In an earlier post on this site I wrote about Gerard Ceunis’ family origins in Belgium, drawing on information supplied to me by Elsie De Cuyper, the artist’s great niece. Elise has also sent me some photographs of her grandfather, Florimond Ceunis, who was Gerard’s brother, and has kindly given me permission to share them on this blog.
As I’ve noted before, Gerard Jules Ceunis was born on 8th December 1884 in Ghent, the youngest of the six children of newspaper typesetter and compositor Prosper Ceunis (1840 – 1897) and his wife Coleta, née Nicaes (1847 – 1931). Gerard’s older brothers and sisters were: Maria (1866 – 1871); Oscar (b. 1871); Charles (1877 – 1925); Florimond (1878 – 1962); and Marie (1878 – 1956).
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis on their wedding day in 1915
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis in their garden in 1953
Another photograph of Florimond and Mathilde in their garden
Florimond Ceunis married Mathilde De Vogelaere in 1915. According to Elsie De Cuyper, her grandparents kept a shop in Ghent which sold hosiery and related items, perhaps providing a clue as to why Gerard chose women’s clothing as the focus of his business after his move to England.
Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis’ daughter Bertha, born in 1922, was their only child. She married Roger De Cuyper, an artist who had studied art at the Atheneum in Ostend. Roger and Bertha’s daughter Elsie was born in 1946 and their son Frank Roger Florimond De Cuyper in 1957. As I’ve noted before, Frank is a widely published author of science fiction, under the name of Frank Roger.
Elsie De Cuyper has shared with me some examples of her father, Roger De Cuyper’s work, including the linocut of a snowbound village which Elise sent me on a card last year. She also sent me the photograph, reproduced above, of her father at an exhibition of his paintings.
Elsie is something of an artist herself. Some of her pieces, including the image of a sunset over water, reproduced above, put me in mind of her great uncle Gerard Ceunis’ paintings, and I particularly like the muted colours of the snowy landscape in the picture reproduced on the Christmas card which I received from Elise just the other day:
Clearly, artistic and literary talent have been passed down through the generations in the Ceunis family.
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.
When Gerard Ceunis and his friends set out to found their literary magazine,Iris, in Ghent in 1907, they enlisted the support, as members of the editorial board, of two distinguished figures. One was the renowned sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and the other was the painter Emile Claus. Although both names would appear in bold letters on the cover of the first issue, which was designed by Ceunis (see this post), the two men’s roles in the magazine were nominal, rather than practical. As Professor Christophe Verbruggen comments, in his history of Belgian literature of the belle époque [my translation]: ‘by committing their names they gave the project prestige so that subscribers and employees could be brought on board’.
Emile Claus (via en.wikipedia.org)
It’s not surprising that Gerard Ceunis approached Emile Claus, since he was a great admirer of the latter’s work. In his artistic manifesto for the magazine, Ceunis mentions Claus in his discussion of the unity of the arts, and in support of his argument, clearly borrowed from the work of Walter Pater, that all art, whether visual or literary, aspires to the condition of music [my translation]:
And we have no wish to see the means of expression from the outset, but rather the embodied image, the art-expressed impression. And so we mention Baudelaire and Aubrey Beardsley in one breath, so many works by the harmonist Claus suggest to us Beethoven’s Pastorale, and so we experience Le Sidaner and G. Rodenbach like a melancholic poem.
Born in 1949 in a village on the banks of the River Leie or Lys, about twenty miles south-west of Ghent, Emile Claus was strongly influenced by the work of the French Impressionists, and in particular Claude Monet. However, in the course of his artistic career Claus developed his own very personal style of painting, known as ‘luminism’, because of the luminous effects he sought to create. Claus is considered to be the pioneer of Belgian luminism: in 1904 he founded the Vie et Lumière (‘life and light’) society and became known as the ‘painter of the Lys’. I used the first of the two paintings below to illustrate my translation of Gerard Ceunis’ story ‘Legend’, which is set by the banks of the river:
Emile Claus, ‘Brouillard sur la Lys’(Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, France)
Emile Claus, ‘Coucher de soleil sur la Lys’, 1911(private collection)
Like Ceunis, Emile Claus was driven into exile in England by the First World War, though unlike the younger artist he returned home after the conflict, living and eventually dying in 1924 in the village of Astene near Ghent. Among Claus’ students in the luminist school/style was the painter Anna de Weert, who kept a studio beside the Lys in the village of Afsnee, which had associations with the Ceunis family (see this post).
