A Tailor's Eye - Proust (I)

In a novel that runs to over four-thousand pages, you have to be willing to accept that some of the allusions and asides are going to be somewhat slippery. But that’s one of the real pleasures of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu … you are forever being sent off on diversions.

Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gold

Proust, or the narrator ‘Marcel’ – a heterosexual version of the author – has a wonderful tendency to compare characters to famous paintings. At the Princess de Guermantes’ party (Volume IV: ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’), we find the Baron de Charlus lurking besides a whist table. Marcel immediately is put in mind of a painting. 

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‘I had no one else to turn to but M. de Charlus, who had withdrawn to a room downstairs which opened on to the garden. I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artful simplicity of his evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor's eye could have picked out, had the air of a "Harmony in Black and White" by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was wearing, suspended from a broad ribbon over his shirt-front, the cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the religious Order of Malta.’

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There is an immediate urge to look up the Whistler, and then to go beyond the initial frustration of finding that there is no specific Whistler painting called ‘Harmony in Black and White’, and perhaps do a bit of detective work around the title. Remember, Proust didn’t have the internet at his fingers and would quite often be forced to rely on memory to recall a title. You don’t need to dig too much. Whistler’s Arrangement in Black and Gold is almost certainly the painting that he is thinking of.  

The clincher is that this is a portrait of the Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who, – wait for it – is one of the composite models for the Baron de Charlus. It’s slightly frustrating then, that the painting that is most often referenced when searching for the real life Charlus – and I’ve been guilty of this as well – is Giovanni Boldini’s magnificent Portrait of Robert de Montesquiou.

Portrait of Robert de Montesquiou, Giovanni Boldini

 

It is superb. The blue topped cane in particular is suitably louche and striking – but it has nothing of the mystery required of Charlus. This is a character who – in Ann Widdecombe’s only memorable utterance, about the then Tory leader Michael Howard – has very much ‘something of the night about him’. Indeed, in the Whistler, less is so much more, and it’s risen right to the top of my wish-list for a visit to the newly reopened and renovated Frick Collection in New York.

Already I’m looking forward to getting up close to the dirty olive and grey of that painting’s subtle brushstrokes. Like Rembrandt, Whistler is a painter that begs to be seen in the ‘flesh’. For example, look at the barely delineated overcoat under the Comte’s left arm. A dirty splodge that comes to life only when you back away and view the whole. 

 

Detail from Whistler's Arrangement in Black and Gold

Subtlety is all with Proust. Returning to Marcel’s description of the Whistler, you almost miss the waspish irony in the description of ‘the merest trifles which only a tailor's eye could have picked out’. Just twenty or so pages before, earlier that afternoon, an astonished Marcel had been spying on the Baron sodomising the tailor Jupien.