Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
Venice Out of Season
By Richard Dorment
The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent
by Hugh Honour, by John Fleming
Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown, 180 pp., $29.95
James Abbott McNeill Whistler: A Life
by Gordon Flemíng
St. Martin's Press, 367 pp., $29.95
There is a moment in Leon Edel's life of Henry James when in the summer of 1885 the novelist received a letter from John Singer Sargent introducing three French friends who wished to be shown the sights of London. One of the three was the aesthete, dandy, and poet Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who was to be the model for Proust's Baron Charlus, and who chose to symbolize his artistic persona with the signature of the chauvesouris, the bat. Landed with so exotic a creature, James knew just what to do. He arranged a dinner at the Reform Club in Pall Mall with the one person in London Montesquiou longed to meet, the creator of the Peacock Room, the painter of the symphonies, harmonies, and nocturnes, who was to be the model for another character in Remembrance of Things Past, the painter Elstir. The man whom Montesquiou had heard so much about was 'le fameux Jimmie,' the Butterfly, James McNeill Whistler.
Review, 3973 words
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