Madeleine Lemaire
Marcel Proust, under the pen name “Dominique”, described in the pages of Le Figaro in 1903 the studio of artist Madeleine Lemaire as “La Cour aux lilas et l’atelier des roses”. Already renowned for her paintings of flowers, Lemaire had also by this time illustrated Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896) as well as Robert de Montesquiou’s Prières de Tous of 1902. The dedication to her in Montesquiou’s book reads “Ce Rosaire qui lui est dû pour tant de Roses”, and the Count dubbed her “L’Impératrice des Roses” and gave that title to his essay on Lemaire in his book Professionnelles Beautés (1905). Lemaire’s purported lover, Alexandre Dumas fils, is said to have exclaimed that she had created more roses than God, and to this day she is widely de-scribed as a “flower painter”. Lemaire indeed created at least hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings and drawings of flowers and other plants in oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and graphite. In our current art historical context, this emphasis on flowers seems saccharine, and the association of Lemaire with it is generally used as a way to dismiss her work and her historical sig-nificance. It is important to recognize, as Proust does in his Le Figaro feature, that she also created hundreds of other paintings and drawings on a wide va-riety of subjects apropos to Belle Époque Parisian culture and its art historical standards.
Kirstin Ringelberg