As a painter, Gerard Ceunis was clearly influenced by Emile Claus, particularly in the early stages of his artistic career. A number of his paintings could be described as luminist, aiming for similar lighting effects to those that Claus displayed in his work. My sense is that Ceunis was particularly influenced by the paintings that Claus produced during his exile in London, which included a number of views of the Thames, often at sunset:
Emile Claus, ‘Sunset on the Thames’(private collection)
Emile Claus, ‘Sunset over Waterloo Bridge’(Galerij Oscar De Vos, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium)
Claus’ influence on Gerard Ceunis is evident in more than a few of the latter’s paintings. Like Claus, Ceunis had a particular liking for watery scenes and a preference for capturing the light at sunset, as in these two paintings from the private collection of Rid Burnett, the second of which is obviously indebted to the works of Claus’ London period:
One can also detect a lingering luminist influence in the reflected light in the river in Ceunis’ 1930 nocturnal painting of St Mary’s church in Hitchin:
A debt to Emile Claus can even be seen in this undated drawing by Ceunis of boats on a river (the Lys?) at sunset, copies of which have been sent to me by both the artist’s granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, and his great niece, Elsie DeCuyper:
If I’m right in thinking that these later works, created after Gerard Ceunis had settled in England, display the continuing influence of Emile Claus and of luminism, then perhaps Christophe Verbruggen is mistaken when he writes that, after the First World War, Ceunis ‘evolved from an impressionism in the luminist style of Emile Claus …. in the direction of the more expressive style of Van Gogh’. If only there were more paintings by Ceunis in the public domain to enable us to assess whether that judgement is true!
In a post last year I shared this 1908 photograph of members of the ‘Flinken’, the group of young feminists active in Ghent in the early years of the last century, of which Alice van Damme, the future wife of Gerard Ceunis, was a member. It was through the connection established between the Flinken and the radical group Reiner Leven, led by the future historian of science George Sarton, that Alice and Gerard met.
I came across the photograph in a book chapter by Christophe Verbruggen, who in turn sourced it from Lewis Pyenson’s 2008 biography, The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and its Discipline. I found it frustrating that the photograph, as reproduced in Verbruggen’s chapter, was without a caption identifying the young women posing for it.
However, I’ve now acquired a copy of Pyenson’s book, which does include information about the identities of those in the photo. According to Pyenson they are, from the left: Marie Mees, Alice van Damme, Marie Praet, Esther Delahaye and Marthe Patyn. Standing on the right are Victorie Ledewyn and Lucie Boulanger. Seated on the right are Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye.
This means that we now have two photographs of the future Alice Ceunis as a young woman: I recently identified her, alongside Gerard, in a photo from the same period, of Flinken and Reiner Leven members on an outing to Knokke. Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye are also in both photographs and I wrote about them in that recent post.
I don’t know much about the other Flinken members in the posed group picture, apart for the basic information provided by researcher Anne Marie van der Meersch which is reproduced in Professor Verbruggen’s chapter. We know from that list that Marie Mees was born in 1886, the daughter of a labourer or workman, and that in 1910 she herself was working as a shopkeeper. Marie Praet was also born in 1886 and her father was also a labourer, while she was employed as a seamstress. Esther Delahaye, also born in 1886, was the daughter of a servant and she was a governess. The father of Marthe Patyn, was born in 1885, was a cabinet-maker, while she herself was a student nurse. However, other sources state that Patyn worked as a secretary for the Dangotte firm of interior decorators, and that she was responsible for recruiting Céline Dangotte and her family’s English lodger Mabel Elwes, the future wife of George Sarton, to the group. Born in 1875, Victoire Ledewijn was a servant’s daughter and was herself a civil servant. Lucie Boulanger, born in 1884, was also the daughter of a servant, and she worked as a telephonist.
There is only one direct reference to Gerard Ceunis in Pyenson’s biography, which is based largely on George Sarton and Mabel Elwes’ letters to each other. However, from what I’ve read of the book so far, I believe it will prove to be another valuable source, complementing the accounts by their daughter May Sarton, for understanding the fascinating social and cultural networks in which Gerard and Ceunis participated during their early years in Belgium.
In addition to the still life with flowers that I wrote about the other day, his great niece Elsie De Cuyper has sent me photographs of two other paintings by Gerard Ceunis that I hadn’t seen before. They demonstrate the sheer stylistic diversity to be found in the artist’s work.
