When Gerard Ceunis and his friends set out to found their literary magazine, Iris, in Ghent in 1907, they enlisted the support, as members of the editorial board, of two distinguished figures. One was the renowned sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and the other was the painter Emile Claus. Although both names would appear in bold letters on the cover of the first issue, which was designed by Ceunis (see this post), the two men’s roles in the magazine were nominal, rather than practical. As Professor Christophe Verbruggen comments, in his history of Belgian literature of the belle époque [my translation]: ‘by committing their names they gave the project prestige so that subscribers and employees could be brought on board’.
Emile Claus (via en.wikipedia.org)
It’s not surprising that Gerard Ceunis approached Emile Claus, since he was a great admirer of the latter’s work. In his artistic manifesto for the magazine, Ceunis mentions Claus in his discussion of the unity of the arts, and in support of his argument, clearly borrowed from the work of Walter Pater, that all art, whether visual or literary, aspires to the condition of music [my translation]:
And we have no wish to see the means of expression from the outset, but rather the embodied image, the art-expressed impression. And so we mention Baudelaire and Aubrey Beardsley in one breath, so many works by the harmonist Claus suggest to us Beethoven’s Pastorale, and so we experience Le Sidaner and G. Rodenbach like a melancholic poem.
Born in 1949 in a village on the banks of the River Leie or Lys, about twenty miles south-west of Ghent, Emile Claus was strongly influenced by the work of the French Impressionists, and in particular Claude Monet. However, in the course of his artistic career Claus developed his own very personal style of painting, known as ‘luminism’, because of the luminous effects he sought to create. Claus is considered to be the pioneer of Belgian luminism: in 1904 he founded the Vie et Lumière (‘life and light’) society and became known as the ‘painter of the Lys’. I used the first of the two paintings below to illustrate my translation of Gerard Ceunis’ story ‘Legend’, which is set by the banks of the river:
Emile Claus, ‘Brouillard sur la Lys’ (Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, France)
Emile Claus, ‘Coucher de soleil sur la Lys’, 1911 (private collection)
Like Ceunis, Emile Claus was driven into exile in England by the First World War, though unlike the younger artist he returned home after the conflict, living and eventually dying in 1924 in the village of Astene near Ghent. Among Claus’ students in the luminist school/style was the painter Anna de Weert, who kept a studio beside the Lys in the village of Afsnee, which had associations with the Ceunis family (see this post).
As a painter, Gerard Ceunis was clearly influenced by Emile Claus, particularly in the early stages of his artistic career. A number of his paintings could be described as luminist, aiming for similar lighting effects to those that Claus displayed in his work. My sense is that Ceunis was particularly influenced by the paintings that Claus produced during his exile in London, which included a number of views of the Thames, often at sunset:
Emile Claus, ‘Sunset on the Thames’ (private collection)
Emile Claus, ‘Sunset over Waterloo Bridge’ (Galerij Oscar De Vos, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium)
Claus’ influence on Gerard Ceunis is evident in more than a few of the latter’s paintings. Like Claus, Ceunis had a particular liking for watery scenes and a preference for capturing the light at sunset, as in these two paintings from the private collection of Rid Burnett, the second of which is obviously indebted to the works of Claus’ London period:
Gerard Ceunis, untitled painting (private collection)
Gerard Ceunis, ‘Soir’ (private collection)
One can also detect a lingering luminist influence in the reflected light in the river in Ceunis’ 1930 nocturnal painting of St Mary’s church in Hitchin:
Gerard Ceunis, ‘St Mary’s Church, Hitchin, Floodlit at Night’ (© North Hertfordshire Museum).
A debt to Emile Claus can even be seen in this undated drawing by Ceunis of boats on a river (the Lys?) at sunset, copies of which have been sent to me by both the artist’s granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, and his great niece, Elsie DeCuyper:
If I’m right in thinking that these later works, created after Gerard Ceunis had settled in England, display the continuing influence of Emile Claus and of luminism, then perhaps Christophe Verbruggen is mistaken when he writes that, after the First World War, Ceunis ‘evolved from an impressionism in the luminist style of Emile Claus …. in the direction of the more expressive style of Van Gogh’. If only there were more paintings by Ceunis in the public domain to enable us to assess whether that judgement is true!
The Quest for Ceunis 