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.
After writing my post last year about the possible descendants of the silent film star Lilian Hall-Davis (the focus of a lifelong obsession for Gerard Ceunis’ friend, the Flemish novelist Johan Daisne), I sought information via a number of Hitchin-based Facebook groups. For some reason I never got around to posting the responses I received, but a recent comment on that last post has prompted me to do so, rather belatedly.
As I wrote back then, Lilian’s only son, Grosvenor Pemberton, married a woman from Hitchin by the name of Cynthia Orson and they lived at 2 Waltham Villas, which was on the corner of St John’s Road, just a short walk from the Ceunis home on Gosmore Road. Their only son, Berkeley William Howard Pemberton, was born there in 1943. Here are some of the responses I received to my request for information about him, which contradict some of my earlier tentative conclusions:
There was a Howard Pemberton who lived in St John’s Road. He was friends with my brother-in-law. He worked in Hitchin but left to live in South Africa, I last saw him in Jo’burg during the early 1990s…I know he went with a lady from the bakers in the High Street. He was an unusual character but I always found him very friendly…I think Jean Redman was with Howard in South Africa. (Anthony Bone)
I was at Bessemer School [in Hitchin] in the ‘50s and knew a Howard Pemberton, who I recall lived near St John’s Road. Could he have been related? We always thought of him as being ‘a bit posh’ at the time, but he was a great lad, full of energy!…I have a feeling he emigrated to South Africa. Another pupil from Bessemer…mentioned him when I was writing my book on Bessemer school. (Robert Prebble)
Howard came to my wedding in 1982 with Jean Redman…He was a regular fixture in The King’s Arms in the early 80s. Although I didn’t know him well he was a dapper and charming man in the old-fashioned sense. (Nick Stevens)
Howard Pemberton died in South Africa about 10 years ago…Never married. (Keith Porter)
So it would seem that, sadly, Lilian Hall-Davis has no surviving descendants who might help to solve the mystery of her possible residence in Hitchin…
Last week I was contacted by Mike Gallagher who lives in Gosmore and had come across my research on Gerard Ceunis via a local website. Like me, Mike is a keen family historian and, in his words a ‘prolific user’ of the genealogical community website Findagrave, where you can search for the location of your ancestors’ burial. The website relies on individual researchers adding details of graves they have identified, which usually includes copies of inscriptions and photographs of tombstones.
Mike had noticed that there was no entry on Findagrave for either Gerard or Alice Ceunis, and at the same time had seen myphotographs on this blog of their grave in the churchyard of St Ippolyts church. He asked whether he might use those photographs to create an entry on the website.
I was only too happy to oblige, and Mike has now created separate entries for Gerard and Alice, marking Gerard’s as belonging to a famous person. You can access the entry for Gerard here and for Alice here.
I’m grateful to Mike for making this information about Gerard and Alice more widely available and for helping to ensure that they are not forgotten.
This image, a reproduction of a postcard of Hitchin, showing the market square in 1922, was recently posted on a local Facebook group. I was immediately struck by the fact that the distinctive black-and-white design on the frontage of the shop in the centre of the photograph, which would become ‘Maison Gerard’, owned and managed by Gerard and Alice Ceunis, was already in existence at this date.
In the last post, I shared what appears to be the 1921 census record for the Ceunis family, placing them at a farm in Essex, where Gerard (for some reason using the pseudonym Ernest) was working as a groom and Alice as a housekeeper. It seems unlikely that they would have opened their shop in Hitchin within a year of this, and therefore my pet theory that the shop frontage was designed by Gerard is somewhat undermined.
Hitchin market square – with ‘Maison Gerard’ clearly visible – undated but possibly 1950s?
Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ (North Hertfordshire Museum)
In another earlier post, I shared my discovery of records which tracked Gerard Ceunis’ ownership of various premises in London in the 1920s and early 1930s. In June 1922, he and an erstwhile business partner dissolved their dressmaking concern in Rathbone Place in the West End, while a commercial directory from 1930 mentions Gerard’s ladies’ dress shop in Church Street, Enfield. However, an Enfield electoral register from the same year gives Ceunis’ home address as 7 Market Place, Hitchin – the site of Maison Gerard. By 1932, his home address had changed to ‘Salve’, the house Gerard built for himself and his family on Gosmore Road, Hitchin, though in 1935 he was still on the register in Enfield, suggesting that he kept his shop there even after opening Maison Gerard in Hitchin.
The site of ‘Maison Gerard’ today
From all of this, it seems likely that Gerard opened Maison Gerard in Hitchin market square in the late 1920s, or by 1930 at the latest. If the date on the postcard is correct, it means that the characteristic frontage, which can still be seen on the premises today, must have been erected by a previous owner. I wonder who that was?
