Proust wove many works of art into his novel ‘‘In Search of Lost Time,’’ including Frans Hals’ “The Women Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouses.” Top, Paul Helleu’s drawing of Proust on his deathbed from 1922.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Even before Marcel Proust died in 1922, ordering iced beer from the Ritz on his deathbed, his monumental novel about art and memory was being dissected for wisdom on a stunning variety of topics.
It has been celebrated for its obsessions with everything from Norman architecture to optics, homosexuality, classical music, botany, tactical warfare, fin de siecle fashion and princely copper-pot French cuisine.
Proust has even been hailed as a pioneer in the field of brain function (“Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” by Jonah Lehrer) and as surely the strangest self-help author in the canon (“How Proust Can Change Your Life,” by Alain de Botton).
So it’s remarkable that before now no one has focused at book length on painting, a subject that dominates his novel - “In Search of Lost Time,” or if you prefer, the more melodic Shakespearean “Remembrance of Things Past” - like almost no other.
As Eric Karpeles, a painter, points out, Proust names more than 100 artists in the course of the novel and mentions or describes dozens of actual works from the 14th through the 20th century, making the novel “one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature.”
Mr. Karpeles has now helped translate the dreamlike visual passages of Proust back into the images that inspired them. His guidebook “Paintings in Proust,” just published by Thames & Hudson, makes up a kind of free-floating museum of the paintings, drawings and engravings that figure or are evoked in the novel. Even for those who have never opened the 3,000-page tome, the book presents a lush coffee-table snapshot of the artistic spirit of Third Republic France as filtered through Proust’s keen sensibility, formed mostly in the Louvre during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with excursions (real or imaginative) to Florence, Venice, New York and London.
While some of its painting references are famous enough to call the images to mind - Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” details of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, “The Angelus” by Millet - many are not.
“This grew out of my own desire to be able to see these paintings in one place - and looking to see if such a book existed, I couldn’t find anything,” said Mr. Karpeles, who added that he had come across only a doctoral dissertation that focused on paintings in Proust and a book published in a small printing in Bogota, Colombia, in the early 1990s with a number of black-andwhite reproductions. “If you can’t conjure up the visual analogy that Proust is making,” he said, “then I think you lose many of the insights in the book.”
Most of the paintings woven into the novel’s pages are there because Proust loved them and used them to amplify descriptions and evoke moods. (The narrator, Marcel, an anxious traveler, compares foreboding Parisian skies to those in the work of Mantegna or Veronese, “beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.”)
Second maybe only to music, painting is the vehicle used in the novel to examine the mysterious commerce between perception, memory and art. Proust’s character Elstir, thought to be made up of pieces of Whistler, Monet, Gustave Moreau, Edouard Vuillard and others, is important not only in terms of plot - Elstir introduces Marcel to Albertine, the woman who will become his faithless love interest - but also in terms of ideas.
Elstir’s artistic ideal, to perceive things more innocently - or as Beckett describes it, to represent “what he sees, and not what he knows he ought to see” - is profound. It goes to the heart of one of Proust’s main themes: that we are held prisoner by preconceptions, by habit and by memory, which provides only a pale, distorted record of the experiences it is supposed to retain.
At the end of the novel, the narrator stands at a party surrounded by many of the novel’s aging main characters and by the paintings of his beloved Elstir, which Proust has described so vividly it is easy to forget that they don’t exist somewhere, maybe in a room of their own at the Louvre.
But the insight that Proust has the narrator draw from such imaginary art seems as authentic and powerful now as it ever did: “It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.”