I was looking online recently for information about Gerard Ceunis, when I came across a photograph of him for sale on eBay, the seller being an antiquarian dealer in Bourges, France. The photograph showed a young (-ish) Ceunis, standing next to one of his paintings, with others displayed on a wall behind him, and it was accompanied by some printed text in French. I decided to buy the photograph, partly because there are so few pictures of the artist in the public domain, but also because I found the story behind it intriguing.
This is my translation of the French text accompanying the photo:
In 1914 the Belgian artist and painter Gerard Ceunis organised an exhibition of paintings at Nieuport. The war came, the canvasses stayed at Nieuport where, one day, the English General Maitland took care of the said paintings by sending them to London, without knowing the name of the artist. The latter, with a view to his current exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, created from memory one of the paintings taken by General Maitland. During the opening of the exhibition the similarity of the subject struck of one the general’s officers and this is how the artist was able to come into possession of his missing works.
The photo shows GERARD CEUNIS NEXT TO THE PAINTING IN QUESTION WITH A PLAQUE FROM THE MAIN SQUARE OF NIEUPORT.
Nieuport – Nieuwport in Flemish – is a coastal town in West Flanders, Belgium, about 15 miles south-west of Ostend/Oostende, and about 50 miles west of Ghent/Gent. So far, I’ve been unable to find any information about any exhibitions held there in 1914. Gerard Ceunis fled to England with his wife Alice and young daughter Vanna soon after war broke out and Germany invaded his homeland in the summer of that year.
I’ve been unable to find any information about a ‘General Maitland’ who served in Belgium during the First World War. I wonder if the reference is actually to Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Fuller Maitland Wilson (1859 – 1941), a senior British Army officer who served with distinction in Flanders, France and later in Salonika? Perhaps the plaque from the Groote Markt / Grand Place in Nieuwport, on display in the photo, was a wartime souvenir brought back from Flanders by the general or one of his officers?
Ceunis’ exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, in Old Bond Street, London, took place in 1929. It apparently featured 60 of the artist’s paintings and was opened by none other than the Belgian ambassador. According to one source, the gallery, which had only been in operation for six years, ‘appears to have attracted the lesser-known artists of the period who probably found difficulty in getting shows at the bigger galleries either because it was felt they were not famous enough names or perhaps the other galleries took too great a commission.’
The typed text accompanying the photo is on a separate piece of paper, glued to the back of the copy which I purchased, which also bears the stamp of what seems to have been its place of origin – Photo ‘Actualite’ G. Champroux in Rue Royale, Brussels. Intriguingly, it turns out that Georges Champroux (1899 – 1983) was a leading Belgian photojournalist, famous for a series of black-and-white photographs of Brussels at night. I assume that he was given the assignment to cover the story of the restoration of Gerard Ceunis’ paintings by a Belgian newspaper from which, perhaps, the text attached to my copy is taken. It would certainly have made for an eye-catching human interest story in Ceunis’ home country.
I suspect that the Arlington Gallery exhibition was one of the high points of Gerard Ceunis’ artistic career. I’m intrigued by the painting in the foreground, which I’ve not seen before and which appears to be of superior quality to many other works of his that I’ve seen. I’d be interested to see a full-colour reproduction, and to discover what became of it and of the other paintings in the exhibition.
The obituary of Gerard Ceunis published in the Hertfordshire Express, following the artist’s death in September 1964, claims that Ceunis’ first professional submission as a painter was in 1912, at the ‘Triennial Salon’, shortly after he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. However, Christophe Verbruggen, in his highly informative article ‘The winding paths of Gerard Ceunis‘, states that the latter first exhibited professionally in the following year, at the Ghent Salon. Perhaps the two articles are referring to the same exhibition?
Poster for the 1913 International Exhibition held in Gent, Belgium. Printed by J. E. Goossens
(via en.wikipedia.org)
The newspaper obituary goes on to suggest that the first painting by Ceunis to be shown in public was entitled ‘Sunset’. However, I’ve discovered that this was actually the title of the painting that the twenty-nine-year-old artist submitted to the Universal Exposition which was hosted in Ghent in 1913. This was a major international event, with more than a dozen countries participating, and requiring a major programme of building and renovation in the city. The Flemish novelist Stefan Hertmans writes about the ‘Expo’ in his 2013 book Oorlog enTurpentijn (‘War and Turpentine’), which I’m currently reading (and which, incidentally, offers some fascinating insights into life in Ghent in the early twentieth century):
He [the writer’s grandfather] often roams the city, which is being turned upside down for the forthcoming world’s fair. La Grande Expo Internationale is expected to put Ghent on the world map. There is some controversy about the organization of the event and the costs. Early on, the French-speaking bourgeoisie takes the lead, mainly because the Germans are thinking about investing in the event. That incites the rising Flemish bourgeoisie to play the German card, in the knowledge that their German brothers support their struggle against Francophone supremacy in their own city. In short, as the Ghent World’s Fair approaches, German and French interests are already directly opposed. Amid the cacophony of world’s fairs in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is just one more disturbing sign of things to come. No one seems to recognize the squabbling in Ghent as a symbol of anything larger, except perhaps of the Franco-Prussian War forty years earlier and other conflicts of the past. Thanks to pressure from Ghent’s Francophone bourgeoisie, the French ultimately gain the upper hand. The Germans withdraw from the organizing committee and it becomes a completely French-language project, chaotic and poorly managed. No one really has any need for yet another international exhibition, except for the ambitious city of Ghent. The Flemish middle class grumbles, complaining that the enemy is now among Ghent’s own people – with their Francophone arrogance, the haute bourgeoisie are a ‘foreign element’ in the heart of their community. The first tears in the fabric are already visible, in a project that was meant as a show of unity.[1]
The exhibition catalogue, which is in French, lists Gerard Ceunis under ‘Groupe II. Beaux-Arts: Œuvres modernes’, and notes the title of his entry as ‘Coucher de Soleil’ – i.e. ‘Sunset’. In an earlier post, I wrote about Ceunis’ admiration for, and debt to, the Belgian luminist Emile Claus (whom Gerard and his friends had persuaded to be involved in their short-lived literary journal ‘Iris’ some years earlier), whose work included a number of striking paintings of sunsets. Both Ceunis’ granddaughter Tessa Cathcart and his great niece Elsie De Cuyper have sent me copies of an undated picture by Gerard of sunset on a river. I had always assumed this was a drawing, rather than a monochrome version of a painting, but I wonder if there is any connection with the painting Ceunis exhibited in 1913?
The catalogue for the Universal Exposition gives Gerard Ceunis’ address as ‘Rue Mercator, 8’ in Ghent. I assume this is a French rendering of (Geraard) Mercatorstraat, which is just to the north of the old city centre. If so, then the photograph below may show the house where Gerard was living at the time, with his wife Alice, whom he had married two years previously, and their infant daughter Vanna:
Geraard Mercatorstraat 8, Ghent (image via google.co.uk/maps)
The ‘Expo’ closed in November 2013. Within a year, the First World War had broken out, Germany had invaded Belgium, and Gerard Ceunis and his young family had fled to England, which would become their permanent home.
Note
From War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, translated by David McKay, published by Penguin Random House UK, London.
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.
Gerard Ceunis’ great niece, Elsie De Cuyper, has sent me a copy of the catalogue of an exhibition of the artist’s paintings that took place at Hitchin Museum. The document is undated, but since Ceunis died in 1964, I would assume that the exhibition took place in either the 1950s or the early 1960s, though of course it might be earlier. It can’t be earlier than the 1940s, which was when the artistic style known as ‘Tachism’, mentioned in Ceunis’ catalogue notes, came into vogue.
Part of the value of the catalogue is that it provides us with a list of what Ceunis himself considered to be his important works, assuming that he selected them for the show. Some of the titles are familiar and relate to pictures that have featured in previous posts on this site, but many are of paintings that are no longer in the public domain and which one would dearly love to see. Ceunis’ pictures of St Mary’s church and the market place in Hitchin can still be seen in the collection of what is now North Hertfordshire Museum, but it would be fascinating to see his depictions of other familiar places in the town, such as St Mary’s Square, Ickleford Mill and the lavender fields, all of which are included in this catalogue. A large number of the pictures in this exhibition – at least half of them, by my reckoning – take flowers as their subject, confirming that they were a favourite subject for the artist, even if they weren’t (pace the obituary quoted in a recent post) his ‘best work’.
Another valuable feature of the catalogue is the inclusion of Ceunis’ own introduction to his work, which provides us with some insight into his aesthetic outlook at this stage in his life. His pragmatism and disdain for artistic jargon are a world away from the passionate espousal of Symbolism and Aestheticism that characterised his youthful manifesto for Iris, the literary journal that he co-founded with a group of friends in Ghent in the early 1900s. However, the catalogue notes also reflect Ceunis’ sense of humour, and his obvious capacity to communicate his ideas to a general, non-specialist audience. The reference to a ‘dirty dustbin’ being as likely a subject of art as a ‘splendid cathedral’ recalls the obituary mentioned earlier, in which Ceunis was quoted as saying that ‘a dustbin and a dirty backyard’ might form as good a subject for a painting as a ‘pretty cottage’.
It’s interesting to see the range of prices attached to the list of paintings and, from a historical perspective, to see them given in guineas rather than pounds. (For younger readers: a guinea was equivalent to one pound and one shilling.) The cheapest painting is offered at 12 guineas, the most expensive at 50. If the exhibition took place in (say) 1955, then the lowest price would have been equivalent to about £500 and the highest about £1400 in today’s money.
Only two paintings in the catalogue do not have a price alongside their title, presumably because they were not for sale. One of these is ‘Tessa’, almost certainly a portrait of the artist’s granddaughter, the daughter of his only child, Vanna. Perhaps it was this ‘negative’ painting of Tessa, a copy of which Elsie De Cuyper sent me recently:
The other painting not for sale was apparently a portrait of ‘Mrs Lillian Hall-Davis.’ Regular readers of this blog may recall that she was mentioned in an earlier post. Lillian Hall-Davis was a popular actress of the silent screen era, and a resident for a while of Hertfordshire. In his account of the summer he spent with the Ceunis family in Hitchin in 1929, in the novel Lago Maggiore, the Belgian writer Johan Daisne notes that Hall-Davis lived ‘in a country house nearby’ [my translation].
Lillian Hall-Davis (via en.wikipedia.org)
But how did Gerard Ceunis come to paint the portrait of a former film star? The answer may lie in Johan Vanhecke’s exhaustive biography of Daisne, a copy of which I’ve just received from the author, and in which I see that Lillian Hall-Davis is mentioned more than once. I’ll have more to say on this when I’ve translated the relevant pages of Johan’s book.
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.
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?
Towards the end of last year I was contacted by Jackie Sablan, who lives (I believe) in Austin, Texas. Jackie had been searching online for information about Gerard Ceunis, as she is the proud owner of three of his paintings, which she bought in Clare, Suffolk, in 2007.
At my request, Jackie kindly sent me photographs of the paintings (above). The first one bears the title ‘Ulenspiegel’ and seems to depict a scene from a Flemish folktale about a legendary prankster, while the second is entitled ‘Riviera Doll’. I’m not sure about the title of the third picture.
I have to confess to being a little sceptical about these paintings to begin with, since they seemed unlike any other pictures by Ceunis that I’d previously seen. Could these whimsical, some might say rather kitsch, pictures really be by the artist who painted ‘Flemish Room’?
Gerard Ceunis, ‘Flemish Room’, c. 1930 (Letterenhuis, Antwerp)
But then, it’s difficult to make a judgement of this kind, given that there are so few of Ceunis’ paintings in the public domain, not to mention the fact that the artist’s own granddaughter tells me that those in public collections are unrepresentative of his oeuvre as a whole. On the other hand, the third painting, depicting a figurine of an elegantly-dressed bewigged gentleman against the background of a formal country estate, does bear a passing resemblance to Ceunis’ painting ‘Nacre’, now in North Hertfordshire Museum.
Gerard Ceunis, ‘Nacre’ (North Hertfordshire Museum)
However, Jackie was able to confirm that all three of the paintings in her possession are actually by Ceunis. Not only do they bear his signature, they also have labels attached with the artist’s name and address.
The most legible of these labels is the one that accompanies ‘Riviera Doll’ (above). Like the labels on the other two pictures, it indicates that this was a work submitted to (an exhibition of?) the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, whose gallery address was in Piccadilly, London. The Royal Institute, which is still going strong, has a membership restricted to about 65 members, who are elected by existing members. Annual exhibitions are open to general submission. Its gallery at 195 Piccadilly seems to have closed in 1970 when the Institute moved to the Mall Galleries.
Gerard Ceunis gives his own address as the Rowley Gallery, a fine art dealer in Kensington Church Street, which is also still in existence. The sale price for this particular painting appears to be 35 guineas. However, without knowing the date of the exhibition at which it was shown, it’s difficult to assess its equivalent value today.
Following the demise of his literary magazine, Iris, and the poor reception afforded to his own literary efforts, including his plays The Captive Princess (1909) andGothic Fairy Tale (1910), Gerard Ceunis decided to turn his attention to the visual arts. According to Christophe Verbruggen, Ceunis enrolled at the Ghent Academy, graduating in 1912, and in the following year exhibited for the first time at the Ghent Salon.
Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent (via nl.wikipedia.org)
After he moved to England in 1914, Ceunis continued to paint, even as he worked at developing his clothing business in London and Hitchin. Information about his artistic output in those early years in England is hard to come by, but I’ve found a couple of references online to exhibitions that took place soon after Ceunis’ arrival.
On 10th March 1915 the ‘London Letter’ column of the Aberdeen Press and Journal included a piece headed ‘Belgian Art of the Newer School’, reporting on ‘a modest but quite interesting little show’ at the Municipal Art Gallery in Kingston-on-Thames. Gerard Ceunis is listed as one of the ‘better-known Belgian artists whose work will be seen in this country for the first time.’
In the following year, a number of paintings by Belgian artists were exhibited at Folkestone Museum, including Ceunis’ ‘Chrysanthemums’, described by the Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate and Cheriton Herald of 8th July 1916 as ‘a painting of some splendid specimens well worthy of the artist’s attention.’
Gerard Ceunis, ‘Still Life With Flowers in a Glass Vase’ (undated, private collection)
There is then a long gap in the record – or, at least, in what I’ve been able to discover so far – until 1930, which seems to have been something of an annus mirabilis for Gerard Ceunis. It was in this year that, according to Christophe Verbruggen, the Arlington Gallery in Old Bond Street, London staged a retrospective of Ceunis’ work by:
His work was highly thought of in England. Ceunis was discussed positively in the leading art magazines and national newspapers. A large-scale retrospective at the famous Arlington Gallery in London in 1930 was opened by the Belgian ambassador.
On 5th February 1930 The Scotsman included the following appraisal by ‘our London critic’ of the retrospective, beneath a review of an exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell:
How different is the work of Gerard Ceunis at the Arlington Gallery. The artist, a Belgian, declares in his foreword that ‘these landscapes, flower pieces, portraits, and still-life studies are meant to be receptacles for holding a much more important treasure: My Rapture.
He then proceeds to unfold the meaning of this. He is a bold man who these cynical days claims to possess unique Raptures, but the possession is even rarer than the genius for communicating them to others. M. Ceunis, it must be confessed, communicates to us from these heavily loaded, gaudily coloured paintings no particularly novel or agreeable sensations. But in one case he has succeeded completely his emotions, although these we can hardly believe to have been rapturous. This in a picture entitled ‘The Cabin’, a delightful study of ‘mal-de-mer’.
A review in the arts section of the Yorkshire Post on 6th February was also somewhat equivocal:
Mr Gerard Ceunis, whose oil paintings are now on view at the Arlington Gallery, has been bold enough to write a foreword to his own work. He pleads for sympathetic collaboration by those who would judge his work. Such collaboration is, of course, always necessary for the enjoyment of any painting from Cimabue to Picasso. We will only get as much from a picture as we can give ourselves. But of Mr Ceunis’s own work we would only say that it is best when it is simplest. This applies more especially to his colour, which suffers sometimes from over-elaboration. ‘Head of a Girl’ (16) is a pleasing portrait, for which the charm of the sitter is not wholly responsible. It is simple in line and colour. We preferred ‘Still Life’ (26) and ‘Flowers’ (27) to the ‘Curtain’ (28), though we note that they are priced at a lower figure in the catalogue. We suspect that Mr Ceunis paints the better when he is less anxious in analysis and the more restrained. Reserve is a vital ingredient in art. The Greeks never forgot it, and it was their enduring legacy to mankind.
An exhibition of modern paintings at Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery in the same year included four canvases by Ceunis, and was reviewed in the Hull Daily Mail on 31st March. Three of the paintings were described as ‘most excellent examples of the best form of impressionist art…each with a still life or floral subject carried out with heavy inlay of colour.’ The review continued: ‘In spite of the very definite colouring and curious treatment, each is a perfect reproduction of its subject.’ The reviewer was less keen on a fourth Ceunis canvas, entitled ‘Sunlight’, warning that it ‘may strike the viewer as being too lurid’. A further exhibition at the same gallery in the following year, this time of work by Belgian artists, included, according to the Hull Daily Mail of 16th July 1931, ‘two flower pieces’ by Gerard Ceunis ‘whose work has several times graced other exhibitions in our Hull gallery’.
Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find reproductions online of any of the paintings mentioned in these reviews. However, the painting that Ceunis submitted for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, also in 1930, entitled ‘Flemish Interior’, is almost certainly identical to ‘Flemish Room’, the painting of his which the Letterenhuis in Antwerp accepted after the artist’s death, at the insistence of the author Johan Daisne (see this post). This painting, somewhat reminiscent of the interiors by Pierre Bonnard, has a depth and richness lacking in some of the artist’s other work, and is a personal favourite of mine.
By comparison with Theodor Kern, the other Hitchin-based émigré artist whose life I’ve been researching, Gerard Ceunis seems poorly represented in public collections, at least in those that I’ve been able to access so far online. For example, while the ArtUK website includes reproductions of 101 paintings by Kern, mainly from the collection at Wardown Park Museum in Luton and a few from galleries elsewhere, the page devoted to Ceunis has only 9 pieces, all of them owned by North Hertfordshire Museum. Most of these are dated 1930 or thereabouts, and are in a rather plain, realist style which (with the possible exception of the painting of St Mary’s church at night) I personally find less interesting than the impressionism of ‘Flemish Room’. Three of the pictures are of Hitchin market place while a fourth depicts the view from the square towards St Mary’s church. Two further paintings are views of the church itself, from beside the River Hiz, while another is of a tree in Priory Park, close to the artist’s home in Gosmore Road. As for the final two paintings, one is entitled simple ‘Nacre’ (mother-of-pearl), while the other is a portrait of the Hitchin historian Reginald Hine, with whom Ceunis collaborated on an illustrated history of the town (to be featured in a future post):
I’ve managed to find reproductions of two other paintings on an auction site : the floral piece reproduced earlier in this post, and this rather poor image of a painting of ‘Oughton Head Near Hitchin’, which was apparently purchased by Chrystabel Waldock for £5 in 1944 (I believe she was a relative of Hitchin businessman Robert Waldock, a leading member of Hitchin Art Club):
It’s possible that there are many more surviving examples of Gerard Ceunis’ artistic work in private collections, or possibly in galleries in Belgium or elsewhere. I would certainly be interested to hear from anyone who has come across any paintings by Ceunis, besides those featured in this post.
The Quest for Ceunis 