The UK census records for 1921 were recently released by the National Archives, so I’ve been searching online to see if I can find an entry for Gerard Ceunis and his family, who emigrated to England from Belgium during the First World War.
‘Melting Snow at Wormingford’ by John Northcote Nash (Beecroft Art Gallery)
My initial search for Gerard Ceunis’ name produced nothing, but when I searched solely for the surname ‘Ceunis’ I came upon a curious result. I found an Ernest Ceunis living at Rochfords Farm in the village of Wormingford, near Colchester in Essex. On the basis of the first name, I would have dismissed this particular record, if it hadn’t been for the fact that this individual is said to be living with his wife, Alice, and his daughter Jeanne. All three are said to have been born in ‘Ghent, Flanders, Belgium’, and their ages match those of Gerard and Alice Ceunis and their daughter Vanna, who in later life sometimes used the alternative name Jeanne.
‘Ernest’, Alice and Jeanne Ceunis in the 1921 census (via findmypast.co.uk)
In the 1921 census record ‘Ernest’ Ceunis is said to be working as a stud groom and Alice as a housekeeper for Major Cadbury-Brown, a gentleman farmer and former officer in the Royal Horse Artillery whose family, originally from Devon, were apparently part of the Cadbury chocolate clan. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that the Major was the father of the modernist architect Henry Thomas ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown, who would have been a child at the time.
I suppose I had assumed that Gerard and Alice started their clothing business soon after their arrival in England, and that they lived in London before settling in Hitchin, but this census record suggests that they may have pursued other occupations, and lived in other locations, in their early years in England. If ‘Ernest’ is in fact Gerard, then it confirms one’s sense of him as a man of many parts: poet, playwright, philosopher, painter, businessman – and stud groom!
But if this is indeed ‘our’ Ceunis family, I wonder why Gerard felt the need to disguise himself as ‘Ernest’?
In the previous post I mentioned that Johan Vanhecke, the author of a recent biography of Johan Daisne (1912 – 1978), had sent me copies of those pages of Daisne’s book Filmathiek (1956) in which the Belgian poet and novelist writes of his lifelong admiration for the English silent film actress Lilian Hall-Davis (1898 – 1933). I was initially interested in what Daisne had to say about Hall-Davis because of the possibility that it might throw on the mystery of how Gerard Ceunis came to paint the actress’ portrait. The more I’ve delved into the connections between Ceunis, Daisne and Hall-Davis, the more intrigued I’ve become, and the more determined to resolve the question of whether the troubled film star, who eventually committed suicide, was actually a neighbour of the Ceunis family in Hitchin towards the ends of her life, as some sources, including Daisne, suggest. As I noted in an earlier post, Johan Vanhecke described Gerard Ceunis’ daughter Vanna and Lilian Hall-Davis to me as Daisne’s two ‘secret loves from Hitchin’.
Lilian Hall-Davis in ‘Quo Vadis?’ (1925) (via wikimedia.org)
I decided to translate in full the sections of Daisne’s book which discuss Hall-Davis, partly in search of clues that might aid my quest, but also out of my growing interest in the silent film star’s own unhappy biography. In Daisne’s determination to bring to light the story of a forgotten artist, I recognised some similarities with my own attempts to rescue not only Gerard Ceunis, but also his fellow Hitchin artist, Theodor Kern, from undeserved neglect. Reading what Daisne writes about Hall-Davis brought to mind some of the frustrations that I’ve encountered in my own research, and also the sheer delight to be had when occasionally discovering an unexpected connection, as well as that uncanny sense one sometimes has that the departed artist is somehow directing one’s search from beyond the grave.
The inscription on the copy of Ceunis’ painting of Lilian Hall-Davis that I reproduced in the previous post claims that Johan Daisne dedicated Filmathiek to the actress. However, Johan Vanhecke tells me that in fact the book has a dual dedication: to Daisne’s son Evert ‘and to Grosvenor Pemberton as a tribute to the memory of his mother: Lilian Hall-Davis’. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, and as Daisne relates in this text, Gerard Ceunis’ neighbour, Grosvenor Pemberton, was Hall-Davis’ only surviving son.) The three sections of Daisne’s book which deal with Lilian Hall-Davis include three poems devoted to her. I’ve included the original Dutch/Flemish text of these, so that the reader can get a sense of the prosody of the original, which once again I’ve found difficult to reproduce in English. There’s a fourth poem dedicated to the film star which can be found in Daisne’s collected verse, but I’ll save that for another post. I’ve added some footnotes to illuminate some of the references in Daisne’s text.
LILIAN HALL-DAVIS (I)
Your memory won’t let go of me,
as if it’s twenty-five years ago
and I see you twice in a neighbourhood cinema:
seen, loved and avowed, when I was only a child.
.
Star of the silent film, once so blonde
your pale light shone across the screen,
the silent darkness of your mouth lives on,
while through night’s realm your tears still roam.
