Stuart Preston, who died at Paris on February 9, aged 89, was a writer and art critic for the New York Times from 1949 to 1965 and a remarkable figure in the world of English letters.

As a soldier, Preston received the Croix de Guerre for his part in the liberation of France. Supremely good-looking, he was well-informed as well as deeply Anglophilic and Francophilic (he lived in Paris for the last 30 years of his life). He came to London to work in intelligence on Eisenhower’s staff in 1942 and seemed, almost overnight, to be on intimate terms with the city’s intellectual aristocracy.

He became known, simply, as “the Sergeant” (he had refused a commission in the U.S. Army) and was later the original of Lieutenant Padfield (“the Loot”) in Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy. He was immortalized in numerous letters and diaries of the period,and made lasting friendships with, among others, Harold Nicolson, Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, Alan Pryce-Jones, and Osbert Sitwell.

Stuart Duncan Preston was born at Hampton Bays, Long Island, on October 22, 1915. His mother (nee O’Brien) belonged to an Irish family that had accumulated power and status in Southampton, where he grew up.

Returning in uniform as Technical Sergeant Preston in 1943, he spent much of his time in the clubs and houses of high and literary society. He was popular partly because he was the opposite – as was Waugh’s “the Loot” – of the stereotypical American soldier. He loved literature, was charming and erudite, and had elegant manners; he enjoyed the nuances of English society and moved easily within it. The young American, looking like Gary Cooper, was photographed by Cecil Beaton.

Asked what he did when he had finally been shipped off to France with the 15th Army in June 1944, Preston replied: “Oh, I would just drive ahead to the next town and ask the mayor if he had parking for 20 jeeps.” His real job was to save works of art and track down German booty.

Preston led his postwar New York social life on many levels. In the higher echelons, his closest friends were William Lieberman, formerly head of modern art at the Met, and Joan Payson, daughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. As the art critic of the New York Times, he was an old-style amateur, relying on connoisseurship rather than immersing himself in the new worlds such as abstract expressionism. Yet Harold Acton, remembering his visits with Preston to modern galleries, wrote: “I was disarmed by the kindly tolerance, his readiness to detect virtues in what were mere daubs to me. No wonder the painters loved him.” Preston’s preferred area of scholarship was the Impressionists and Post-impressionists; he wrote a book about Vuillard in 1971. But his star had begun to fade by the mid-1960s. In the early 1970s, he exiled himself to France to begin what he called, ironically, his “Bonjour Tristesse” existence. He wrote occasionally for Burlington and Apollo magazines, and lived in a small apartment on the Rue St. Dominique, where he was almost engulfed by his books.

His close friend and entree into Parisian life was the American Ethel de Croisset, nee Woodward, whose father-in-law, Francis, had been a friend of Proust and the original for Bloch in “A la recherche du temps perdu” – a link that Preston would have relished. He recounted with pleasure that Marie-Laure de Noailles (granddaughter of Proust’s original for the Duchesse de Guermantes) described Preston as “too Bostonian for me.” He also became close to the fearsome art critic Douglas Cooper and his friend John Richardson, subsequently Picasso’s biographer, at Castille.

Preston had been bruised by his caricature as “the Loot” in 1961; but Nancy Mitford, whom he had known since the 1950s, defended him. She wrote to Waugh: “You are horrid about that good old Serge & I’m afraid he’ll mind. So naughty making him talk American.” Waugh replied on a postcard: “Can’t think what you mean about ‘Sergeant.’ “

What his friends and admirers perhaps most appreciated in Preston, apart from his sweetness of nature and his great loyalty, was his vast store of arcane knowledge, delivered in his understated drawl. He was unmarried.