The first painting, an untitled picture of a doll in traditional (Flemish?) costume, set against the background of a rural landscape with a building that resembles a church, with a cross visible on a distant hillside, is reminiscent of two of the Ceunis paintings owned by Jackie Sablan – ‘Riviera Doll’ and the untitled picture featuring a figurine of a bewigged eighteenth-century gentleman – which I wrote about here. Both figures are similarly set against a rural background and, in fact, the church-like building in the second painting is almost identical to the one in the picture sent to me by Elsie.
The second ‘new’ painting is unfortunately only a black-and-white reproduction, with the title ‘Vieille Maison à Gand’ (Old house in Ghent). This is the picture, accompanied by a handwritten greeting from Gerard and Alice, that I referred to in the last post. It depicts what appears to be an elderly couple, sitting on either side of the front door of their house, which seems to be situated alongside one of the rivers that runs through the city.
Personally, even on the basis of a monochrome version, I find this realistic and expressive style of Ceunis’ more appealing than his (to me) rather kitsch pictures of dolls and figurines. However, I wonder if both can be seen as expressing something of the artist’s nostalgic longing for his homeland? In his obituary of his ‘uncle’ Gerard, the writer Johan Daisne noted that ‘his most beautiful and best known paintings are of flowers, Hitchin’s ancient church, and memories of Flanders’. It would seem that many of Ceunis’ paintings of his homeland, including the superb ‘Flemish Room’ which is now in the Letterenhuis in Antwerp, were composed after he moved to England, and reflect an exile’s feelings about what he has left behind. I wonder if the paintings of dolls and figurines are meant to be stylised representations of aspects of Flemish culture, with the landscapes behind them drawing on the artist’s memories of his Belgian childhood? It could be that there are symbols and tropes in these pictures that I’m missing: if so, perhaps someone reading this might be able to provide a more insightful interpretation of these pictures than my own.
The photograph above was taken in 1907 or 1908 on an outing from Ghent to Knokke by members of the radical groups Reiner Leven and De Flinken. When I first posted a copy of this photo, nearly a year ago, I was unsure of the identities of the people in the picture. I hadn’t realised – or at least, I hadn’t been able to confirm – that the group included Gerard Ceunis and the woman who would become his wife, Alice Van Damme. However, I’ve now traced the photograph to its source, in the catalogue of the Letterenhuis – the Museum of Flemish Literature, based in Antwerp – which helpfully names those featured in the photo.
From left to right, the photograph shows: Augusta de Taeye, Melanie Lorein, Lisbeth Verwest, Raymond Limbosch, Céline Dangotte, Gerard Ceunis and Alice Van Damme.
Augusta de Taeye (1885 – 1976) was a feminist teacher and educational pioneer. She married the educator and science populariser Leo-Michel Thiery (1877 – 1950). They were the parents of Herman Thiery, who wrote under the name Johan Daisne (see the previous post).
Melanie Lorein (1886 – 1977) was at one time linked romantically with the pioneering historian of science George Sarton (see his daughter May Sarton‘s memoir I Knew a Phoenix, which I wrote about here), though he would eventually marry another Flinken member, Mabel Elwes. Melanie would marry the Polish-born socialist Viktor Alter (1890 – 1941), though she remained in Belgium when he returned home to lead the Jewish socialist Bund. He was executed in one of Stalin’s purges in 1941.
Lisbeth Verwest (1885 – 1921) was a poet. She would marry the painter Robert Aerens. She is the ‘Tantelle’ of Johan Daisne’s novel Lago Maggiore (see this post). Having become ill while her husband was serving at the front in the First World War, she died in a sanatorium in 1921.
Raymond Limbosch (1884 – 1953) was a poet and philosopher. He would marry Céline Dangotte.
Céline Dangotte (1883 – 1975) inherited her mother’s interior design business but in later life also became known as a writer. She was married to Raymond Limbosch. May Sarton wrote a tribute to her in her essay collection A World of Light and fictionalised her life story in the novel The Bridge of Years.
It’s wonderful to have another photograph of Gerard Ceunis, as there are so few of him in the public domain. He’s dressed quite formally here, as I suppose was the style at the time, though his hair looks rather longer and more unruly than in later photographs of him as an established businessman in England. It’s also wonderful to have a picture of him alongside, and smiling at, Alice who, unfortunately, has turned away from the camera at the key moment.
