Portrait of Marcel Proust

In 1892 Blanche sent this portrait to the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts, the newer of the two Paris exhibitions, set up by breakaway artists only two years before. Marcel Proust, then 21, was a young man about town who wrote society pieces for small magazines and had not yet published a book. The two had met the year before at the seaside resort of Trouville as guests of the same Paris hostess, Madame Baignères.

For a painter known for his quick, loose brush, the picture is unusually still. He faces us head-on against a dark ground, dressed in black, with a white orchid in his buttonhole. The museum thinks the canvas probably began as a full-length portrait. Proust kept it until his death in 1922, and it stayed with his family until 1989, when the state accepted it in payment of inheritance tax.