Faces in another photograph

In a post last year I shared this 1908 photograph of members of the ‘Flinken’, the group of young feminists active in Ghent in the early years of the last century, of which Alice van Damme, the future wife of Gerard Ceunis, was a member. It was through the connection established between the Flinken and the radical group Reiner Leven, led by the future historian of science George Sarton, that Alice and Gerard met.

I came across the photograph in a book chapter by Christophe Verbruggen, who in turn sourced it from Lewis Pyenson’s 2008 biography, The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and its Discipline. I found it frustrating that the photograph, as reproduced in Verbruggen’s chapter, was without a caption identifying the young women posing for it.

However, I’ve now acquired a copy of Pyenson’s book, which does include information about the identities of those in the photo. According to Pyenson they are, from the left: Marie Mees, Alice van Damme, Marie Praet, Esther Delahaye and Marthe Patyn. Standing on the right are Victorie Ledewyn and Lucie Boulanger. Seated on the right are Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye.

This means that we now have two photographs of the future Alice Ceunis as a young woman: I recently identified her, alongside Gerard, in a photo from the same period, of Flinken and Reiner Leven members on an outing to Knokke. Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye are also in both photographs and I wrote about them in that recent post.

I don’t know much about the other Flinken members in the posed group picture, apart for the basic information provided by researcher Anne Marie van der Meersch which is reproduced in Professor Verbruggen’s chapter. We know from that list that Marie Mees was born in 1886, the daughter of a labourer or workman, and that in 1910 she herself was working as a shopkeeper. Marie Praet was also born in 1886 and her father was also a labourer, while she was employed as a seamstress. Esther Delahaye, also born in 1886, was the daughter of a servant and she was a governess. The father of Marthe Patyn, was born in 1885, was a cabinet-maker, while she herself was a student nurse. However, other sources state that Patyn worked as a secretary for the Dangotte firm of interior decorators, and that she was responsible for recruiting Céline Dangotte and her family’s English lodger Mabel Elwes, the future wife of George Sarton, to the group. Born in 1875, Victoire Ledewijn was a servant’s daughter and was herself a civil servant. Lucie Boulanger, born in 1884, was also the daughter of a servant, and she worked as a telephonist.

There is only one direct reference to Gerard Ceunis in Pyenson’s biography, which is based largely on George Sarton and Mabel Elwes’ letters to each other. However, from what I’ve read of the book so far, I believe it will prove to be another valuable source, complementing the accounts by their daughter May Sarton, for understanding the fascinating social and cultural networks in which Gerard and Ceunis participated during their early years in Belgium.