Long overlooked in Proust’s published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only
twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but
contains the seeds of his later work. Proposed in 1895 to the newspaper Revue hebdomadaire
(it was rejected), this essay is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice
to a young man suffering from melancholy, where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday
world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond
the realm of mere objects.
