ABSTRACT
Through his extensive reading of Ruskin, Proust’s knowledge of British painting extended from Turner to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglo-American Whistler. Ruskin was among the first to ‘discover’ Turner, and, as Proust noted, he wrote five monumental tomes as a sort of apologia of his work: ‘il ecrit les Modern Painters tout entiers pour faire comprendre Tumer’/‘He wrote all of Modern Painters to make Turner understood’.1 Ruskin also championed the Pre-Raphaelites, and Proust commented that his writings in defence of their works had been widely circulated: ‘ses idees sur les preraphaelites ont ete vulgarisees jusqu’a la banalite’2/ ‘his ideas on the Pre-Raphaelites have been banalized through their popularization’. Proust’s initial interest in Whistler’s work may well stem from an attempt to understand why Ruskin had rejected him so uncompromisingly, leading to the infamous trial between them which Proust read about in Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies?
