La Plage de Cabourg by René-Xavier Prinet — May 2025

The Société des Amis de Marcel Proust acquired, at the end of 2024, a work by René-Xavier Prinet entitled La Plage de Cabourg, 1908, which now joins the collections of the Maison de Tante Léonie – Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers-Combray. This acquisition brings together two ways of looking at a single world: that of the painter and that of the writer, two contemporaries who frequented the same Norman shores.

Prinet and Proust shared the same seaside resort, the same Norman sky, the same figures strolling along the promenade. Their sensibilities, one pictorial, the other literary, converge with a striking affinity: where the one captured on canvas the atmosphere of a suspended instant, the other rendered it through the magic of words. La Plage de Cabourg, 1908 is thus far more than a document of seaside holidaymaking during the Belle Époque: it embodies that profound harmony between painting and literature which animates the museum's mission.

Overview

La Plage de Cabourg, 1908 is an oil on canvas by René-Xavier Prinet (1861–1946). The work depicts a lively beach scene in which, bathed in the white light characteristic of the painter, figures from different social backgrounds mingle: an elegant couple, maids in white aprons, a little girl in a red jacket, and a sailor leaning nonchalantly against a rowing boat.

Prinet spent every summer in Cabourg at the Villa Double-Six, a property belonging to his wife's family. A few metres away, Marcel Proust stayed at the Grand Hôtel from 1907 onward. Both observed the same strollers on the promenade. La Plage de Cabourg, 1908 was exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in the very year it was painted; Proust, a regular at the gallery and at the Norman resort that same season, may well have seen it. It stands as a striking illustration of the "change in social proportions characteristic of seaside life" evoked in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.

The entry of this painting into the collections of the Maison de Tante Léonie was made possible at the end of 2024 thanks to the generosity of patrons and donors.

Authors and Contributors

Jérôme Bastianelli, president of the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust, writes the introduction and presents the multiple resonances between Proust, Prinet and Cabourg.

Antoine Compagnon, of the Académie française, devotes his study to the symbolic and literary richness of the Balbec promenade — a reflection of the one at Cabourg —, a space of wandering, desire and memory that runs through the whole of the Recherche.

Jean-Paul Henriet, former mayor of Cabourg, retraces Marcel Proust's successive stays in Cabourg between 1881 and 1914, their medical, social and creative contexts, and their impact on Proust's work.

Olivia Chadenet, member of the Cercle littéraire proustien de Cabourg-Balbec, devotes her study to René-Xavier Prinet, to his attachment to the Norman resort, and to his creative process.

Emily Eells, professor emerita at the Université Paris Nanterre, sheds light on the aesthetic correspondences between Prinet's pictorial style and the world described by Proust.

Louis Peyrusse, art historian, traces the history of the artistic representation of beaches, from scenes of maritime labour to the elegant seaside promenades of the Belle Époque.

The brochure is edited by Jérôme Bastianelli and Anne Imbert, secretary general of the Société; the design is by Guénola Six.

Contents

• Introduction, by Jérôme Bastianelli
• "Digue dondaine, digue dondon," by Antoine Compagnon, of the Académie française
• "Marcel Proust in Cabourg," by Jean-Paul Henriet
• "Prinet in Cabourg," by Olivia Chadenet
• "Prinet, an Unsuspected Illustrator of Proust," by Emily Eells
• "Beach Strolls in a Few Paintings," by Louis Peyrusse

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback
• ISBN: 978-2-492318-29-0
• Price: 9,50 €
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray
• Printer: Suisse Imprimerie, Paris
• Legal deposit: May 2025