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.
In an earlier post on this site I wrote about Gerard Ceunis’ family origins in Belgium, drawing on information supplied to me by Elsie De Cuyper, the artist’s great niece. Elise has also sent me some photographs of her grandfather, Florimond Ceunis, who was Gerard’s brother, and has kindly given me permission to share them on this blog.
As I’ve noted before, Gerard Jules Ceunis was born on 8th December 1884 in Ghent, the youngest of the six children of newspaper typesetter and compositor Prosper Ceunis (1840 – 1897) and his wife Coleta, née Nicaes (1847 – 1931). Gerard’s older brothers and sisters were: Maria (1866 – 1871); Oscar (b. 1871); Charles (1877 – 1925); Florimond (1878 – 1962); and Marie (1878 – 1956).
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis on their wedding day in 1915
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis in their garden in 1953
Another photograph of Florimond and Mathilde in their garden
Florimond Ceunis married Mathilde De Vogelaere in 1915. According to Elsie De Cuyper, her grandparents kept a shop in Ghent which sold hosiery and related items, perhaps providing a clue as to why Gerard chose women’s clothing as the focus of his business after his move to England.
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis’ daughter Bertha, born in 1922, was their only child. She married Roger De Cuyper, an artist who had studied art at the Atheneum in Ostend. Roger and Bertha’s daughter Elsie was born in 1946 and their son Frank Roger Florimond De Cuyper in 1957. As I’ve noted before, Frank is a widely published author of science fiction, under the name of Frank Roger.
Elsie De Cuyper has shared with me some examples of her father, Roger De Cuyper’s work, including the linocut of a snowbound village which Elise sent me on a card last year. She also sent me the photograph, reproduced above, of her father at an exhibition of his paintings.
Elsie is something of an artist herself. Some of her pieces, including the image of a sunset over water, reproduced above, put me in mind of her great uncle Gerard Ceunis’ paintings, and I particularly like the muted colours of the snowy landscape in the picture reproduced on the Christmas card which I received from Elise just the other day:
Clearly, artistic and literary talent have been passed down through the generations in the Ceunis family.
In my last post I drew upon Johan Vanhecke’s biography of the Belgian novelist and poet Johan Daisne as a key resource to explore the intriguing connections between Daisne, Gerard Ceunis and the silent film actress Lillian Hall-Davis. The section of Johan’s book from which I quoted in that post occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Marquita’. The paragraphs immediately preceding the discussion of Lillian Hall-Davis provide a detailed account of the summer vacation that Daisne, whose real name was Herman Thiery, spent as a young man at the home of Gerard and Alice Ceunis in Hitchin, in 1929, and of the writer’s unrequited passion for the Ceunisses’ daughter Vanna. Although the account contains a good deal of information that is already familiar from Daisne’s own writings, and indeed occasionally quotes from those texts, it also contains a number of fresh and interesting insights. Vanhecke’s narrative begins on page 79 of the book (as before, all translations from the biography are my own):
With peace of mind he [i.e. Daisne] goes to England for the summer to spend the holiday in Villa Salve on Gosmore Road in Hitchin in Hertfordshire with Uncle Gerard and Aunt Lisa, the painter Gerard Ceunis and his wife Lieze Vandamme, one of the best friends of Augusta de Taeye from the time when they belonged to the group of friends known as the Flinken. Daisne tells the story of that summer at length in Aurora. Herman had got to know their daughter Vanna a year before on the beach at Knokke ‘and immediately found her very sympathetic and no less interesting. She also liked me from the beginning, I saw it, I don’t know how, in the softening of her sea-grey eyes.’
Johan Daisne (Herman Thiery) as a young man
Gerard Ceunis’ wife’s first name was actually Alice, but according to Daisne, she was known to friends and family as ‘Lisa’, ‘Lize’ or ‘Lieze’. Augusta de Taeye was Daisne’s mother: see earlier posts for further information about Augusta, Alice and the ‘Flinken’. The reference to Daisne and Vanna meeting for the first time on the beach at Knokke, presumably on a return visit to Belgium by the Ceunis family, confirms – and provides a specific location for – the story, related by Daisne in Aurora, which was eventually included in his Zes domino’s voor vrouwen of 1944. Knokke, on the Belgian coast near Zeebrugge, had been a favourite location for outings by the ‘Reiner Leven‘ and ‘Flinken’ groups, which included both Daisne’s parents and Gerard and Alice Ceunis, in their youth. In Aurora, Daisne provides further details of this initial encounter with the girl he there calls ‘Vavane’ [my translation]:
Vavane! I had met her by the sea, in a cloud of English cigarette smoke: a beautiful, tall girl, with a blonde pageboy haircut, a spoiled rich kid, wild and lazy, who wasted her time or frittered it away with horseback riding and dancing during the holidays, and during the year, at her ‘college’, with novels and chocolates. At first sight our characters appeared to be two extremes, but at the same time we resembled each other, because of I know not what warm sympathy.
