Winter Garden

Eugène BOUDIN • Trois-mâts dans le bassin de Deauville

Eugène Boudin (born in Honfleur, died in Deauville) made the Normandy coast, which was enjoying a golden age at the time, the setting for his landscape paintings. Boudin painted Proustian visions ‘where the sea enters the land, where the land is already marine’, as the writer would say. He foreshadowed the figure of the painter Elstir, who in his painting of the port of Carquethuit used ‘only marine terms for the little town, and only urban terms for the sea’ and ‘accustoms the eye to recognising no fixed border, no absolute demarcation, between land and ocean’. ‘King of the skies’ according to Corot, Boudin - whom Monet considered his master - prefigured the Impressionist revolution.

Jacques-Émile BLANCHE • Henley, House Boat sur la Tamise

For his contemporaries, Jacques-Émile Blanche was ‘the only portraitist to have bequeathed to us the customs of his time with an acute post-impressionist talent’, to quote Jean Cocteau. His paintings show us the customs of a world that has disappeared. An Anglophile and Anglophone, Blanche lived almost half his life as an artist in London. There he met James McNeill Whistler, the painter so dear to Proust, and his friend Walter Sickert. Henley, a small town on the River Thames, was the birthplace of the famous Boat Race, a rowing regatta between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and a major social event. Jacques-Émile Blanche painted several pictures of the regattas at Henley.

SIX-PANEL FOLDING SCREEN

This folding screen, made from wallpapers from the Parisian manufacture of Jules Desfossé imitating oriental lacquer (patterns of stairs, pagodas, numerous characters fishing or engaged in tea ceremonies), is the "twin" of the screen that was once in Marcel Proust's bedroom, now housed in the Carnavalet Museum (Paris).

Cage