There are few novelists whose life and work is so entwined with the visual arts as Marcel Proust. This wide-ranging exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid explores the subject from various angles, showing portraits of Proust, Impressionist paintings that the author would have seen in his youth, as well as works from the Louvre, a museum Proust often wrote about visiting (4 March–8 June). Significant locations in the author’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, such as Paris and Venice, are well represented here: the former by Renoir, Dufy, Pissarro and more; the latter by Turner, Whistler and Fortuny. Details from his books are also picked out, such as Swann writing a monograph on Vermeer, while paintings by Monet, Helleu and Moreau – who all provided elements for the character of the painter Elstir – are on display, along with a languorous depiction by Georges Clairin of Sarah Bernhardt, who is said to have inspired Proust’s glamorous actor, La Berma.
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Find out more from the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s website
Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (1876), Georges Jules Victor Clairin. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (1834), J.M.W. Turner. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
After the Luncheon (1879), Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Diana and her Nymphs (c. 1653–54), Johannes Vermeer. Mauritshuis, The Hague