Photograph of Vanna Ceunis, c.1938, in the Johan Daisne archive at the Letterenhuis, Antwerp
Venhecke’s biographical account continues:
Vanna was born in Ghent and named after a character from a play by Maeterlinck. Her father, Gerard Ceunis, had taken some steps in literature himself, with a play that was published in 1909 with a foreword by André de Ridder, The Captive Princess, and previously appeared in Vlaamsche Arbeid, and with The Simple Room. A Gothic Fairy Tale, which appeared in Flandria’s Novellesbibliotheek a year later. At the start of the First World War, he crossed over to England, since he was a member of the Civil Guard, and set up a second-hand fashion store with his wife. Now that it is running well, he has turned to painting.
As I’ve noted before, the young Gerard Ceunis was a great admirer of the plays of MauriceMaeterlinck and named his daughter after the eponymous heroine of Maeterlinck’s 1902 play ‘Monna Vanna’. One of the frequent criticisms of Ceunis’ own youthful dramatic output was that it was a pale imitation of Maeterlinck’s style. I quoted from one hostile contemporary review of The Captive Princess in this post. I’ve yet to see the text of Ceunis’ Gothic fairy tale, and this is the first time that I’ve seen its full title cited. For more information about Flandria’s Novellesbibliotheek, including Ceunis’ illustrations for its covers, see this post.
I’ve mentioned before that Ceunis’ membership of the Civil Guard appears to be one of the main reasons behind his decision to flee to England, after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. Vanhecke’s account above contains the first suggestion that I’ve come across that Ceunis sold ‘secondhand’ [tweedehands] clothing in his stores: I think this may be a mistake.
Moreover, the suggestion in the next sentence that Ceunis ‘turned to painting’ following his success in business is perhaps slightly misleading. In fact, this ‘turn’ took place when he was still a young man living in Belgium. After his failure to break through as a poet and playwright, Gerard Ceunis began to study art at the Ghent Academy and exhibited in his home country before emigrating. It is, however, accurate to say that his later success in business gave him the leisure to devote himself, as Christophe Verbruggen puts it, to ‘painting and philosophising’.
The next section of Vanhecke’s narrative draws heavily on Daisne’s own accounts, both in Aurora and in his obituary for Gerard Ceunis:
The holiday starts badly, because in London Daisne misses his train connection to Hitchin. He sends a telegram in a combination of French and English, and fortunately finds Vanna on the platform hours later. It will be an adventurous and at times romantic holiday, with all kinds of tours, on foot and by car.
One evening they return so late from a movie (Desert Song, with John Boles) that they hardly dare ring the bell, for fear of Vanna’s mother’s reaction. Seeing a light in the bathroom, they throw pebbles against the window and are let in by Uncle Gerard in his pyjamas. Vanna loves the music of Ravel. In the afternoons they would listen to the Bolero and Daisne decides to translate the Pavane. ‘And on one of the last evenings, alone in the drawing room, we would read on the sofa, both of us wearing plaid. We took turns reading aloud, she English poets, I French, until we wearily let the book rest on our knees, secretly smoked a cigarette together, stared into the fire and finally lost ourselves blushing into each other’s eyes.’ Herman also introduces her to his beloved Les Miserables, which he has of course brought with him, and from Vanna receives Wuthering Heights, which he will not read until two years later.
Herman Thiery is in love and draws positive energy from this. Or as he puts it much later in Lago Maggiore: ‘The air of that summer was so filled with the scents of love that I thought I had found its object in Cousin Vanna’s blonde figure and grey look. And indeed, with the immediate image of that companion in mind, I then began my studies at the [university] with all the power of infatuation.’
But on the morning that he has to leave England, Vanna is sick in bed. He says goodbye to her, but does not dare to kiss her and is quite frustrated about it. Everything else he relates in the story Aurora about Vanna is strictly true (except that she doesn’t have a son but a daughter).
