Tessa Cathcart, Gerard Ceunis’ granddaughter, who has been such a great help to me in my research this year, has sent me a beautiful Christmas card, adorned with a reproduction of an oil painting – Canal at Ghent – by her grandfather that I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure whether this picture was a product of the artist’s youth, when he was still living in the Belgian city, or the fruit of a return visit later in his life.
The treatment of water and the use of reflection has something in common with the painting of St Mary’s church in Hitchin that I’ve used in the past as a header photo for this blog. There are also similarities with one of the two black-and-white postcards that Tessa enclosed with her Christmas card, depicting sunset on a river with rowing boats. The other postcard has a reproduction of a painting with the title Hitchin Church (Winter) – St Mary’s again. This appears to have been painted from exactly the same position from which Ceunis drew one of the illustrations in Reginald Hine’s book The Story of Hitchin Town (see this post). Indeed, the two pictures have similar titles and might even have been created on the same occasion.
The Quest for Ceunis 