.
Turzhansky’s and Baroncelli’s star,
heroine of Nichevo and Volga-Volga,
why, when still as young as Annabel Lee,
did you follow the fate of the silent film?
.
When did you commit that desperate act?
Why? And where? How did they find you?
Everything has long been wiped away
from the records of your life throughout the world.
.
But your memory never let go of me,
and I’ll take a moment now to seek you,
your pale beauty and my blush,
on earth, and in the heavenly realm of books!
This poem of mine appeared in the Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift of June 1952 [1]. I also made a French translation of it, which was included in Le Journal des Poètes (III-1954) [2]. Thereupon Richard Minne was kind enough to publish an article on the ‘Spiritual Life’ page in Vooruit [3], dated January 16, 1954, illustrated with the photo from the cover of the novelisation of the film Nitchévo mentioned therein, and to which I had given the title: In search of a star, twenty years later, in the shroud of the silver screen. Because I wanted to stop that ‘seek’ from the last stanza of my poem becoming a redundant verb, and to call on the cooperation of all those still interested, via the most widely read medium, that of the newspaper.
It has since become a wonderful story, worthy of the muse with the magic lantern. But here’s the text of the article:
What I accomplished in literature before, in rescuing the talented Dutch (children’s) writer Tine van Berken (1870-99) from ungrateful oblivion [4], I have for some years been trying to do for the English stage and film actor Lilian Hall-Davis, the wonderful artist who was once beloved across our continent, who died in such an untimely and miserable fashion. At every opportunity I repeat her singing name; I brought her into in my Russian literary history From Nitsjevo to Chorosjo (for she was the Persian princess in Volga-Volga, the film based on the well-known ballad about the robber chieftain Stenka Razin); in the N.V.T. of June 1952 one can read my belated poem of mourning in her memory; and in a new novel in preparation, I recall her in the same way that I previously included Tine van Berken in The Stairway of Stone and Clouds, before bringing her authentically on stage in Tine van Berken. In the meantime, I continue to collect data about Lilian Hall-Davis, and in what follows I will probably begin to share some of that, to the extent it can serve my spiritual purpose. After all, ‘repetitio est mater studiorum’ may also apply in love.
Cover of the novelisation of ‘Nitchevo’, from ‘Filmathiek’
First, I recall the three most important of Lillian Hall-Davis’s films; three titles out of a few dozen others.
1.
Quo vadis? (1925) realised in Rome by Georg Jacoby (Marika Rokk’s husband), assisted by Gabriellino d’Annunzio (son of the poet) [5]. In it, Lilian Hall-Davis was the leading lady, alongside Emil Jannings (Nero). More than a quarter of a century before her compatriot Deborah Kerr, she already bestowed the same noble soft profile to the Christian Lygia [6]. Alan Arnold relates in his book Valentino (Hutchinson, London, 1925) how Rudolph Valentino and his wife, the artist Natacha Rambova, attended the filming while traveling through Europe, and how it was like an artist’s depiction of Babel, because of the dozen languages that were spoken at the same time on the sets: the English of the leading lady, Jannings’ German, as well as French, Italian of course, etc. It is a melancholy paradox, the way the talking film has suddenly muted that colourful sound from the heroic era.
2.
Nitchevo (1926). Screenplay and direction by Jacques de Baroncelli. Filming in Paris and at the scene of the action: the military port of Bizerte in Tunis. Here, Lilian Hall-Davis played the haunted role of delicate Russian émigré Sonia Cartier, in a beautiful setting that brought together the names of Suzy Vernon, Marcel Vibert and Charles Vanel. The Cinema-Bibliothèque of J. Tallandier, Paris, published a novel based on this film, drawn by René Jeanne and J. Baroncelli, and illustrated with photographs from the film (1926).
3.
Volga-Volga (1928) realized in Berlin under the director Viacheslav Turzhansky, with Hans Adalbert von Schlettow as Stenka Razin, the ataman, the rebellious Don-kozzaken from the ancient ballad.
I saw those films in the order listed above, and after the second one had already lost my heart so much to the virginal image of the girl Marquita [7], to whom I wrote via a film magazine, sending the required amount in stamps, requesting the address of the star, and begging her for a photo in exchange for my fifteen-year-old heart. The answer to my questions appeared a week later, and informed ‘Don X, in Ghent’ that Lilian Hall-Davis lived in the county of Middlesex, 91 College Road, Osterley Park, and that she would gladly send me her portrait free of charge, by contrast with Suzy Vernon, to whom 3 francs compensation should be sent for the costs.
That address with those comments was the first document for the Lilian Hall-Davis file in my film archive. I was so happy with it that I didn’t even request the picture. Three years later I spent a summer vacation at a villa in the gentle Hertfordshire countryside, just above London and Middlesex; but Don X (who, perhaps not everyone knows, is actually called Don Q, in Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s second Zorro film) could only dream of making a visit. And when I thought I had cherished the clipping long enough, I learned that it was irretrievably too late to make use of the address.
Indeed, in 1950 (yes, poets can wait that long!) I learned from correspondence with RenéJeanne that Lilian Hall-Davis had voluntarily left this life years before. And Jeanne’s Histoire encyclopédique du cinema, part II, published by Laffont in Paris, came in 1953 to confirm this obituary, in the extensive ‘heroic’ filmography at the back of the book: Hall-Davis, Lilian: English actress… summary of her films… and the short funeral oration…Discarded by the studios following the advent of talking pictures, she committed suicide in 1934.
In vain I wrote to all the old-timers among the film connoisseurs known to me, and consulted every new or old biographical resource I could lay my hands on; no one remembered her name more than vaguely, and nowhere, nowhere was she mentioned.
The muse with the magic lantern, however, is not unsympathetic to truly infatuated poets, but she demands long mourning and fidelity. A few months ago, I leafed through the anniversary album The Elstree Story (Clerke & Cockeran, London, 1948?), published on the 21st anniversary of the studios of British International Pictures (now Associated British Pictures) in Elstree, Hollywood, England (in … Middlesex!). On pg. 4, Lilian Hall-Davis is commemorated with an image from the first film of the B.I.P. realised in Elstree (exteriors in Morocco): The White Sheik. The picture depicts Lilian Hall-Davis in a chaste embrace with Warwick Ward, and both as the ‘passion team, vintage 1927’.
And yesterday, by far greater coincidence, I found something again, specifically in the Who’s Who in the Theatre, compiled and edited by John Parker, published by Pitman & Sons, London, 1947. For the umpteenth time, I was in that thick alphabetical book to look for Miss Hall-Davis’ missing name. Annoyed, I decided to look up the address of John Parker in the general Who’s Who 1953, to finally write him a heartfelt letter. But Parker turned out to have passed away just a year ago. I picked up the first book again with shaky hands, and it fell open at the end of a list of ‘Theatrical wills’ that had hitherto eluded me. And yes, the beloved name suddenly smiled at me again.
That list, truly an (Anglo-Saxon) curiosity, gives in order of importance the sum of the estates of ‘a few well-known managers, actors, dramatic authors, composers and others’. The always flamboyant Phineas T. Barnum, showman, aged 80, up front, with £1,000,000. Last on the list comes Florenz Ziegfeld, manager, aged 64, also with a million pounds, but in debt! Douglas Edgar Wallace (age 57), famed detective novelist, £64,000 in debt. Oscar Wilde (46) was rich to the tune of £100 at his death…and Lillian Hall-Davis, just a few lines before him, £411. She was thirty-four years old…
See to what strange archaeology cinema sometimes devotes its soul. To those who are interested, I warmly appeal for all possible information and documentation (newspaper clippings, programmes, prints, photos) concerning Lilian Hall-Davis. I will gladly reimburse the costs, and try to repay the effort in literary terms. I could, of course, proceed more scientifically and formally: consult the Middlesex registry office, the History Committee of the British Film Institute, etc. But I hesitate. I prefer to collect scraps, from which a clearer image may arise. For anyone who wants to help me should only do it from the living memories of his heart, and that will be the best service of love that one can still render to this childlike artist – better to leave the great words Art and History to rest with that sleeping beauty.
LILIAN HALL-DAVIS (II)
The appearance of the above reprinted article has given me more pleasure than any other publication. I can still see myself buying the newspaper on a dreary winter morning, after taking my boy to school, and walking happily with it along the Leie [8], with my eyes caressing the capitalised name and the reproduced image of the disappeared one, and moved by a rare bliss of satisfaction, muttering over and over, ‘If only she knew…if only she knew!’ And she seems to have known.
First of all – I would not have dared to hope for this – I received letter after letter from my readers. Mostly unsigned sheets, but accompanied by faithfully preserved and generously donated clippings and photos, and even a letter from Prof. Dr. Herman Uyttersprot [9], with a touching word of remembrance, a surprise that no longer amazes me from that renowned Kafka specialist:
‘Coincidentally, I found your article about Lilian Hall-Davis in an issue of Vooruit... It also prompted me to search for information about her… If everything goes well for you, you will find in your impressions treasure from an apparently vast emotive youth, still have enough Mutterboden [10] for a powerful production… That you also managed to find the grave of the author of Mädchen in Uniform [11] in a small French cemetery, says more to me than long eulogies, and a good deal about the one who is bold enough to write. I believe that one day your work will also be regarded as a great song of Liebe und Tod…[12]’
Johan Daisne (right) with Herman Uyttersprot in 1961 (via Johan Vanhecke, ‘Johan Daisne: tussen magie en werkelijkheid,1912 – 1978’)
At the same time a friend returned from England, which she had visited for the Christmas holidays, and brought me as a New Year’s gift a bouquet of wild flowers behind glass, like those wall decorations that were very popular in the days of the Old West and are now coming into fashion again. My friend hadn’t read the article, but the magical realist that I am accepted the flowers – most likely from Lilian Hall-Davis’ region – as a greeting from the beloved dead.
At the beginning of February I also wrote in Vooruit:
Unexpectedly, there are many readers who have been moved to respond to my article about Lilian Hall-Davis. They wrote to me, in sometimes touching terms, to encourage me on my ‘quest’, and they sent me all kinds of interesting memories: clippings, photos, etc. In this way they made me very happy, by providing their personal, intimate proof, that the subject of the heroic film is and will always be topical, and that Lilian Hall-Davis has not yet died the death of oblivion (the worst for an artist). Therefore, on her behalf, thanks to everyone!
I have to follow this public route to make this acknowledgment, because my correspondents have been too modest: most have given neither name nor address. (Perhaps they consider a writer, especially in this age of the ball-point pen, an all too unreliable individual!) Nevertheless, that silence makes their gesture an even more beautiful mourning tribute. Let me then express my gratitude to them, also in my own name, with a few lines:
On 100,000 copies
after 20 long years dead,
your name is suddenly there in the paper!
.
Then someone brought from your land,
a heart-sized memento
full of flowers sprung from your grave.
.
So still there blooms, through the winter sadness,
the spring green, the summer red:
.
Of love that cannot forget,
and, God knows how, your grateful knowing!
LILIAN HALL-DAVIS (III)
And then, one February morning, the mail brought me two letters from England, one from London and one from Hitchin.
The letter from London answered the one I had finally sent, asking for official confirmation of Lilian Hall-Davis’ end.
It read as follows [13]:
‘Ambassador of Belgium
London, 20 February 1954.
Sir,
I have the honour of being charged with receiving your letter of the 5th of this month, which was forwarded to me by the secretary to the Lord Mayor of London concerning the English actress Lilian Hall-Davis.
According to the information with which I have been furnished, this artiste of the theatre and cinema made her debut on screen in 1915.
Date and place of birth: Hampstead London N.W., 1898.
Married to Walter Pemberton, actor.
She had a son who was aged 14 in 1933, and a brother, Henry Charles Davis, a postal engineer.
Lilian Hall-Davis committed suicide by cutting her throat with a razor on 25 October 1933 at Cleveland Gardens, Golders Green, London N.W.
Please accept, sir, the assurance of my distinguished consideration.’
I read this letter first. After all, I was expecting it and without knowing it, I also followed the right order in so doing. After this tragic nightmare of death there now awaited me the fairy tale of resurrection. Because the other letter, from Hitchin, as already mentioned, was from the Ghent-born writer and painter ‘Uncle’ Gerard Ceunis, who has lived in England since World War I and with whom I once spent that sweet summer vacation in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside as an eighteen-year-old. At that time, I wandered a good deal through that landscape, alone or with Vanna, and kept silent about both my inevitable love for her and about the name of Lilian Hall-Davis.[14]
The ‘rolling Hertfordshire countryside’, near the home of Gerard Ceunis in Hitchin (author’s photo)
And here’s the miracle. On New Year’s Eve, my uncle and aunt had ordered a work of art from a well-known shop in Ghent; it had been sent to them, wrapped in a newspaper, the Vooruit; they had read my article in it, and immediately translated it for a certain Mr. Pemberton, who has been coming to play bridge with them every week for years, and who they said would write to me without delay and send me whatever I wanted. Because Grosvenor’s mother was… Lilian Hall-Davis. She spent the last years of her life in Hitchin; she was there that time when I stayed at my friends’ villa; as I roamed around Hitchin, beside her garden hedge, perhaps under her weary gaze. But now she has lifted that gaze and we talk to each other through her son.[15]
However, I want to reserve that material for my novel [16]. Let me conclude this reflection with a final poem, for cinematography is an epic lyric of the seventh art.
There is no coincidence in this life,
there is the blind logic of fate,
there are the miracles of God.
.
I have held back for a quarter of a century,
only dreaming of the departed beloved
and then – simply sobbing as I write to her.
.
And strange flowers from her land,
souvenirs from unknown hands
suddenly came to enrich us.
.
Even some wrapping paper,
in which the mourning verse was printed,
succeeded in reaching the son of the departed.
.
It’s no coincidence. It’s a token
that in a radiant logical realm
those we love still live.
.
They read our belated letters,
they pass them on with a smile,
and with a gentle blush enlighten us!…
Notes
‘New Flemish Magazine’, published between 1946 and 1983. See here.
French-language Belgian literary journal, launched in 1931. See here.
Literally ‘Forward’. Flemish left-wing newspaper. See here.
Tine van Berken, pseudonym of Anna Christina Witmond-Berkhout (1870 – 1899), Dutch children’s writer.
‘Son of the poet’, i.e. the Italian writer and Fascist sympathiser Gabriele D’Annunzio.
The British actress Deborah Kerr played the part of Lygia in the 1951 version of Quo Vadis?
‘Marquita’ was the name Daisne used to denote a particular feminine ideal, and to describe Vanna Ceunis, among others, in his collection Zes domino’s voor vrouwen. See this post.
The Leie, or Lys, is the river that runs through Ghent, Daisne’s home city.
In a recent post, I wrote about the intriguing connections between Gerard Ceunis, the Belgian writer Johan Daisne, and the English silent film actress Lilian Hall-Davis. My interest had been sparked by discovering a reference to a portrait of the actress in the catalogue to an exhibition of Ceunis’ paintings, . It was one of only two paintings in the exhibition (the other being a portrait of the artist’s granddaughter Tessa) which was not for sale. Until this weekend, all my efforts to track down a copy of the painting had come to nothing. However, yesterday I received a parcel, kindly sent to me by Elsie De Cuyper, Ceunis’ great niece, which included a number of items relating to the artist – including a monochrome reproduction of the painting:
The more I look at this reproduction, the more I’m struck by the way it conveys the character and charm of its subject, particularly through the eyes, so that one catches a glimpse of what so enchanted the young Johan Daisne. The painting also displays Ceunis’ skill as a portraitist, as is also evident in his paintings of his friend Reginald Hine and of Daisne himself.
I’m still curious to know how it was that Gerard Ceunis came to paint the portrait of the silent film star, who died by her own hand in 1933. From Johan Daisne’s own account, as reproduced in Johan Vanhecke’s biography of the writer, we know that in later life Gerard and Alice Ceunis befriended Hall-Davis’ son Grosvenor Pemberton, who lived near them in Hitchin. But is it true, as Daisne also claims, that Lilian herself had been a neighbour of the Ceunis family, towards the end of her life? I’m still searching for any evidence that would confirm this. In the meantime, it has been useful to learn, from the inscription on the copy of the portrait sent to me by Elsie, that Ceunis painted the portrait in 1958, twenty-five years after the actress’ death. This suggests that it was painted from a photograph, rather than from life, unless of course it was based on a much earlier sketch. The full inscription, when translated into English, reads as follows:
LHD (Lilian Hall-Davis): film actress (London, 1898- 1933)
Painting (copy) by Gerard CEUNIS , 1958
(until her early death she was a neighbour of the Ceunis family in Hitchin, Hertfordshire)
J.D. dedicated his ‘Filmathiek’ to her.
I don’t have any information about the origin of the copy now in my possession. However, the inscription suggests it might be from a book or article about Johan Daisne, since he is referred to here simply by his initials. Filmathiek, published in 1956, is a collection of Daisne’s writings on cinema. Johan Vanhecke has kindly sent me copies of the pages devoted to Lilian Hall-Davis, which include a number of poems dedicated to the actress. I plan to discuss them in a future post.
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’
In the previous post, I mentioned that one of the paintings on display in an exhibition of Gerard Ceunis’ work held in Hitchin during his lifetime was a portrait of the silent film star Lillian Hall-Davis. I noted also that the actress’ name occurs in the Belgian writer Johan Daisne’s account of his stay with Gerard and Alice Ceunis in Hitchin in the summer of 1929 (during which he developed an unrequited passion for their daughter Vanna):
In a country house nearby lived a film star that I loved to watch, the delicate Lilian Hall-Davis. I didn’t find this out until much later, when she had long since met her tragic end. But I must have sensed something of her proximity.
(Johan Daisne, Lago Maggiore: De roman van een man; de roman van een vrouw, 1957; my translation)
I’m intrigued by the mystery of how Gerard Ceunis came to be painting Lillian Hall-Davis’ portrait. However, since writing the last post I think I’ve made some progress towards solving the mystery.
Earlier this week, I took delivery of a copy of Johan Vanhecke’s biography of Johan Daisne (whose real name was Herman Thiery), kindly sent to me from Belgium by its author, who is head of archive processing at the Letterenhuis in Antwerp [1]. The book includes a number of intriguing references to Lillian Hall-Davis and provides some clues as to the possible connection between the actress and Gerard Ceunis. Before examining those references, it might be useful to summarise what we know about Hall-Davis, her career, and her sad demise. The following information is from a website devoted to Classic Actresses:
Lillian Hall-Davis(via imdb.com)
She was born on June 23, 1898 in London, England. Her father Charles was a taxi driver and she had three younger siblings. Lillian started her career acting on the London stage. She made her film debut in the 1917 French drama La p’tite du sixième. The following year she appeared in the British film The Admirable Crichton. She married stage actor Walter Pemberton and had a son in 1919 named Grosvenor. During the early 1920s Lillian appeared in numerous movies including The Hotel Mouse, Afterglow, and The Passionate Adventure directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her performance in the 1924 western Quo Vadis brought her to the attention of American audiences. She was now earning $150 a week and newspapers called her ‘one of the most beautiful actresses to ever grace the screen’. Hitchcock was so impressed with her that he gave her leading roles in two more of his films – The Ring and The Farmer’s Daughter.
Although she had become a popular British star Lillian had trouble making the transition to sound films. Her final role was in the 1931 comedy Many Waters. By this time her health was deteriorating and she had a nervous breakdown. Sadly she began suffering from severe depression and neurasthenia (a condition caused by emotional disturbances). Lillian and her family moved to a modest house in the Golders Green area of London. She told friends that was feeling suicidal but they didn’t think she was serious. Tragically on October 25, 1933 she committed suicide by slashing her throat with a razor and turning on the gas in her kitchen. Lillian was only thirty-five years old. When her fourteen-year-old son came home from school he found a note she left that said ‘The kitchen door is locked. Don’t try to get in, but go over the road to Mrs. Barnard’. She was buried at Hendon cemetery in Hendon, England.
Johan Vanhecke kindly signed my copy of his book, inscribing it ‘in memory of Vanna Ceunis and Lilian Hall-Davis, Daisne’s secret loves from Hitchin’, and it’s clear that the actress had a special place in the heart of the Belgian magic-realist writer. One of the early chapters of the biography is entitled ‘Marquita’. As Johan explains [2]:
Around the same time, [Daisne] falls in love with a blonde girl from the neighbourhood, Mariette Cleppe. He sees her for the first time in August 1925 during the Ghent Festival and calls her ‘Marquita’, after the popular tune he heard over and over that summer from the street musicians in Blankenberge and of which he will later collect countless recordings.
The pages that follow discuss Daisne’s love of cinema, and of one film in particular:
The most important film of that time for him, however, is Nitchevo (1926) by Jacques de Baroncelli. He goes to that movie because he was given the programme by his beloved classmate Jacques Lorre.
Still image from ‘Nitchevo’ (via mubi.com)
A long quotation from Daisne’s own writing follows, explaining that this film was especially important to him
because the lead role, that of the soft, anguished, even secretive Russian emigrant, [Sonia], was played by Lilian Hall Davies [sic], who looked so poignantly like Marquita. So much so that [I] have danced and cheered for days on end and imitated in every way the poses and gestures of Charles Vanel, who played her husband the naval officer. I remember a delightful little scene where Vanel wants to light a cigarette before leaving his wife. [Sonia] gently takes it out of his mouth, slides it between her lips, sucks it alight, then returns it with a tender smile. Don’t laugh, reader, it was so beautiful. [3]
Vanhecke’s narration continues:
Daisne is so captivated by the resemblance to Marquita that he asks a film magazine for the address of Lilian Hall-Davis. Although he signs the letter with ‘Don X, in Ghent’, he nevertheless receives the address with the declaration that she would be happy to send her portrait free of charge. He is so overjoyed that he doesn’t even ask for the portrait any more.
However, the key passage in the biography for our purposes occurs later in the same chapter, coming at the end of the description of Daisne’s 1929 summer vacation with the Ceunis family, at ‘Salve’, their home in Gosmore Road, Hitchin:
This holiday in England grows another magic-realist tail in relation to the Marquita-like movie star Lilian Hall-Davis. When in the 1950s Daisne discovered that she had committed suicide, shortly after the emergence of talking pictures, he wrote an article in the newspaper Vooruit dedicated to her memory, illustrated with her portrait. He asks readers to contact him if they have any further documentation. An answer comes from England. Gerard Ceunis and his wife ordered a vase from the Dangotte art gallery (Aunt Céline) in Ghent, which was sent to them, wrapped in the issue of Vooruit that included Daisne’s article. In their letter they write that their neighbour, whom Herman must have seen in her garden almost 25 years ago during his English holiday, was Mrs. Pemberton, alias Lilian Hall-Davis. Her son Grosvenor is a family friend, who often comes to play cards with the Ceunis family. He is flattered and deeply moved by Herman’s article. From this Grosvenor, Daisne acquires a good deal of intimate information about his once famous mother. This provides inspiration for a novel about Lilian Hall-Davis, which remains unfinished, just as a play about her remains trapped in his pen.
Reiner Leven / Flinken outing in 1907 or 1908. Left to right: Augusta de Taeye, Melanie Lorein, Lisbeth Verwest, Raymond Limbosch, Céline Dangotte, Gerard Ceunis and Alice Van Damme. See this post.