In fact, as well as getting the sex of Vanna’s child wrong, Daisne would (deliberately?) add another fictional detail in Aurora, describing ‘Vavane’s’ husband erroneously as ‘an English earl’.
The next section of the biography includes two stanzas from Daisne’s plaintive poem ‘Vanna’. My attempt at an English translation of the whole poem (which I draw on below) can be found in thispost.
After her marriage in 1936 to a London lawyer, as a result of which he writes the poem ‘Salve’, there is no direct contact between Herman and Vanna, but Herman does maintain a correspondence with Aunt Lisa and Uncle Gerard.
When the latter dies in the 1960s, Vanna begins to write to him again, which inspires him to write the poem ‘Vanna’, of which he sends her a French translation in early 1974. He somewhat reproaches her for never expressing herself clearly but confesses that he has always loved her.
We were eighteen, long ago,
and you so tall and blonde and slim.
Sometimes you still write back with love
when I’ve sent you some nice thing.
.
But neither of us ever dared to say…
Shall I do it here and now?
Know this, by my eyes I swear:
I always loved you, to the end.
‘Salve’ today (via rightmove.co.uk)
I’ve yet to see a copy of Daisne’s poem ‘Salve’: in fact, this is the first reference to it that I’d come across, and I’d be very interested to read it. The next section includes an extract from an early version of Aurora which provides further insight into Daisne’s feelings of regret over his unfulfilled relationship with Vanna Ceunis:
However, he is very clear with himself in Chisinau, the first version of Aurora:
I did not respond, I was the little boy who did not dare, I was never clear, I who thought to lay all future hopes in barely veiled, brilliant words, which should be words of thanks, confessions, words of promise, and were only hopeless and bumbling obscurities. I alone have been dark, I alone am guilty, innocently guilty, because then I didn’t know any better and I couldn’t help it.
How clear were Vavane’s letters, how clear her dedication and her marginal notes in Stevenson’s ‘Virginibus et Puerisque’, my first and last Christmas present from her, after that English summer. How clear, above all, her last letter…
Vanhecke then offers an intriguing insight into Johan Daisne’s mixed feelings about the Ceunisses, and his resentment at having to rely on his friend Robert Mussche as an intermediary with them:
Herman may have had a problem with the general atmosphere at the Ceunis family home. He regularly talks about this with Robert Mussche, who stays in Hitchin in the summer of 1931: ‘I doubt whether you understand my feelings for them correctly […], they are also so difficult: in theory I love them, but in practice I can’t show it, because sometimes it moves me too much & furthermore, mainly, because I’m critical of their behaviour, cold condescension & capricious “grande geste”.’
In August 1933 he even had Robert Mussche provide her with the text of an article he had written about ‘Romanticism & Rationalism’: ‘The thoughts from it will probably best explain my attitude. Tell her above all about the distinction I make between our theoretical all-encompassing feelings of friendship and love & the practical attitude of criticism existing with it and alongside it.’
Robert keeps in regular contact with Vanna, but doesn’t like to talk about this with Herman.
On the weekend of March 10, 1934, this led to an almighty quarrel: ‘I have become accustomed to the fact that I always have to ask you if I want to know anything about the Ceunisses […] but the fact that you did not inform me on your own initiative of Vanna’s engagement, you must have understood that was anything but OK.’
Robert Muscche as a young man (via Johan Vanhecke’s biography of Daisne)
I’ve written elsewhere about Daisne’s friendship with the poet Robert Mussche (which is the main subject of the Basque novelist Kirmen Uribe’s docu-fiction Mussche) and about Mussche’s own visit to Hitchin, at his friend’s suggestion, and their rival affections for Vanna. I knew that the two friends temporarily fell out over this, and also as a result of Daisne’s apparently unflattering depiction of Mussche in Aurora. However, I hadn’t realised that Robert acted as a conduit for information about Vanna, nor was I aware of Daisne’s ambivalent feelings about his ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ in Hitchin. He writes about them elsewhere with such affection, that his use here of terms like ‘cold condescension’ comes as something of a shock.
