The shop in the square

In a corner of the market square in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, stands a building with a distinctive black-and-white timbered pattern on its frontage. Facing the Tudor premises of Halsey’s delicatessen, with a view of the fifteenth-century parish church of St Mary beyond, this building often features in picturesque photographs of the town.

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Hitchin market place, February 2019 (author’s photographs)

At the time of writing, the building – Nos. 6-7 Market Place – is home to the local branch of the Starbucks coffee chain, but before that it housed the much-missed Tea and Coffee House, the location for many Saturday morning brunches when our children were young. Before that, it was apparently a shop bearing the name of Sarah Lewis. However, those who (unlike us) have lived in the town for many years, will remember the building as the home of the outfitter Maison Gerard.

Postcard from 1956

I wonder how many of those who bought their clothes from this shop knew the identity of its owner, the man whose name was on the sign outside?  Perhaps a few were vaguely aware that, in his spare time, he was something of a painter, and may have seen one or two of his pictures in exhibitions at the town hall. But the number of people who knew that the proprietor of Maison Gerard was a Belgian refugee who had fled his country at the outbreak of the First World War, and was not only an accomplished painter who had exhibited his work in prestigious London galleries, but a published poet, playwright and essayist, must have been even fewer.

For myself, I have to confess that, despite having lived in Hitchin for more than two decades, it was only very recently that I came across the name of Gerard Ceunis. In 2019 the newly-opened North Hertfordshire Museum in Brand Street, Hitchin, staged an excellent exhibition of paintings from its collection, many by artists associated with the town. My main motivation in attending was to view a rarely-displayed painting by another Hitchin-based émigré painter, the Austrian-born Theodor Kern, whose life I’ve been researching. But on touring the remainder of the exhibition, I found myself drawn to the paintings by Ceunis, which I was seeing for the first time, and was curious to find out more about him.

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ (© North Hertfordshire Museum)

My curiosity intensified when, searching for information about Ceunis online – and there is very little in English – I discovered that he had lived for many years in Gosmore Road, on the south side of Hitchin, just a few minutes’ walk from our house. The more I found out about Ceunis, his early life in Belgium, and his literary and artistic connections, the more intrigued I became. As was the case with my research on Theodor Kern, I became determined to piece together the story of Gerard Ceunis’ unusual life, and at the same time to make that story better known.

I plan to use this blog as a place to share my discoveries, and (I hope) to make contact with those – surviving relatives and friends, other researchers – who have information that could help to fill in the gaps in the narrative.