Included in the latest batch of items sent to me by Elsie De Cuyper, Gerard Ceunis’ great niece, is an obituary of the artist that I hadn’t seen before, from a British local newspaper. Although the name of the publication is not attached, I would hazard a guess that it’s from the Hitchin-based Hertfordshire Express, given the extensive comments included from E.W.Hodson, described as the former editor of the paper and a ‘close friend for many years’ of Gerard’s.
The obituary is particularly valuable, since it includes details about Gerard Ceunis’ life that I haven’t come across anywhere else. For example, I wasn’t aware that Gerard actually underwent military service after fleeing to Britain from Belgium in the First World War: the obituary mentions that he was ‘invalided out of the Army’. Was this as a result of sickness or injury, I wonder? Then there is the reference to Gerard’s donation of a proportion of the income from the sale of his pictures to the Red Cross during the Second World War. £100 in the 1940s would have been equivalent to about £4000 today. Apparently, this was just one example of the artist’s ‘warm-hearted generosity to people and causes – all done with a retiring modesty that forbade publicity.’ Taken together with Mr Hodson’s statement that Ceunis ‘loved Hitchin and was ever-ready to conduct campaigns for the preservation of historic and outstanding places in the town’, this provides us with a fresh insight into the character of a man who is otherwise known to us only through his art.
Of even greater value is the insight that the obituary offers into Ceunis’ artistic career. The article supplies what seems to be a (partial) catalogue of the various exhibitions in which he participated, beginning with the Triennial Salon in Ghent in 1912. The other exhibitions listed in the obituary include: Walker Galley, Liverpool (1913); first one-man exhibition (1914); exhibition in Denmark (1918?); Arlington Gallery, Bond Street (1929); and Royal Academy (1930 and subsequent years). I’ve written about Ceunis’ first contribution to the Royal Academy summer exhibition elsewhere, and have also previously mentioned the Arlington Galley show, which was opened by the Belgian ambassador, and which (according to the obituary) included 60 of the artist’s works. However, all my efforts so far to find out more about this obviously significant exhibition and its contents have been unsuccessful.
The obituary helpfully mentions some of the key works shown at these exhibitions. For example, we learn that Ceunis exhibited a painting entitled ‘Sunset’ at the 1913 event in Ghent, and ‘Flemish Houses’ at the Walker Gallery show. I wonder where these painting are now? We also learn that at least one of his paintings, a ‘floral study’, was owned by his friend E.W.Hodson, and that many art critics consider his paintings of flowers to be Ceunis’ ‘best work’. Best, perhaps: but arguably not the most interesting?
I quite like the apparently ‘famous comment’ attributed to Ceunis, included in the obituary, that ‘a dustbin and a dirty back yard form as good a subject, or a better one, than a pretty cottage’, though what I’ve seen of the artist’s work tends more towards the latter than the former.
The Quest for Ceunis 