Vanhecke adds a final detail about Daisne’s stay with the Ceunisses, drawing once again principally on the novelist’s own account in Aurora:
A small detail of the stay in Hitchin should not go unmentioned. One morning at the villa, Herman makes an important discovery. ‘There was no one down yet, the sun rose in the drawing-room and then by inspiration I followed the one ray that fell in that library, on a small item, it was called “La belle que voila” and standing up, strangely moved, I read that little, gripping story of unforgettable childhood love.
Liette, beautiful name!…I was still completely silent at breakfast, people asked what it was, and as I looked at Vavane’s sea-grey eyes, my heart became so soft that I was once again tempted into making a joke of it: I said I had a dream and told a variant of “La belle que voila.”’ Louis Hemon’s book is a real revelation. Herman immediately wants to translate it into Dutch, but after a few pages he gives up, because his Dutch seems too clumsy to him. Only thirty years later does he feel ready for a re-creation: The beauty of never again [De schone van nooit weer]… Whenever he rereads the story, he thinks back to England.
‘The beauty of never again…’ A phrase that nearly encapsulates Johan Daisne’s lifelong feelings of nostalgia and regret when recalling the magical summer he spent with Gerard, Alice, and above all Vanna Ceunis, in Hitchin.
Summer sunset over Priory Park, Hitchin: the view from near ‘Salve’
I’ve referred in a number of recentposts to the summer that the Belgian novelist and poet Johan Daisne spent, as a young man in 1929, at the Hitchin home of Gerard and Alice Ceunis, and to his unrequited love for their daughter Vanna. It’s an experience that finds its way repeatedly, one might say obsessively, into Daisne’s poetry and his semi-autobiographical novels.
Robert Mussche, Johan Daisne and an unnamed friend (undated photograph)
In my first post about Daisne, I noted that, on his recommendation, his close friend Robert Mussche would spend the following summer of 1930 with the Ceunisses, and also develop a crush on Vanna, which briefly became a point of contention between the two young men. Mussche, who had first met Daisne when they were students together at the Ghent Atheneum, was himself a poet, writing under the pseudonym Rudo Reyniers (Daisne also wrote pseudonymously, his real name being Herman Thiery). Robert Mussche’s commitment to progressive causes led to him covering the Spanish Civil War for a left-wing newspaper, and to temporarily adopting a young Basque girl whose parents had perished in the bombing of Guernica. Mussche would be imprisoned by the Nazis during the Second World War and would die in 1945 when Allied planes bombed in error the prison ship in which he was being transported.
Cover of the original Basque editiion of Kirmen Uribe’s docu-fiction ‘Mussche’
My primary source for Mussche’s story, and for the story of his friendship with Herman Thiery / Johan Daisne, was the Basque novelist and poet Kirmen Uribe’s 2013 docu-fiction Mussche, the text of which I discovered online while googling Gerard Ceunis’ Hitchin address. As I noted in that original post, it was something of a shock to come across not only Ceunis’ name, but the words ‘Hitchin’, ‘Salve’ and ‘Gosmore Road’ in a Basque-language text. That post included my attempt at a translation, heavily dependent on Google Translate, of the relevant passage from the book.
I’ve since discovered that Uribe’s book has been translated into Spanish, under the title Lo que mueve el mundo(‘What moves the world’ or ‘What makes the world go round’) and also into Chinese and Japanese. In 2019 the novel was translated into Dutch as Watbeweegt de wereldand in July of that year the author spoke at a launch event, held appropriately in Ghent, as did Mussche’s daughter Carmen, who wrote a foreword to the translation.
Cover of the Dutch translation of ‘Mussche’
I have copies of both the Spanish and Dutch versions of the book and have spent some time browsing through them. My knowledge of both languages is poor, though, it has to be said, somewhat better than my understanding of Basque. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no other passages, besides the one I translated in my original post, that refer directly to Ceunis. However, a good deal of the book, and certainly its early chapters, appears to focus on the friendship between Mussche and Daisne/Thiery, which is certainly something about which I’d be keen to know more.
Having recently read and enjoyed Kirmen Uribe’s first docu-fiction, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, which also weaves together fiction and (in this case auto-) biographical elements, and which thankfully has been translated into English, I’d be very interested in reading an English translation of Mussche. Given its subject matter, it’s obvious that the book is of keen interest to Basque, Spanish and Flemish readers, but I believe it would also appeal to British and North American audiences.
Uribe’s regular English translator is the American poet Elizabeth Macklin. I wrote to Elizabeth to ask whether she had any plans to produce an English version of Mussche. She replied with some kind words about my own attempt at translation, but also to say that, sadly, she has no plans to translate the whole book: Elizabeth is currently working on Uribe’s poems and on some more recent fictional pieces of his for U.S. publication.
