Emery on Gamble (2024)

How best to tell the life story of a gifted young Englishwoman whose artistic reputation was eclipsed by the illustrious Frenchmen whose legacy she worked to preserve, especially when one of them was Marcel Proust (1871–1922)? Cynthia Gamble provides a response in her new book, drawn from the hundreds of documents (in French and English)—many unknown and previously unpublished—left by Marie Riefstahl (née Nordlinger; 1876–1961). Nordlinger, a student of artist and book illustrator Walter Crane (1845–1915), himself a former student of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–96), helped Proust so extensively with his Ruskin translations (La Bible d’Amiens, 1904, et Sésame et les Lys, 1906) that he shared royalties with her. Gamble’s title promotes Nordlinger as a “muse” for Proust, while quickly revealing her as much more “hands on” than muses are generally thought to be. Not only did Nordlinger offer Proust the now-legendary Japanese pastilles that, when placed in water, blossomed into the miniature world that became the Combray of memory in the “madeleine” passage of La Recherche, the two also engaged in long discussions about Ruskin and art, she loaned him books and performed fieldwork, she deciphered English syntax, and she spent the last decades of her life embellishing his literary reputation.

In order to capture the dual tension between Nordlinger’s own artistic path and her better-known role as Proust’s “muse,” Gamble adopts a chronological structure divided into seven parts over 530 pages. The first five sections present Nordlinger in her own right, relying on private archives, published letters, and journal entries to reconstruct the unusual freedom afforded the young artist by her cosmopolitan Italian-German-English-French family. After art studies in Manchester, she moved to Paris in 1896 to perfect her technique, first with painter Gustave Courtois (1852–1923) and then with sculptor Jean-Antoine Injalbert (1845–1933) at the Académie Colarossi. It was in Paris that the twenty-year-old developed friendships with her French cousins, notably composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947), who introduced her to Proust. Hahn, for non-proustisants (a term coined by Nordlinger; 18), was Proust’s closest friend at this time. 

Gamble, a renowned specialist of Proust and Ruskin, brilliantly traces the complex threads of references weaving in and out of the letters sent to and from Nordlinger, Hahn, Proust, and their many relatives and acquaintances to reconstitute minute details related to their relationships and activities. This is a tour de force that would be impossible without Gamble’s encyclopedic knowledge and fluency in English and French. The thoughtful footnotes will assist non-Proustians in navigating Nordlinger’s social networks, which were even more “tentacular” than Proust’s, and stretched across Europe and the United States. The indexes dedicated to people, characters, places, concepts, and works will assist readers interested in particular aspects of her activities as artist, translator, art dealer, scholar, and mentor.

Nordlinger’s multilingualism, so valued by Proust in his translation projects, also furthered her professional career. After being refused apprenticeships in Paris with René Lalique (unwilling to take on a woman) and Camille Claudel (too busy), she moved to Hamburg (where her grandmother lived), training under Alexander Jakob Schonauer (1871–1955). There, she developed a lifelong friendship with Justus Brinckmann (1843–1915), a prominent collector of East Asian art and director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. After commissions in Manchester, where she won national recognition, she was hired by art dealer Siegfried Bing as a ciseleuse in the Art Nouveau workshop run by his son, Marcel. The Bings so valued Nordlinger for her artwork and her interpretation skills that they sent her to the United States where she sold works for them while developing a friendship with a Bing client, Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), founder of the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution. She helped “Charlie” catalogue and organize his collections and interpreted for him in Europe. 

The first section of Gamble’s book provides fascinating insights into the mid-nineteenth-century trajectories of families like the Nordlingers and the Hahns, where nationalities, languages, and religions blended into comfortable and supportive international networks. Details from Marie’s letters from Paris (parts two, three, and four) bring to life the freedom and the pressures experienced by young women who sought to pursue careers as working artists in the 1890s and early 1900s. Readers learn about her bicycle commutes, the gender constraints that impacted living conditions, education, travel, and work opportunities, and the joy she expressed in being allowed to accompany Hahn and Proust on their social and artistic adventures. 

Nordlinger’s trajectory was both unique and characteristic of the challenges faced by other women who sought to become professional artists: most opportunities lay in the decorative arts where their identities were effaced in collaborative projects. It is impressive that Gamble has managed to locate—and reproduce in color—so many works known to have been created by Nordlinger in different media. Indeed, her personal contributions became increasingly less visible over time, from works crafted by multiple artisans in Bing’s atelier and her work with Proust (she refused to let him acknowledge her publicly) to the unsung work she performed in organizing Freer’s collection and, finally, the labor of wife and mother. Parts five and six cover Nordlinger’s rushed marriage to German scholar Rudolf Meyer (later Meyer-Riefstahl, 1880-1936) and the struggles of the young couple to establish a Paris antiquities business in the years immediately preceding World War I. When forced to flee to England with the outbreak of the war, they lost not only their commercial stock, which was sequestered by the French state and later sold, but also many of Marie’s Proust-related materials. This section provides fascinating information about the perils of international marriages (women were obliged to take the nationality of their husbands), English internment camps for Germans, and the refuge offered by the United States, where Rudolf became a celebrated scholar before leaving Marie for another woman. After being granted a divorce in 1924, Marie dedicated herself to raising their two children as a single parent.

The last two hundred pages (parts six and seven) will captivate Proust scholars as Gamble describes in detail Nordlinger’s apotheosis as “gardienne” and “championne” of Proust’s legacy (350, 341) after the publication of her Lettres à une amie (Editions du Calame, 1942), an edition of forty letters Proust sent her from 1899–1908. This section presents unpublished letters and articles sent to or from Nordlinger and her family from a host of largely forgotten figures active in establishing Proust’s legacy: Laurence Adolphus Bisson, Marie-Louise Berrewaerts, Miron Grindea, Derrick Leon, Mina Curtiss, Céleste Albaret, and others. These sections, where the English originals are helpfully accompanied by elegant French translations, reveal Nordlinger as an amateur scholar whose decades-long work to establish the edition of the Proust-Hahn letters her cousin Reynaldo requested has not been sufficiently acknowledged. Indeed, her gracious letters cast a remarkably unflattering light on mid-twentieth-century Proust scholars, literary executors, and the French publishing industry, whose competition to “scoop” one another led them to exploit figures like Nordlinger, who worked alongside them, granted access to letters, answered questions, and shared manuscripts of her own work. 

The “treasure trove” of previously unknown documents Gamble has selected for inclusion in this wide-ranging volume is sure to spark further studies of Nordlinger as a working artist, as a possible model for Albertine, and as contributor to the establishment of Proust’s and Hahn’s legacies. While the focus in this book lies on her friendship and collaboration with Proust, the wealth of materials now make it possible to explore other aspects of Nordlinger’s career, notably her work as an art dealer and her support of the arts community, hinted at in mentions of her mentorship of ceramicist Bernard Leech and photographer Dorothy Bohm and her support of Manchester’s Red Cross Guild. One hopes that the private archives so often cited will find their way to a public repository, which will make investigation into other aspects of Nordlinger’s artistic legacy easier to trace. In the meanwhile, Gamble has provided a true Ruskinian “king’s treasury” by selecting, organizing, and translating materials that pave the way for future scholarly insights.