Gerard Ceunis: the London years

Although Gerard Ceunis is closely associated with the town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where he built himself a splendid house and owned a dress shop in the market place, I’ve found evidence that, in the early years of his exile from Belgium, he also had business interests in London. Here, for example, is a notice published in The London Gazette of 22^nd September 1922, above the names of Gerard Ceunis and Morris Rose:

32 Rathbone Place today (via Google Maps)

Rathbone Place is a narrow street on the north side of Oxford Street, close to the junction with Tottenham Court Road. Assuming that the numbering of the buildings hasn’t changed, No. 32 is now a small computer exchange shop (see image above). I haven’t been able to find a listing of premises for the 1920s, but a 1940 Post Office directory for Rathbone Place includes a number of tailors’ workshops and clothing stores. Many of the shopkeepers’ names are clearly Jewish, including A & G Eisen, selling ‘gowns’ at Nos. 17 and 18. Could this be the same ‘F. Arnold Eisen’ under whose name Gerard Ceunis and Morris Rose had been trading?

As for Morris Rose himself, his name suggests he was also Jewish. There are a number of men with his name in the London records from the period, but it’s possible he was the son of David Rose, a tailor and immigrant from Poland, who can be found living with his large family in Mile End at the time of the 1911 census.

50 Church Street, Enfield (via Google Maps)

By 1930, Gerard Ceunis, described as a ‘ladies’ tailor’, was listed in the business directory for Enfield and Winchmore Hill, on account of his shop at 50 Church Street, Enfield, situated between the Rising Sun public house and the premises of the Nickolds Brothers, purveyors of pianos, gramophones and theatre tickets. No. 50 is now a furniture shop, but it looks as though the original building has been replaced.

However, it would seem that, by this time, the shop in Enfield was not the only outlet for Gerard Ceunis’ business activities. The electoral register for Enfield from the same year – 1930 – gives his ‘abode’ as 7 Market Place, Hitchin. This would suggest that, at this stage, Gerard and Alice Ceunis were living ‘over the shop’ at Maison Gerard in the Hertfordshire town. Incidentally, this is the record that mistakenly gives Gerard’s middle name as William.

By 1932, though, the Enfield electoral register has ‘Salve’ in Gosmore Road, Hitchin, as the home address for both Gerard and his wife Alice. Gerard’s name also appears in the register for 1935, suggesting that at this date he still kept a shop in the town, in addition to his premises in Hitchin.

I don’t know if, or when, Gerard Ceunis gave up his London shops and concentrated his energies on ‘Maison Gerard’ in Hitchin market place. However, Professor Christophe Verbruggen suggests [my translation] that ‘once he had made his fortune, Ceunis left the management of his shops to his wife Alice and spent his days painting and philosophising’.

Three ‘new’ paintings by Gerard Ceunis

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.

From Ghent to Gosmore Road

Gerard Ceunis was born in in 1885 in Ghent, Belgium. Situated in the Flemish region of the country, Ghent (Dutch = Gent, French = Gand, medieval English = Gaunt), is the capital and largest city of the province of East Flanders, and the third largest city in the country, after Brussels and Antwerp. A port and university town, in the late Middle Ages Ghent was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, its prosperity based largely on the textile industry, which revived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the city’s medieval centre and many of its historic buildings have been preserved. As described in the previous post, Ghent in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries – the Belle Époque – was a hub of literary and artistic activity and innovation, home to writers like Maurice Maeterlinck, and as Christophe Verbruggen notes, the setting for a ‘complex tangle’ of literary and artistic movements, magazines and associations.

Ghent in 1900 (via wikimedia.org)

According to at least one source, Gerard Ceunis’ father was Prosper John Ceunis, who worked (as did his son for a time) in a printing house. I don’t have any other information about Ceunis’ family of origin: for example, his mother’s name, or whether he had any brothers or sisters. The previous post provided a thumbnail sketch of Ceunis’ early life and education. Another source gives a useful list of the addresses at which he lived in Ghent. Apparently he was born in the Dekstraat , but in 1886 the family moved to Baliestraat, then in 1877 to Hertstraat, in 1890 to Bagattenstraat, in 1891 to Zwijnaardsesteenweg and in 1900, when Ceunis was fifteen, to Ottergemsesteenweg. Here he remained until 1909, apart from two short breaks: he was in Lübeck, Germany in 1907 and Liège in 1907-1908.

Old street map of Ghent 

From 1910, when he was twenty-five, Ceunis lived in Baudelostraat and from 1912 in Mercatorstraat. I’m not absolutely sure when Gerard Ceunis married Alice Pauline Vandamme, but it was probably around 1910, since their daughter Vanna was born in 1911.