Elizabeth told me that, as part of the launch event for the Dutch version of Mussche, the Belgian composer Wim Mertens composed ‘a piano piece…taking off from ten excerpts’ from the book. He performed this with Uribe himself reading the excerpts ‘and I believe also with an English reader’. Elizabeth added that she herself translated those excerpts into English, ‘but not the whole novel’. She has searched to see whether there might be a video online of this performance, but so far without success, though having read my email, she promised to ask Uribe himself, as well as passing along my appreciative comments about his work. Finally, Elizabeth suggested that I might write to Uribe’s Basque or Spanish publisher, to see whether they have any plans for an English translation of Mussche, which I shall certainly do.
‘Stolpersteine’ (‘stumbling stone’ – see here) in memory of Robert Mussche, in Paul Fredericqstraat, Ghent.
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:
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:
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!
Searching for information about Gerard Ceunis online, I came across the beautifully illustrated catalogue for a major sale of book art, including Belgian and Dutch art nouveau printing and illustrated books, which took place in May 2009 at Arti & Amicitiae, an artsclub and exhibition space on the Rokin in Amsterdam.
Ceunis’ name is associated with two items in the catalogue. The first, listed under ‘Belgian art nouveau book art’, is a single volume that includes two complete years of the short-lived journal Iris, which Ceunis co-founded in 1908. The item, said to be from the library of the writer Maurice Bladel and bearing his bookplate, is described as ‘very rare’. The individual numbers of the journal contain illustrations by Ceunis, along with some by other artists, including Emile Claus and Jules De Bruycker. In addition, the catalogue confirms that the overall design for the journal was also by Ceunis: something I’m not sure I’d realised before, since the signature on the cover is difficult to read in the online image, this being the only issue of the magazine that I’ve seen:
The second item bearing Gerard Ceunis’ name is included in a collection of eight Flemish illustrated books from the years 1899 – 1917. One of these is described as ‘Flandria’s Novellen Bibliotheek, 1910, 1911, 1913. w[ith] cover by Gerard CEUNIS’. Flandria is the Latin name for Flanders, ‘novellen’ means novellas, and a ‘bibliotheek’ is a library: a title which initially confused me, until I realised that this was the name of another journal (or at least, a regular series of publications) produced by Plantijn or Plantyn of Gent in the early years of the last century. I’d come across the name before, in an advertisement which also included a reference to the appearance of Ceunis’ essay ‘Individualism’.
Although the sale catalogue doesn’t include an illustration of the item, I’ve managed to find the image, reproduced above, of a cover designed by Gerard Ceunis for an edition of Flandria’s Novellen Bibliotheek that appeared in 1911. The art nouveau design is very characteristic of Ceunis: it reminds me somewhat of his designs for the exterior of his dress shop in Hitchin market square and even of the interior decoration of his own home, ‘Salve’, in Hitchin, on view in the photograph of the artist that I posted recently.
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.
North Hertfordshire Museum, to which I owe my original introduction to the work of Gerard Ceunis, is due to re-open next week, as lockdown restrictions are eased. When it does so, pride of place in the Terrace Gallery will be given to its newest acquisition, a painting entitled ‘The Red Curtain’ by William Ratcliffe.
The artist, who died in 1954, spent much of his life in Letchworth Garden City, just a few miles from Hitchin, and was a member of the Camden Town Group of artists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Rosamond Allwood, Cultural Services Manager at North Hertfordshire Museum, can be seen unwrapping the new acquisition in the video below. (Ros is also the author of the excellent William Ratcliffe : paintings, prints and drawings, which was published by North Hertfordshire District Council in 2011. She provides a more detailed introduction to Ratcliffe’s life and work in another Youtube video.)
When I first saw a reproduction of ‘The Red Curtain’, on the museum’s Facebook page, I was immediately struck by the similarities with Ceunis’ ‘Flemish Room’, my current favourite among his paintings: hence this post. Most obviously, the subject-matter of the two paintings is very similar: both depict a domestic scene, a room with a carpet or rug on the floor, a round table covered by a tablecloth, flowers, and a wooden chair standing in front of a curtained window with a view into a garden.
