Les Invités de Marcel Proust

David Richardson

Resemblance: The Portraits & etc.

Landscape, not portraiture, has been my primary genre as a painter. My notable illustration experience were drawings made for the first two articles of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail”, published in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1972. The portraits of Marcel’s characters came as a surprise. Involuntary memory is important to us all, so too I think is involuntary inspiration. One morning, six months after finishing a first reading of À la recherche du temp perdu, I found myself with nothing particular to do, picked up a small piece of balsa wood, and with no one in mind painted the face and torso of a woman, an imagined figure, and left her on the easel. Three days later, looking at her, I realized she was Oriane de Guermantes and saw I could continue with the rest of the characters. I stopped when there were 56 characters and a few incidental illustrations.

It was not my intention to fix the images of the characters for other readers, indeed one might see Oriane’s nose more beak-like, Gilberte’s hair redder, Rémi more resembling Rizzi’s bust of Loredan, and my depiction of the duc de Châtellerault stretches his age way past his encounter with the footman at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s. Painting the characters allowed me to remain in Marcel’s time while finding my own, and each character, plus others not yet painted, could be painted as many times, in as many ways as each appear in the novel. I came to Proust through a dear friend whose mentor was Wallace Fowlie. Years later, having no idea where it would lead, I began to read the novel. I think it’s a measure of Marcel’s genius that he allows his readers to trail away from his text onto pathways of their own. You can find all of Richardson’s famous portraits on his website, Resemblance: The Portraits & etc.

Here is a fine collection of David Richardson's work: