The shop in the square revisited

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?

Cover designs by Ceunis

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.