William Ratcliffe, ‘The Red Curtain’ (North Hertfordshire Museum)
However, there are also other remarkable similarities between the two pictures, for example in the patterns in the carpet or rug: repeated crosses in the Ratcliffe, stars in the Ceunis. What’s more, the use of colour in the two paintings has some striking affinities. Although the dominant colour in Ratcliffe’s picture is the muted purple that was apparently a favourite among the Camden Town artists, while the walls of Ceunis’ room are a rather vivid green, the sheer richness and depth of the two colour schemes is very similar. And then there is the fact that the bright red of Ratcliffe’s curtain, which gives its name to the painting, is echoed in the colour of Ceunis’ tablecloth, almost as if he had deliberately transposed it from one part of the room to the other.
Of course, there are some significant differences between the pictures: for example, the window of the Flemish room is hung with a net curtain through which bright sunlight is filtered and reflected on the furniture, while the lighting in Ratcliffe’s room is more muted, refracted as it is through the deep red of his curtain.
Ratcliffe’s preference for domestic scenes and his use of colour were clearly influenced by the work of his fellow artists in the Camden Town Group, particularly that of his friend Harold Gilman, and they in turn were influenced by the technique of Lucien Pissarro, son of the famous French Impressionist Camille Pissarro.
Of course, a liking for intimate domestic scenes, a vivid use of colour and an impressionist-influenced technique are not unique to the Camden Town Group. For example, there are aspects of both Ratcliffe’s and Ceunis’ paintings which recall the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, whose habit of looking out on the world through the window of a familiar interior was an influence on a number of later artists, including David Jones (the main subject of my long-forgotten PhD thesis, about whom I wrote recently in relation to another Hitchin artist, Theodor Kern).
Pierre Bonnard, ‘The Open Window’, 1921 (Phillips Collection)
Édouard Vuillard, ‘Interior with a Woman in Yellow in Front of a Window’ (private collection)
Édouard Vuillard, ‘The Yellow Curtain’, c. 1893 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
However, if there is any question of one artist’s work influencing the other in the paintings by Ratcliffe and Ceunis, then the influence can only be in one direction. According to Ros Allwood’s book, Ratcliffe first exhibited ‘The Red Room’ in 1916, while Ceunis showed ‘Flemish Room’ at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1930. Is it too fanciful to speculate that the exiled Belgian, who lived just a few miles from his English fellow-artist (and from the house in Letchworth depicted in his painting) had seen ‘The Red Curtain’ and consciously or unconsciously imitated aspects of Ratcliffe’s composition and style in his ‘Flemish Room’?
Given that both men were living and working in North Hertfordshire in the middle decades of the twentieth century, they must surely have been aware of each other’s existence, and may even have known each other personally: it would certainly be fascinating to find out. (Based on his youthful involvement in radical social movements in Belgium, I imagine that Ceunis might have shared some of Ratcliffe’s enthusiasm for the utopian vision that lay behind the creation of Letchworth as the world’s first garden city.)
Incidentally, both the writer Johan Daisne and the commentator Christophe Verbruggen give Ceunis’ painting the title ‘Flemish Room’, but when exhibiting at the Royal Academy the artist called it ‘Flemish Interior’ (assuming it’s the same painting). However, I notice that the catalogue of the Letterenhuis in Antwerp, which is now the picture’s permanent home, gives it the Flemish title ‘Boerenkamer’, which literally means ‘farmer’s room’. Perhaps this was the title bequeathed by Ceunis himself and he had in mind a particular remembered farmhouse from his childhood in Flanders?
In addition to the still life with flowers that I wrote about the other day, his great niece Elsie De Cuyper has sent me photographs of two other paintings by Gerard Ceunis that I hadn’t seen before. They demonstrate the sheer stylistic diversity to be found in the artist’s work.
The first painting, an untitled picture of a doll in traditional (Flemish?) costume, set against the background of a rural landscape with a building that resembles a church, with a cross visible on a distant hillside, is reminiscent of two of the Ceunis paintings owned by Jackie Sablan – ‘Riviera Doll’ and the untitled picture featuring a figurine of a bewigged eighteenth-century gentleman – which I wrote about here. Both figures are similarly set against a rural background and, in fact, the church-like building in the second painting is almost identical to the one in the picture sent to me by Elsie.