The copy of the photograph in the Letterenhuis collection is from the archives of Johan Daisne. Alice Van Damme is referred to in the catalogue as ‘Lize’, which appears to have been the version of her name by which Daisne knew her: in Lago Maggiore he writes about staying with ‘Aunt Lize and Uncle Gerard’ in Hitchin in the summer of 1929. Daisne seems to have regarded a number of the members of Reiner Leven and De Flinken as his aunts and uncles.
The sheer happiness that these young people felt in each other’s company shines through this photograph from more than a century ago. Less than a decade later, the cataclysm of a world war and the invasion of their country would scatter them to the four winds and utterly change their lives.
Among the many items relating to Gerard Ceunis that his great niece Elsie De Cuyper kindly shared with me (see the previous post) is a two-page handwritten account by the artist, in English, of his family’s connection with Charles Beelaert, a wealthy Ghent resident and benefactor. I’m still struggling to reconcile this story with the printed family history that Elsie also sent me, but for now I’ll simply present Ceunis’ narrative as I found it. I assume that the family legend of his grandmother marrying an adventurer and deserter from the French royalist army, not to mention the suggestion of aristocratic connections and a lost family fortune, would have appealed strongly to Gerard Ceunis’ romantic imagination.
The opening paragraph of Ceunis’ handwritten narrative
Charles Beelaert by Gerard Ceunis
Along the Coupure (1), Ghent, the Hospital, a large building, bearing an inscription and the name of Charles Beelaert. He was my great-uncle, my grandmother’s brother. They lived at Afsnee, 5 or 6 miles from Ghent in the Kasteel van Afsnee (2). There was also a second sister, who was known by my parents as Meetje – being my brother’s godmother. They were wealthy. They had the lone fishing rights on the Lys for many miles. The knowledge of this fact gave me much satisfaction when I went fishing in that river as a boy, even though I never caught anything.
The youngest Beelaert sister, who was to become my grandmother, fell in love with a certain Ceunis, a kind of adventurer whom the family thought to have been a deserter from the followers of the French King when he stayed at Ghent during the Napoleonic Disturbances (3). The romance was not looked upon with favour by the Kasteel, and the couple eloped. There was a usual sequel – a baby, a girl. The event softened Beelaert’s heart. The lovers married and were allowed to return to Afsnee and to live in the Kasteel. They stayed there happily for many years during which four more children were born, all boys. My father was the eldest.
Alas, Ceunis died. His wife, my grandmother, still youngish, soon married another man, and left the Kasteel. The five children however were brought up by Beelaert and his sister. All was very well till one day, the two eldest boys, home from college, behaved as though they were ‘fils a papa’ (4) and strutted about in the village with top hats, walking sticks and so forth. Charles Beelaert did not stand for that. There were frequent quarrels and at last a final rupture. The Ceunis children were sent away from the Kasteel. By then, the eldest, born away, had already married. She became the wife of Van Assche, a well-known and rich notaire from Ghent. I always thought that his house in the Nederkouter (near the famous Verloren Brood Straatje) was one of the nicest Renaissance residences of the town (5). I hope it is still there, intact. The four brothers had to look out for jobs, and there was much poverty in the land. Anyhow what did it matter. They were the only heirs to the Beelaerts’ fortune, and ‘Meetje’ was extremely kind to them. There was no complete enmity either. I heard many tales of functions and family reunions, which my parents had to attend and where they met many of Beelaert’s rich friends, especially Roman Catholic bishops and similar high-placed clericals.
Alas again, ‘Meetje’ died before her brother. No more help. When Beelaert himself passed [from] this life, the event was soon known by my parents’ neighbours, and they streamed to the house to express their congratulations. The Ceunisses were rich. At least they thought so for a few days. When the will was read – a bombshell! The entire fortune was left to the Hospice for the purpose of erecting a Hospital at Ghent (probably much needed).
Oh yes. There was a court case. The findings were not satisfactory, a small percentage was allotted to the heirs. Divided into five parts, it did not come to much. I know that most of this went into town shares, which eventually all dwindled down to nothing –
Perhaps, for a time it helped to [sic] our education.
That is the reason why the Hospital building bears the name of Charles Beelaert. [6]
At his funeral each mourner (and there were many) carried a candle which held a golden coin in the wax.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Coupure was a busy commercial canal connecting Ghent with Bruges, lined with expensive town houses.
Afsnee is a village on the Lys river to the south-west of Ghent. ‘Kasteel’ is Dutch/Flemish for a castle or manor house. The village was famously home to the Belgian Luminist painter Anna De Weert (1867 – 1950).
Louis XVIII of France fled to Ghent in May 1815 after Napoleon’s return from Elba and the defection of Marshal Ney.
