This was the masterpiece that drew Marcel Proust out of his cork-lined room in Paris for the last time. He had seen it once before, in a visit to The Hague in 1902. It was to him ‘the most beautiful painting in the world‘. Almost twenty years later, suffering from lung disease, he made a shorter but more arduous pilgrimage from his apartment in boulevard Malesherbes, near the Madeleine, across four streets to the Jeu de Paume,