The second ‘new’ painting is unfortunately only a black-and-white reproduction, with the title ‘Vieille Maison à Gand’ (Old house in Ghent). This is the picture, accompanied by a handwritten greeting from Gerard and Alice, that I referred to in the last post. It depicts what appears to be an elderly couple, sitting on either side of the front door of their house, which seems to be situated alongside one of the rivers that runs through the city.
Personally, even on the basis of a monochrome version, I find this realistic and expressive style of Ceunis’ more appealing than his (to me) rather kitsch pictures of dolls and figurines. However, I wonder if both can be seen as expressing something of the artist’s nostalgic longing for his homeland? In his obituary of his ‘uncle’ Gerard, the writer Johan Daisne noted that ‘his most beautiful and best known paintings are of flowers, Hitchin’s ancient church, and memories of Flanders’. It would seem that many of Ceunis’ paintings of his homeland, including the superb ‘Flemish Room’ which is now in the Letterenhuis in Antwerp, were composed after he moved to England, and reflect an exile’s feelings about what he has left behind. I wonder if the paintings of dolls and figurines are meant to be stylised representations of aspects of Flemish culture, with the landscapes behind them drawing on the artist’s memories of his Belgian childhood? It could be that there are symbols and tropes in these pictures that I’m missing: if so, perhaps someone reading this might be able to provide a more insightful interpretation of these pictures than my own.
The photograph above was taken in 1907 or 1908 on an outing from Ghent to Knokke by members of the radical groups Reiner Leven and De Flinken. When I first posted a copy of this photo, nearly a year ago, I was unsure of the identities of the people in the picture. I hadn’t realised – or at least, I hadn’t been able to confirm – that the group included Gerard Ceunis and the woman who would become his wife, Alice Van Damme. However, I’ve now traced the photograph to its source, in the catalogue of the Letterenhuis – the Museum of Flemish Literature, based in Antwerp – which helpfully names those featured in the photo.
From left to right, the photograph shows: Augusta de Taeye, Melanie Lorein, Lisbeth Verwest, Raymond Limbosch, Céline Dangotte, Gerard Ceunis and Alice Van Damme.
Augusta de Taeye (1885 – 1976) was a feminist teacher and educational pioneer. She married the educator and science populariser Leo-Michel Thiery (1877 – 1950). They were the parents of Herman Thiery, who wrote under the name Johan Daisne (see the previous post).
Melanie Lorein (1886 – 1977) was at one time linked romantically with the pioneering historian of science George Sarton (see his daughter May Sarton‘s memoir I Knew a Phoenix, which I wrote about here), though he would eventually marry another Flinken member, Mabel Elwes. Melanie would marry the Polish-born socialist Viktor Alter (1890 – 1941), though she remained in Belgium when he returned home to lead the Jewish socialist Bund. He was executed in one of Stalin’s purges in 1941.
Lisbeth Verwest (1885 – 1921) was a poet. She would marry the painter Robert Aerens. She is the ‘Tantelle’ of Johan Daisne’s novel Lago Maggiore (see this post). Having become ill while her husband was serving at the front in the First World War, she died in a sanatorium in 1921.
Raymond Limbosch (1884 – 1953) was a poet and philosopher. He would marry Céline Dangotte.
Céline Dangotte (1883 – 1975) inherited her mother’s interior design business but in later life also became known as a writer. She was married to Raymond Limbosch. May Sarton wrote a tribute to her in her essay collection A World of Light and fictionalised her life story in the novel The Bridge of Years.
It’s wonderful to have another photograph of Gerard Ceunis, as there are so few of him in the public domain. He’s dressed quite formally here, as I suppose was the style at the time, though his hair looks rather longer and more unruly than in later photographs of him as an established businessman in England. It’s also wonderful to have a picture of him alongside, and smiling at, Alice who, unfortunately, has turned away from the camera at the key moment.
The copy of the photograph in the Letterenhuis collection is from the archives of Johan Daisne. Alice Van Damme is referred to in the catalogue as ‘Lize’, which appears to have been the version of her name by which Daisne knew her: in Lago Maggiore he writes about staying with ‘Aunt Lize and Uncle Gerard’ in Hitchin in the summer of 1929. Daisne seems to have regarded a number of the members of Reiner Leven and De Flinken as his aunts and uncles.
The sheer happiness that these young people felt in each other’s company shines through this photograph from more than a century ago. Less than a decade later, the cataclysm of a world war and the invasion of their country would scatter them to the four winds and utterly change their lives.
The Quest for Ceunis 