Portraits de Peintres. Pièces pour Piano d'après les poésies de Marcel Proust

First edition of this rare fascicle, unnumbered, published in a small number of copies on Dutch laid paper.
Work illustrated with a portrait of Albert Cuyp after Maurin.
In sheets under grey-green publisher's wrappers printed in black and red, 5 pages of lithographed music (Imp. Delanchy), publisher's blind stamp on verso of final blank leaf. Very small tears to margins of spine and boards, handsome copy.
Poetic and musical portrait of the Dutch Golden Age painter Albert Cuyp, created collaboratively by Marcel Proust and Reynaldo Hahn who accompanies the writer's verses with a piano melody.
This is the first of four portraits of painters that Proust and Hahn admired at the Louvre (they devoted the following ones to Paul Potter, Anton Van Dyck and Antoine Watteau). The luxurious fascicles were sold separately as indicated on the printed wrapper. For each of them, Proust's verses specially composed for the occasion are printed in italic characters beneath reproductions of old engravings offering portraits of the painters evoked. The poems would be published the same year in the first edition of Plaisirs et les Jours. Hahn's melodies were premiered at Madeleine Lemaire's on May 28, 1895, in the presence of prestigious spectators, including Princess Edmond de Polignac, Count Robert de Montesquiou, José Maria de Heredia to whom the poems were dedicated, Count Primoli, as well as Anatole France.

"The interposition of the poem between painting and music has therefore proven an excellent conductor between the arts thanks to the fact that Hahn scrupulously respected the spirit of the poem while preserving his autonomy in his composition. The link between music and painting is revealed after the other materials unite among themselves; it is in this alliance that an astonishing complementarity then operates, sought upon the soothing light of Albert Cuyp" (Nicolas Vardon)

Precious copy of utmost rarity, a superb manifestation of the immense artistic complicity between Marcel Proust and Reynaldo Hahn.