Acquisition of an Original Drawing by Madeleine Lemaire – Société des Amis de Marcel Proust

The Société des Amis de Marcel Proust has just enriched the collections of the Maison de Tante Léonie - Musée Marcel Proust through the acquisition of a drawing by Madeleine Lemaire, reproduced in Les plaisirs et les jours.

Here is the description of this drawing on the website of the Johann Naldi gallery:

"MADELEINE LEMAIRE (1845-1928) RARISSIME DESSIN POUR ILLUSTRATION MARCEL PROUST"

Madeleine LEMAIRE(Les Arcs, 1845 – Paris, 1928)
Original ink drawing, signed
XXVI Sous-Bois, chapter heading, p. 231 (chestnut-tree branch) 19.5 x 15.5 cm (visible).
Provenance:
Hôtel Drouot sale (Georges Petit, expert), Aquarelles, dessins, gouaches & sanguines par Madeleine Lemaire, 29 avril 1897, no. 82 ("Marronniers, houx, chandelle, fougère, trèfle. Cinq dessins à la plume").

Note by Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, art historian:
These drawings belong to a body of compositions produced by Madeleine Lemaire at the request of Marcel Proust to illustrate his first book, published in 1896 by Calmann-Lévy under the title Les Plaisirs et les jours. In this volume, the young author brought together texts of various kinds, short stories and prose poems, published in 1892 and 1893 in periodicals such as Le Banquet and the Revue blanche. For the future genius of À la Recherche du temps perdu, these 1890s were years of apprenticeship, and it was chiefly under the auspices of Robert de Montesquiou, to whom he was then very close and whom he had in fact met at Madeleine Lemaire's, that Proust had his first aesthetic and literary experiences. It was also with the count's help that he entered "society" and discovered the aristocracy that would populate his great work, in particular Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe, Montesquiou's cousin, the future "duchesse de Guermantes". Madeleine Lemaire also belonged to this fashionable, artistic Paris from which Proust would draw inspiration; she was to be the model for Madame Verdurin, an emblematic character of a somewhat self-made bourgeoisie in search of social advancement. The "patronne", as she is called in La Recherche, would in fact achieve her ends by becoming princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps retrouvé. It is no coincidence that Proust chose to give this key figure in his cycle a surname redolent of nature: Verdurin, evoking verdure – a double reference, then, since it recalls Madeleine Lemaire's vocation as a painter of flowers, while also carrying a faint pejorative connotation suggesting the character's rustic origins. Montesquiou, Madeleine Lemaire, Reynaldo Hahn, several of whose short scores are included in the edition, and Anatole France for the preface: the volume appears highly characteristic of the fashionable aestheticism that flourished, quite literally, in those symbolist years of the fin de siècle. Jean Lorrain, whose own prose was nonetheless so marked by those years of decadentism, did not refrain from savaging Les Plaisirs et les jours under his usual pseudonym Raitif de la Bretonne, first in Le Journal of 1 July 1896, coupling it with Montesquiou, those "pretty young things in want of literature", and then a second time in more detail, on 3 February 1897. He thus mentioned the writer's "amateurism" and added: "this delicate volume would not be a typical example of the genre were it not illustrated by Mme Madeleine Lemaire". It is moreover in this very article that Lorrain, with his customary malice, mocks Anatole France's preface and suggests a forthcoming one by Alphonse Daudet "who will be unable to refuse it, either to Mme Lemaire, or to her son Lucien." The between-the-lines evocation of Proust's affair with Lucien Daudet then provoked the famous pistol duel between Lorrain and Proust, without result, on 6 February 1897.

As can be seen, an entire world surrounds Les Plaisirs et les jours, a particularly luxurious volume since it was sold for 17.50 francs, three times the price of an ordinary volume. It is not, however, a work of fine bibliophile illustration despite its limited print run, and one must note the rather mediocre rendering of Madeleine Lemaire's illustrations by the printer, whose work does not do justice to the delicacy of the original inks. More than the full pages devoted to characters or complete subjects, whose draughtsmanship has truly aged, the ornamental and symbolic drawings conceived by the artist retain their charm and bear witness to genuine graphic qualities. If Madeleine Lemaire's watercolours or oils seem to us today rather saccharine, the inks display a fine sureness of hand and a botanical precision that does not exclude poetic interpretation. Whether it is the holly and fern, treated with great simplicity, the chestnut leaves and clover, more complex in their arrangement, or the dandelion seed head (taraxacum officinale) whose scattering recalls the fine drawing created by Eugène Grasset for the Librairie Larousse, the artist delivers pages that are handsome, balanced and assured.

Judging by the fragments of inscriptions, unfortunately partly illegible, Madeleine Lemaire took part in the design of the book. The final decision, however, lay with the publisher. It is worth noting that the holly leaves, drawn (and signed) vertically, were in the end reproduced horizontally, with the signature moved accordingly. It is not always easy to link the choice of images to the content of the text. Is there really a connection between the clover flowers used as a header for "Coucher de soleil intérieur", or the fine dandelion seed heads for the "Sonate au clair de lune" – called "chandelle" by the author because a breath scatters them as a flame is extinguished? Nothing is less certain. Thus the chestnut-tree branches illustrate the chapter heading "Sous-bois", whereas it is in the following chapter, entitled "Les Marronniers", that Proust writes: "J'aimais surtout à m'arrêter sous les marronniers immenses quand ils étaient jaunis par l'automne" (p. 233). It seems rather that the floral headers and tailpieces were arranged for plastic and decorative reasons. Thus, when Jean Lorrain writes mockingly: "Mme Lemaire's ingenuity has never been so closely fitted to an author's talent", one can only agree, without irony this time…

It is known that, when he came to write and publish the Recherche, Marcel Proust would try to make people forget his previous books, and in particular Les Plaisirs et les jours, perhaps too strongly marked, in his eyes, by the milieu and context of the "fin de siècle". Yet it is in this very soil that the writer's masterpiece takes root, and Proust's work is today regarded as forming an indissociable whole, from Les Plaisirs et les jours and Jean Santeuil to Contre Sainte-Beuve and La Recherche. Madeleine Lemaire does indeed belong to this world, as much as painter, with these charming drawings, as model for Madame Verdurin; and this "empress of roses", as Robert de Montesquiou had dubbed her, well deserved the tribute of Anatole France, who wrote in his preface, of Proust: "Happy is his book! It will go through the town all adorned, all perfumed with the flowers with which Madeleine Lemaire has strewn it with that divine hand which scatters roses along with their dew."

Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond