Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time

This is a delightful art(coffee table) book. Each page contains quotation from Proust which mention a specific painting or an artist; on the opposite page there is a well-printed plate of corresponding painting.Charming!

I did not receive the book. Please. I need 'objet number' of the shipment in USA post office.
Thank you.
Conrado

This is a treasure to savor slowly. I keep it on my table and look at a few every day. It is different to look at a painting through Proust's eyes. What a gift!

Influenced by his readings in Carlyle and John Ruskin, Marcel Proust knew his art, whether it was art theory, the role of the artist in society, or the works of Vermeer, Manet, or Mantegna. For Proust, a painting inspired a thousand words. Painter Eric Karpeles enhances one's appreciation for reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) with his superb compilation of 206 illustrations in Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time. Combining his knowledge of art with his love of reading Proust, Karpeles carefully matches every painting or painter referenced in Proust's monumental seven-part masterpiece with Proust's own textual passages from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/ Enright translation. The result is nothing less than profound. With its introduction examining the various ways in which Proust used art to extend his descriptive vocabulary and its comprehensive index of artists and paintings referenced in Proust's novel, Karpeles' labour of love will appeal to anyone with a love for reading Proust. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt

This publication will undoubtedly please any Proust fan and will make you wonder how nobody had the idea before. It lists and reproduces all the paintings alluded to in Proust's masterwork "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" (In Search of Lost Time). Each work is reproduced in full color, next to the passage of the book in which Proust mentioned it (or sometimes just alluded to it, only mentioning a detail of the work without naming it, and this is where the book does a wonderful documentation job).

The illustrated works (more than 200 of them) range from Renaissance paintings by Titian, Fra Bartolomeo, Da Vinci, etc, to Vermeer's famous View of Delft (illustrated next to the description of Bergotte's death), to modern works by Degas or Manet, but there are also numerous works by lesser-known artists, whose reproductions would be very difficult to find elsewhere (Léon Bakst, Gustave Jacquet,Jehan-Georges Vibert...).

This book is all the more important to the understanding of Proust as he himself acknowledged that "La Recherche" was a work whose theme was the birth of an artistic vocation in the narrator's soul, the novel itself being the result of this birth. He also wrote that " my book is a painting" (as quoted in the present book). Art, and painting in particular, holds a central part in the whole work and, until now, no one had undertaken the necessary task of documenting this. "Paintings in Proust" is at the same time a very helpful and a beautiful contribution to the study of one of the most important works in Western literature.