A French phrase meaning ‘little big man’, or alternatively ‘spoilt brat’.
Nederkouter is a long street in the centre of Ghent, while Verloren Brood Straatje literally means ‘lost bread street’.
Interestingly, I’ve come across a similar story of a lost fortune in my own family history, recounted in her autobiography by my distant relative, the New Zealand crime novelist Ngaio Marsh. Perhaps every family has a story of this kind. See this blog post: https://mprobb.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-seager-family-a-new-discovery/
Googling Gerard Ceunis’ name recently, I came across a number of websites which mentioned the Belgian novelist and short-story writer Frank Roger, who turns out to be Ceunis’ great nephew. Roger’s work has been described as a blend of ‘fantasy, satire, surrealism, science fiction and black humour, all constantly cross-pollinating each other’: I can recommend his collection, The Burning Woman and Other Stories, a copy of which I managed to get hold of last week.
Frank Roger was born in 1957 in Ghent, as Frank Roger Florimond De Cuyper. His father was the painter Roger De Cuyper (1921 – 2008), and his mother was Bertha Ceunis, the daughter of Florimond Ceunis, brother of Gerard. This much I discovered from an email exchange with Frank, who has been generous in providing me with information about his family, as well as recommending this website on his official Facebook page.
Frank also very helpfully put me in touch with his sister Elsie De Cuyper, who has a veritable treasure trove of material relating to Gerard Ceunis, much of which she has kindly shared with me via email. It’s going to take me a while to work my way through everything that Elsie has sent, and it will take a number of posts to report on the new information about Ceunis that I’ve discovered as a result. In this post, I’ll begin by trying to summarise what I’ve learned from these documents, and from Frank’s and Elsie’s emails, about Gerard Ceunis’ family origins.
The grave of Gerard Ceunis’ parents, Prosper and Coleta Ceunis
Gerard Jules Ceunis was born on 8th December 1884 in Ghent, Belgium, the youngest of the six children of newspaper typesetter and compositor Prosper Ceunis (1840 – 1897) and his wife Coleta, née Nicaes (1847 – 1931), who were married in 1870. Prosper was the son of Jean Livinus Ceunis (1809 – 1849) and Maria Francesca, née Elias. Jean was in turn the son of Francis Xavier Ceunis (1770 – 1826) and his wife Maria Sofia, née Van de Vijver. (The names in the original family history document are in Latin, so some of the names in this post are my guesses at their French or Flemish equivalents.)
Prosper and Coleta’s other children besides Gerard were: Maria, born before her parents’ marriage (1866 – 1871), Oscar (b. 1871), Charles (1877 – 1925), Florimond (1878 – 1962) and Marie (1878 – 1956).
According to Elsie De Cuyper, her grandfather Florimond Ceunis, Gerard’s brother, was a travelling salesman, while his wife Mathilde, née De Vogelaere, kept a shop in Ghent that was part of the same business. Elsie sent me a copy of the card shown above, which suggests that Florimond’s business, selling items such as shirts, underwear, hosiery and gloves, was rather similar to that of his brother Gerard, who sold women’s clothing at ‘Maison Gerard’, his shop in Hitchin market square.
Bertha, born in 1922, was Florimond and Mathilde Ceunis’ only child. She married Roger De Cuyper, who had studied art at the Atheneum in Ostend. He is described by one source as a figurative painter with a tendency towards abstraction, who painted beach scenes and seascapes as well as impressions from his travels in France, Switzerland, Spain and the former Yugoslavia. Roger and Bertha’s daughter Elsie was born in 1946 and their son Frank in 1957.
The documents sent to me by Elsie De Cuyper include an account, in English, by Gerard Ceunis himself, of his family’s connection with the prominent Beelaert family. I’ll write about this in a separate post.
Last week I reported that Jackie Sablan had sent me photographs of three paintings by Gerard Ceunis which she bought some years ago. Now another reader, Rid Burnett, has got in touch with information about three Ceunis paintings which he inherited from his late father-in-law, a Hitchin doctor, and has also kindly sent photographs. The family story is that Dr George Carter, who lived in Tilehouse Street in the town, was given the pictures by the artist in lieu of medical fees.
One of the paintings, which is 44 x 39 cm in size, bears the title ‘Ghent’ on the back of the frame and features a view of boats on the canal in the artist’s home city. It appears to be a version of the picture that featured on the Christmas card sent to me last year by Ceunis’ granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, and which at the time of writing I’m using as the header image for this website. However, the copy owned by Rid is in a fairly conventional realist style, while ‘Canal in Ghent’ employs the impressionist / pointillist technique that is familiar from some of Ceunis’ other paintings.
