In memoriam Gerard Ceunis

I’m indebted to Johan Vanhecke, head archivist at the Letterenhuis in Antwerp, and biographer of the Belgian poet and novelist Johan Daisne, for sending me a copy of Daisne’s obituary of Gerard Ceunis, which appeared in Ghent’s Vooruit newspaper towards the end of 1964. As Christophe Verbruggen has noted, Vooruit was the only Flemish newspaper to mention the artist’s death. Daisne’s tribute is more a collection of personal memories than a detailed account of Ceunis’ life, and once again the writer reverts to his recollection of the ‘unforgettable summer’ he spent with his ‘uncle’ Gerard , and more especially his daughter Vanna, at their home in Hitchin (see my last post, and also this earlier post).

As always, I’ve relied heavily on Google Translate to help me produce a passable English version of Daisne’s article, and there are one or two words and phrases of whose meaning I remain unsure (perhaps any Dutch/Flemish readers can enlighten me). The footnotes are mine.

Gerard Ceunis died in England, on Wednesday 9 September, towards evening, in a beautiful modern clinic. He had begun to suffer from pernicious anemia and his heart had failed. It was a gentle death, one that did not go on too long.

Gerard Ceunis – the name means little or nothing to you? Flanders does not always know its own history and the men who helped make it what it is today. The English press has bid farewell to ‘an artist of international reputation’. Indeed, his paintings hang, not only in many British museums and interiors, but far beyond them. And if you want to look it up, you can find his name in our own Literature Directory [Lectuurreportorium], because he was a Fleming who started his artistic career as a writer: of essays (Individualism) and drama (The Captive Princess), introduced by the late Prof. Dr. André de Ridder.

Gerard Ceunis was born in Ghent on December 6, 1885, into an ordinary family. He studied at our Academy, was a clerk, then a teacher at the Berlitz School (a club for improving one’s English). As a young man he had a bit of the dandy about him and belonged to the artistic circle made up of the friends of Peegee (Paul Gustave van Hecke, who back then used to walk around  in a theatrical velvet jacket), who included the Francophone poet Raymond Limbosch (+), the future American professor Georges Sarton (father of the poet and novelist May Sarton), the English painter Mabel Elwes (later Sarton) (+), the Antwerp citizen André de Ridder, the future Prof. Dr. Paul van Oye, Céline Dangotte (later Limbosch), of her father’s Art Deco business, and leader of the ‘Flinken’, and my pedagogical parents [1]. He, Gerard Ceunis, was engaged to Alice, a telephonist, and the original way she used her first name left a mark on a simple seamstress [2], who would later write in French, the late Lisbeth Aerens-Verwest, ‘Tante L’ in my Lago Maggiore.

Gerard Ceunis, ‘St Mary’s Church’, from Reginald Hine’s ‘The Story of Hitchin Town’

At the beginning of the First World War, Gerard Ceunis, like other former members of the civil guard, sailed to England, soon to be followed by his wife and daughter. They had a difficult time to begin with, but then Ceunis quickly made a fortune with his clothing store. With that money he would live out his long life in a property in the quiet town of Hitchin (Hertfordshire), painting and philosophising. He read a great deal, his beloved Sir Oliver Lodge [3] and everything he could get hold of from Flanders. His most beautiful and best known paintings are of flowers, Hitchin’s ancient church, and memories of Flanders. He is now buried in that graveyard in Hitchin [4]. In my youth I walked there, dreaming between the graves. Sometimes I climbed up in the church tower to stare endlessly at the summer opulence of the ‘commons’. A tall, very blonde young girl kept me company. Her name was Vanna (one of my Six dominoes) – that’s what Gerard had called his daughter. After Maurice Maeterlinck‘s Monna Vanna. We were both eighteen when I spent that unforgettable summer holiday at his house, ‘Salve’. We smoked sweet-scented cigarettes, listened to Maurice Ravel’s Bolero in a record store, went to the cinema to see A Desert Song with John Boles, sat in the afternoon garden or by the evening fireplace getting excited about John Galsworthy and Aldous Huxley. And once, over the dishes in the kitchen, we whispered about birth control [5].

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Churchyard – Winter’, from ‘The Story of Hitchin Town’

I never saw the Ceunises again. I did receive a few letters from Vanna, and all the children’s books I had regularly received from Aunt Lize via Santa Claus, and I continued to correspond with Uncle Gerard for more than thirty years. He wrote mostly in English, but occasionally with complete sentences in Dutch, and there was always a Dutch word at the end: ‘Innig!’ [6] He was a lively, refined, attentive and learned man, of parfaite bonne volonté, a real gentleman, and a very gifted artist, a member of no school, but true to himself to the end. In our Museum of Flemish Literature in Antwerp hangs his Flemish Room, which he was determined to donate a few years before his death, so that a little piece of him would remain here too.

And now with this goose feather, I too am burying a bit of you in Flanders, Uncle Gerard. With you, another part of my youth, of my life, is gone forever. Rest in peace – we will never forget you, and you are now back with the friends of your youth: Georges Sarton, Mabel Elwes, Raymond Limbosch, André de Ridder, Tante L, and Pipa Thiery [7].

Courage, Aunt Lize; and to you, Vanna Rutherford [8], the kiss I never dared to give you back then. Even if your father would have closed his eyes rather than see that. And now they are closed …

Johan Daisne.

Notes

1. The parents of Johan Daisne, real name Herman Thiery, were the radical educators Leo Michel Thiery and Augusta de Taeye.
2. I was unsure how to translate this phrase, which in the original reads as ‘waarvan de voornaam-originele habitus een stempel heeft gedrukt…’ literally ‘whose original first name habitus left a mark…’ Does it simply refer to the fact that  Lisbeth Verwest adopted the shortened version of Alice’s first name – ‘Lize’ – for herself (she later went by the name ‘Elise’)?
3. Sir Oliver Lodge (1878 – 1955) was a British poet and author who wrote about science and spiritualism. It’s unclear which of these interests appealed to Gerard Ceunis.
4. Daisne was misinformed: Gerard Ceunis is actually buried in the churchyard of the nearby village of St. Ippolyts. See this post.
5. The original actually reads ‘onder de vaat’ – literally ‘under the dishes’. ‘Birth control’ is in English in the original.
6. ‘Sincerely’.
7. Given that there are a number of printing errors elsewhere in the article (which someone has corrected in green ink on this copy), I wonder if this should actually be ‘Papa Thiery’ – i.e. the author’s own father, Leo Michel Thiery?
8. Gerard Ceunis’ daughter Vanna married Henry Rutherford in 1936.