Lolita, Nabokov's best-known novel, is one of the most demanding with respect to the reader's faculty of observation. It is after repeated readings that we are able to fully perceive the real tragedy incorporated in this seemingly blithe novel: the ruination of a young girl's life. When this tragedy is recognised, Lolita appears to be, in Linda Kauffman's words, ‘an uncannily accurate representation of fatherdaughter incest’. With respect to his stories, Nabokov noted that ‘a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one’ (SL 117). Humbert's account is so well written that, albeit semitransparent, it is difficult to concentrate on the main story, the wreckage of Dolly's life. The paintings mentioned in Lolita help to distinguish the veiled story from Humbert's dominant and spectacular report. Apart from five contemporary painters mentioned rather en passant and three painters mentioned to modulate certain images – ‘Claude Lorrain clouds’, ‘a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain’ (152) and ‘three horrible Boschian cripples‘(235) – six artists are mentioned who have a special bearing on the two stories told: Beardsley, Botticelli, Van Gogh, Prinet, Reynolds and Whistler. Beardsley's work is not mentioned explicitly but the lascivious and ominous qualities of his work apply most fittingly to Humbert's story. The same goes for Prinet's Kreutzer Sonata ‘the unappetizing one in which a dishevelled violinist passionately embraces his fair accompanist as she rises from her piano stool with clammy young hands still touching the keys’ (LoS 37), a reference to Tolstoy's story with the same title. In this story, Tolstoy fulminates against the vileness of physical love. To express his disgust, the word ‘swinish’ is frequently used.

The remaining four paintings, Reynolds's The Age of Innocence, Botticelli's Venus, Van Gogh's L’Arlésienne and Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black form a surprising quartet (198; 270; 36; 184). Together they represent a female's life compendiously in four stages; a very young girl, a young adult, a middle-aged woman and an elderly lady. Moreover, the four portraits show their subject in a defenceless and fragile position. Reynolds's young girl has a wary look and is barefooted, ill at ease, with a background showing excitement in the air.