Céline Dangotte was a member of the ‘Flinken’, the group of Ghent feminists to which Gerard Ceunis’ wife Alice Van Damme belonged as a young woman, and which was closely linked to the radical ‘Reiner Leven’ group with which Gerard was for a time associated. Céline, who was also responsible for introducing her family’s lodger, Mabel Elwes, the future wife of George Sarton, to the ‘Flinken’, belonged to the Dangotte family of interior designers. She married the poet Raymond Limbosch, another member of ‘Reiner Leven’. They were all friends of Johan Daisne’s (aka Herman Thiery’s) parents, Leo Michael Thiery and Augusta de Taeye, and (as with the Ceunisses), he was in the habit of referring to them as his aunts and uncles.
The coincidence of Gerard and Alice coming upon Daisne’s article in the wrapping of an article purchased from a mutual acquaintance, and of their having a connection with Lillian Hall-Davis, is like something from one of Daisne’s own magic-realist novels.
2 Waltham Villas, St John’s Road, Hitchin (via google.co.uk/maps)
As for the information that they shared in their letter to Daisne, I’ve discovered that Lillian Hall-Davis’ son with her husband Walter Pemberton, was indeed named Grosvenor: this is the same son, who as a boy, had the traumatic experience of discovering what was, in effect, his mother’s suicide note. I’ve found a record of Grosvenor Charles Pemberton’s marriage in 1942 to Cynthia Joyce Orson. The wedding took place in Hitchin, which was Cynthia’s home town: she was the daughter of William Orson, a postman, and his wife Vera. In 1939, according to the register for that year, the Orsons were living at 2 Waltham Villas, just off St John’s Road, Hitchin, and Cynthia, then aged 19, was working as a cake maker at a confectionery factory. It would seem that Grosvenor and Cynthia lived with her parents following their marriage and eventually inherited the house, since Grosvenor’s probate record, following his death in 1973, gives 2 Waltham Villas as his last address.
Grosvenor and Cynthia Pemberton’s modest semi-detached house, just opposite the town cemetery in St John’s Road, would have been a short walk of no more than five minutes from the Ceunisses’ home in Gosmore Road. The question that remains unanswered, though, is whether their friendship was simply the result of proximity, or whether there was a prior connection between Gerard and Alice Ceunis and Grosvenor’s mother, Lillian Hall-Davis.
Gerard and Alice’s letter to Johan Daisne, as reported by Johan Vanhecke, certainly suggests the latter. They describe the late ‘Mrs Pemberton’, i.e. Lillian Hall-Davis, as their former ‘neighbour’ (‘buurvrouw’ in the original Dutch). Their statement that Herman (i.e. Daisne) would have been able to see her in her garden when he visited them a quarter of a century before suggests that she was actually quite a close neighbour. However, I’ve yet to come across any firm evidence that Lillian Hall-Davis ever lived in Hitchin. The only connection to Hertfordshire I can find for the actress is a suggestion that at one time she had a house in the village of Great Amwell, near Ware, but that’s about twenty miles from Hitchin. But then how did her son Grosvenor come to be living in Hitchin and to meet and marry a local woman? Was this simply coincidence, or was he returning to the town where he had spent at least part of his childhood, even if by the time of his mother’s death the family had moved back to London?
One further, less important question: why is Gerard Ceunis’ portrait of the famous actress labelled ‘Mrs Lilian Hall-Davis’? Surely she was either Miss Hall-Davis or Mrs Pemberton?
I shall continue to search for answers to these questions. In the meantime, if anyone reading this has any knowledge of the Pemberton or Hall-Davis families, or perhaps memories of Grosvenor or Cynthia Pemberton (who died in 1991), which might throw some light on these mysteries, I’d love to hear from you.
Finally, as Johan Vanhecke notes, despite the help offered him by Grosvenor Pemberton, Johan Daisne’s plans to write either a novel or a play about Lilian Hall-Davis came to nothing. In the 1960s he was still planning to write a play, for which he had assembled copious notes, and in his own words, ‘also actual documents, copy of her marriage certificate, coroner’s report on her death etc.’ Daisne added: ‘She was the mistress of Charles Vanel, the old French movie actor, but she won’t let go of me.’
Notes
Johan Vanhecke (2014), Johan Daisne: tussen magie en werkelijkheid, 1912 – 1978, Antwerp/Utrecht, Houtekiet
All translations from Johan Vanhecke’s biography of Daisne included in this post are my own (with substantial assistance from Google Translate).
In addition to Daisne’s misspelling of ‘Davis’ here, it should be noted that, throughout the biography, the actress’ first name is spelt ‘Lilian’. In my own commentary, I’ve kept to the more usual spelling, with a double ‘l’ in the middle of her name.
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 