Paintings in Proust is a book with a simple but fruitful purpose: to list, illustrate and comment on all the pictures referred to in A la recherche du temps perdu. Given the length and sophistication of the novel and the extent of its author’s interest in painting, that is no small task, but Eric Karpeles makes an excellent job of it. 

Proust was deeply interested in all the arts, especially painting and music. In early life his interest took the form of an aestheticism which he later satirised in his novel as a sort of spiritual disease, though whether he ever quite recovered from the sickness himself is a