A second painting, whose dimensions are 37 x 54 cm, is untitled but appears to depict a seashore at evening. It’s also impressionistic in style, showing the setting sun reflected in the pale blue of the water, with the shoreline and buildings a shadowy blur.
The third picture, labelled ‘Soir’ (80 x 57 cm), shows another evening scene, a dramatic sunset providing a background for skaters on a frozen lake or river, with a rather mournful looking balloon seller and his brightly-coloured wares dominating the foreground.
Ceunis clearly enjoyed depicting skaters: see also his drawing of a frozen river at St Ippolyts in Reginald Hine’s The Story of Hitchin Town:
I’m grateful to Rid, and also to Jackie, for sharing these paintings with me and making them available to a wider audience.
I’ve written before about the Belgian poet and novelist Johan Daisne (1912 – 1978), who as a young man, in 1929, spent the summer with Gerard and Alice Ceunis at ‘Salve’, their house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where the future writer fell hopelessly in love with the Ceunises’ daughter Vanna. Johan Daisne was the pen name of Herman Thiery, and he was the son of Leo Michel Thiery and Augusta de Taeye, both members as students in Ghent of the radical groups Reiner Leven and De Flinken, which was how they befriended Gerard and Alice.
As a child, Daisne got to know not only Gerard Ceunis and his future wife Alice Van Damme, but many other members of their network of artists, writers and scientists in Ghent, whom he came to regard as his uncles and aunts. They feature in his 1957 novel Lago Maggiore: De roman van een man; de roman van een vrouw, which appears to mix fact and fiction in a magic realist style. As far as I can ascertain, the novel, which was written in Dutch/Flemish, has not been translated into English. I’ve purchased a secondhand copy of a German translation, partly because my knowledge of German is better than my understanding of Dutch, and also for the simple reason that it was much cheaper.
So far, I’ve come across two references in the book to Gerard and Alice Ceunis. The first occurs in a long section in which the novelist writes admiringly about his ‘aunt’ Lisbeth Verwest , a member of ‘De Flinken’ and a poet in her own right, who would go on to marry the painter Robert Aerens. In the novel her name is shortened to ‘Tante L’, which then becomes ‘Tantelle’. Daisne writes [my translation]:
Tantelle had started out as a simple seamstress, but she had wanted to work her way up and had been noticed by the ‘Reiner Leven’ group, in which rich and poor young people came together in their idealism. There she had met my aunts and uncles who were a little older than her; the poet Raymond Limbosch, who died a few years ago; the future American professor George Sarton, the father of the History of Science, and the playmate of my childhood vacations, the novelist Mary Sarton. There Tante L had also met the painters Gerard Ceunis, who now lives in Hertfordshire, and Robert Aerens. And shortly before the war broke out, Elisa Verwest had become Lisbeth Aerens-Verwest. At that time she lived alone in her little villa in Afsnee while Robert was at the front; and you can still read her daydreams in the posthumous book of poems and prose published by De La Croix at Van Melle, of which I gave my copy to our city library to preserve her memory a little.
Portrait of Lisbeth Verwest by her husband Robert Aerens, c. 1921
Later in the novel, Daisne refers to his stay with the Ceunises in Hitchin, ‘Aunt Lize’ presumably being his name for Alice Ceunis:
But the summer vacation in Hertfordshire, with Aunt Lize and Uncle Gerard Ceunis, got me back in shape.
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 their proximity. The air was so full of the scents of love that summer, that I thought I had found its source in the blonde shape and grey eyes of my cousin Vanna. And indeed, with the image of this companion firmly in front of my eyes, I began my studies at the academy with the zeal of a lover.
In fact, the former silent film star Lilian Hall-Davis, who would take her own life in 1933, lived in the village of Great Amwell, near Ware, which is twenty miles or so from Hitchin.
This was the second time that Johan Daisne had managed to work Vanna Ceunis’ name into his fiction (the first being in his 1944 short story collection Zes domino’s voor vrouwen, or ‘Six dominoes for women’), which gives a sense of the intensity of his unrequited love. And, of course, Lago Maggiore is not the only postmodern novel to feature Daisne’s lovelorn summer in Hitchin, the other being Basque writer Kirmen Uribe’s 2013 book Mussche.
The Quest for Ceunis 