of the sails at night… is not a great painter, one can only think there never was one.”
James McNeill Whistler is on at Tate Britain in London until 27 September 2026
Excellent analysis - really loved this piece!