In one of the first posts on this site, I speculated about the proper pronunciation of Gerard Ceunis’ surname. I suggested that most English speakers would be inclined to pronounce it as ‘Kyew-nis’, though if it turned out to be French rather than Dutch in origin, perhaps it should be ‘Seuh-nis’ or even ‘Seuh-nee’, possibly with the stress on the final syllable?
However, I can now put all such speculation to rest, having asked the artist’s Belgian descendants Frank and Elsie De Cuyper for help with the matter. After all, they should know, since their mother Bertha was a Ceunis by birth.
They have confirmed that the name is most definitely not pronounced in the French fashion: despite Gerard’s liking for the family myth that his original Ceunis ancestor was a deserter from the French royalist army. The initial letter is a hard ‘C’ – like a ‘K’ – and the sound of the ‘eu’ in the first syllable is close to the German ‘ö’, as in ‘schön’.
So ‘Köh-nis’, or ‘Keuh-nis’, it is.
In the previous post, I reproduced a handwritten caption written by Gerard Ceunis’ widow, Alice, to accompany a copy of his final painting. Attached to the photograph of another painting, which I’ll share in the next post, the words written below were inscribed by either Alice or Gerard. The rather playful asterisked note, ‘as per trouwboekje’, apparently explaining why Gerard’s name is given in Latin, means ‘as per (our) marriage certificate’,
The note provides additional confirmation that Gerard’s middle name was actually Julianus or Julius: or in colloquial form, Jules, which is the form in which it appears on his tombstone in St Ippolyts churchyard, despite the claim in an least one British census record that it was William.
The Quest for Ceunis 