Whether John Singer Sargent and Marcel Proust ever met is unknown, but they shared close personal relationships and moved in the same circles. Among those relationships were artists Paul Helleu and Jacques-Émile Blanche; society figures Dr Samuel Pozzi, Comte Robert de Montesquiou and Winnaretta Singer; and musicians Gabriel Fauré, Léon Delafosse and Reynaldo Hahn. The works of the painter and the novelist share other traits: penetrating and incisive portraiture; encyclopedic portrayals of social transformation; and complex representations of outsiders in Jewish, homosexual and artistic figures. Sargent and Proust are unexpected counterparts in the representation of life in the Belle Époque.