New acquisition for the Maison de Tante Léonie

The collections of the Musée Marcel Proust - Maison de Tante Léonie have just been enriched by the purchase at public auction (Wattebled Portay auction house) of this pastel by Paul Baignères depicting Henri François Alexandre van Blarenbergue (1819-1906).

Two reasons for this acquisition:

Paul Baignères was a friend of Marcel Proust, and we already hold a work by him (a view of Lake Geneva).

Mr van Blarenberghe is mentioned from the very first sentence of « Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide », Proust's text (1907) on the murder of the widow Blarenberghe by her son (the first sentence reads thus: « Quand M. van Blarenberghe mourut, il y a quelques mois, je me souviens que ma mère avait beaucoup connu sa femme » ["When Mr van Blarenberghe died, a few months ago, I remember that my mother had known his wife well"]).

Proust also mentions van Blarenbergue in a long letter to Daniel Halévy: "As for Mr Van Blarenberghe the father, Maman thought highly of him, and he was charming towards us whenever we made those journeys that my health made so complicated for me and so sad for Maman. I remember the ordeal of our journey to Venice, and at each station where Maman wanted me to be able to set down my cross, have an empty carriage, and take an anti-asthmatic fumigation there, she would produce a long letter that Mr Van Blarenberghe had given us (he was, I believe, chairman of the board of the Compagnie de l'Est) which the Italian stationmasters found highly amusing. [...] Mr Van Blarenberghe was rather too reactionary for Maman's taste, she who had the greatest and most tender heart I could ever imagine. He was somewhat of the sort of person of whom she used to say: "he does not like anything that might bring down rents and railway shares." But since my grandfather's death, she had, with a kind of fetishism, adopted, and turned into objects of worship, into instruments of commemoration and ceremony, what during his lifetime she had perhaps found a little excessive in him; and yet my grandfather, kind and tender as she was, whom I saw go for weeks without sleeping because he had seen a man strike a child in the street, and who, even when ill and almost an invalid, would have his cab stop two streets from his home so as not to risk troubling his concierge with the sight of a luxury he could not afford himself, my grandfather believed that the good of the people could only be achieved under an authoritarian regime (relatively speaking) and, moreover, an anticlerical one (even more relatively speaking; Louis-Philippe sent his sons to the lycée)."

The work will shortly be hung at the Maison de Tante Léonie

Join us, to support our acquisitions and the development of our museum - historic house! https://amisdeproust.fr/fr/adhesions