I was looking online recently for information about Gerard Ceunis, when I came across a photograph of him for sale on eBay, the seller being an antiquarian dealer in Bourges, France. The photograph showed a young (-ish) Ceunis, standing next to one of his paintings, with others displayed on a wall behind him, and it was accompanied by some printed text in French. I decided to buy the photograph, partly because there are so few pictures of the artist in the public domain, but also because I found the story behind it intriguing.
This is my translation of the French text accompanying the photo:
In 1914 the Belgian artist and painter Gerard Ceunis organised an exhibition of paintings at Nieuport. The war came, the canvasses stayed at Nieuport where, one day, the English General Maitland took care of the said paintings by sending them to London, without knowing the name of the artist. The latter, with a view to his current exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, created from memory one of the paintings taken by General Maitland. During the opening of the exhibition the similarity of the subject struck of one the general’s officers and this is how the artist was able to come into possession of his missing works.
The photo shows GERARD CEUNIS NEXT TO THE PAINTING IN QUESTION WITH A PLAQUE FROM THE MAIN SQUARE OF NIEUPORT.
Nieuport – Nieuwport in Flemish – is a coastal town in West Flanders, Belgium, about 15 miles south-west of Ostend/Oostende, and about 50 miles west of Ghent/Gent. So far, I’ve been unable to find any information about any exhibitions held there in 1914. Gerard Ceunis fled to England with his wife Alice and young daughter Vanna soon after war broke out and Germany invaded his homeland in the summer of that year.
I’ve been unable to find any information about a ‘General Maitland’ who served in Belgium during the First World War. I wonder if the reference is actually to Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Fuller Maitland Wilson (1859 – 1941), a senior British Army officer who served with distinction in Flanders, France and later in Salonika? Perhaps the plaque from the Groote Markt / Grand Place in Nieuwport, on display in the photo, was a wartime souvenir brought back from Flanders by the general or one of his officers?
Ceunis’ exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, in Old Bond Street, London, took place in 1929. It apparently featured 60 of the artist’s paintings and was opened by none other than the Belgian ambassador. According to one source, the gallery, which had only been in operation for six years, ‘appears to have attracted the lesser-known artists of the period who probably found difficulty in getting shows at the bigger galleries either because it was felt they were not famous enough names or perhaps the other galleries took too great a commission.’
The typed text accompanying the photo is on a separate piece of paper, glued to the back of the copy which I purchased, which also bears the stamp of what seems to have been its place of origin – Photo ‘Actualite’ G. Champroux in Rue Royale, Brussels. Intriguingly, it turns out that Georges Champroux (1899 – 1983) was a leading Belgian photojournalist, famous for a series of black-and-white photographs of Brussels at night. I assume that he was given the assignment to cover the story of the restoration of Gerard Ceunis’ paintings by a Belgian newspaper from which, perhaps, the text attached to my copy is taken. It would certainly have made for an eye-catching human interest story in Ceunis’ home country.
I suspect that the Arlington Gallery exhibition was one of the high points of Gerard Ceunis’ artistic career. I’m intrigued by the painting in the foreground, which I’ve not seen before and which appears to be of superior quality to many other works of his that I’ve seen. I’d be interested to see a full-colour reproduction, and to discover what became of it and of the other paintings in the exhibition.
The Quest for Ceunis 