In addition to the still life with flowers that I wrote about the other day, his great niece Elsie De Cuyper has sent me photographs of two other paintings by Gerard Ceunis that I hadn’t seen before. They demonstrate the sheer stylistic diversity to be found in the artist’s work.
The first painting, an untitled picture of a doll in traditional (Flemish?) costume, set against the background of a rural landscape with a building that resembles a church, with a cross visible on a distant hillside, is reminiscent of two of the Ceunis paintings owned by Jackie Sablan – ‘Riviera Doll’ and the untitled picture featuring a figurine of a bewigged eighteenth-century gentleman – which I wrote about here. Both figures are similarly set against a rural background and, in fact, the church-like building in the second painting is almost identical to the one in the picture sent to me by Elsie.
The second ‘new’ painting is unfortunately only a black-and-white reproduction, with the title ‘Vieille Maison à Gand’ (Old house in Ghent). This is the picture, accompanied by a handwritten greeting from Gerard and Alice, that I referred to in the last post. It depicts what appears to be an elderly couple, sitting on either side of the front door of their house, which seems to be situated alongside one of the rivers that runs through the city.
Personally, even on the basis of a monochrome version, I find this realistic and expressive style of Ceunis’ more appealing than his (to me) rather kitsch pictures of dolls and figurines. However, I wonder if both can be seen as expressing something of the artist’s nostalgic longing for his homeland? In his obituary of his ‘uncle’ Gerard, the writer Johan Daisne noted that ‘his most beautiful and best known paintings are of flowers, Hitchin’s ancient church, and memories of Flanders’. It would seem that many of Ceunis’ paintings of his homeland, including the superb ‘Flemish Room’ which is now in the Letterenhuis in Antwerp, were composed after he moved to England, and reflect an exile’s feelings about what he has left behind. I wonder if the paintings of dolls and figurines are meant to be stylised representations of aspects of Flemish culture, with the landscapes behind them drawing on the artist’s memories of his Belgian childhood? It could be that there are symbols and tropes in these pictures that I’m missing: if so, perhaps someone reading this might be able to provide a more insightful interpretation of these pictures than my own.
The Quest for Ceunis 