The Thickness of Art: Paintings and Photographs in Proust’s Recherche

The aim of this article is to show that Proust's 'celebre jet d'eau d'Hubert Robert' is a strange hybrid: it is a three-dimensional object in a garden, a painting, and a photograph. Moreover, the referential convolutions of Proust's fountain narrative are compounded at its points of contact with the work of other writers, most notably Diderot. Proust's narrative also anticipates key developments in twentieth-century aesthetics, particularly with regard to mechanical reproduction. The article examines the 'definitive' version of Proust's description, a number of early (manuscript) versions, and other passages in A la recherche du temps perdu in which Robert's name occurs.