Gerard, Alice and Vanna Ceunis emigrated to England in 1914, presumably to escape the German occupation of their country, which took place in August of that year. On arriving in England, Ceunis seems to have exchanged his dream of pursuing ‘la vie bohème’ (see the previous post) for bourgeois respectability, making a comfortable living from his clothing shops. Why he took this decision, and how he raised the capital or acquired the knowledge necessary to make a success of the business, is not known. Nor do we know what his wife Alice, a  former member of the radical Reiner Leven association and the feminist ‘Die Flinken’, thought of this move, especially when (as Christophe Verbruggen reports) he later left the running of the shops to her so that he could devote himself to ‘painting and philosophising’.

Hitchin in the 1930s

Neither is it clear why the Ceunises decided to make their home in Hitchin, a small market town in north Hertfordshire, nor whether they settled here immediately on their arrival in the country. The first record I’ve found that places Gerard Ceunis in Hitchin is an electoral register from 1927 which links him to an address in Church Street, Enfield, in north London, but gives his ‘abode’ as 7 Market Place, Hitchin – as noted in an earlier post, this was the address of Maison Gerard, Ceunis’ shop in the centre of the town. From this we learn two things: firstly, that at least initially, the Ceunis family lived ‘over the shop’ in Hitchin. Secondly, that Gerard owned more than one shop, including one in Enfield. He, and in some cases Alice, also feature in electoral registers for Enfield in 1930, 1932 and 1937.  Evidence from electoral registers in 1938 and 1939 also suggest that Ceunis had premises in Green Lanes, Southgate.

Extract from Enfield and Winchmore Hill Directory, 1930, showing Ceunis’ shop at 50 Church Street

From 1932, the London electoral registers begin to give the address of Gerard Ceunis’ main ‘abode’ as ‘Salve’, Gosmore Road, Hitchin. (I assume the house was named for the Latin greeting.) This would remain the family home for the remainder of Gerard’s and Alice’s lives: it is the address on his probate record from 1964 and hers from 1967. When the announcement of their daughter Vanna’s engagement appeared in the newspaper in 1934, her parents’ address was given simply as ‘Salve, Hitchin’.

Gosmore Road is on the southern side of Hitchin, connecting the town with the picturesque hamlet of Gosmore, famous as one of the locations where John Bunyan preached in secret in the seventeenth century. Most of the houses along this road were built since the Second World War, and when the Ceunises arrived here in the 1930s, or perhaps before, it would have been a quiet country road, with the parkland belonging to Hitchin Priory (formerly a Carmelite monastery but by then a grand private house and today a hotel) on one side, with views to the Chiltern Hills beyond.

Map of the southern part of Hitchin in the early twentieth century

Priory Park from Gosmore Road, Hitchin (author’s photograph)

On the other side of the road – the left-hand side as you come from the town – are a small number of large houses built before the War, one of which I assume is (or was) ‘Salve’. Frustratingly, none of the records that I’ve seen give a number for the house, making it harder to identify. The only clue is the description of the house in one account as ‘stylish’. Another is that Jean Watts, in her history of Hitchin Art Club, whose 1956 painting competition Ceunis judged, states (inaccurately) that he lived in London Road, from which Gosmore Road diverges at its northern end, suggesting that his home may have been closer to the ‘town’ end of the road. Whatever its precise location, and as can be seen from the map above, the Ceunis’ would have been within walking distance of the town, with its church tower, where their summer visitor, the young Belgian writer Johan Daisne, sat ‘staring endlessly down at the summer opulence’ and the cemetery where he wandered, ‘dreaming among the graves’.

The character of the area changed dramatically in the mid-1960s, soon after Gerard Ceunis’ death, when a new bypass – Parkway – was cut through the area, requiring, I believe, the demolition of a number of properties. It crossed my mind that ‘Salve’ might have been among them, but then I came across a legal repossession order for 1973 that mentioned the property, which suggests that it is still standing , albeit possibly under a different name.

I’m writing this post during the coronoavirus lockdown, which makes it difficult to pursue the matter further for now. However, once conditions change, I shall take a walk in the direction of Gosmore Road – just five minutes from where I’m writing this, and one of our popular walking routes in normal times – and see if I can determine which of the houses was ‘Salve’, and home to Gerard Ceunis.

A note on pronunciation

I wonder if Gerard Ceunis gave his outfitter’s shop in Hitchin the name ‘Maison Gerard’ (and even, as on a second sign above the shop, the more English ‘Gerard’s’) because he thought his surname would be too difficult to pronounce – or that his customers wouldn’t be sure how to pronounce it? I imagine that most English speakers, on seeing the name ‘Ceunis’ for the first time, are tempted to pronounce it ‘Kyew-nis’. However, if Google Translate is to be trusted, then the Dutch pronunciation should be ‘Keuh-nis’, while the French version would be closer to ‘Seuh-nee‘, with the stress on the second syllable. So which is correct? Does Ceunis’ choice of a French name for his shop, and the fact that he and Alice styled themselves in at least one record ‘M. and Mme. Ceunis’ suggest that, by contrast with his literary hero Maeterlinck, a Dutch/Flemish speaker who wrote in French, Ceunis was a French speaker who wrote in Dutch/Flemish? I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can help to resolve this question.