Louis Dewis
Louis Dewis | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Isidore Louis Dewachter |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Known for | Painting |
| Awards | Officier de l'Instruction Publique (France)
Lauréat du Salon des Artistes Français (France) Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (France) Grande Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française (France) Chevalier de l'Ordre de Leopold II (Belgium) Médaille d'or d'Albert I (Belgium) Nishan al-Iftikhar, San'f al-Talet (Tunisia) |
| Patron(s) | Georges Petit |
Louis Dewis (1872-1946) was a Belgian Post-Impressionist painter, who lived most of his adult life in France.[1]
Early Life
Dewis was born Isidore Louis Dewachter in Mons, Belgium, the son of Isidore Louis Dewachter and Eloise Desmaret Dewachter. He spent his formative years in Liege where his closest boyhood friend was Richard Heintz (1871-1929) Reference in French, who also became an internationally known landscape artist.
Although the name "Dewachter" may have Flemish roots, Dewis always considered himself a Walloon.
by Louis Dewis
Family Disapproval
He painted as Louis Dewis (pronounced Lew-WEE Dew-WEES), because his successful merchant father was embarrassed that his son would waste his time... and sully the family name... by painting.
Dewis continued to manage the family business (a chain of men's clothing stores -- Maison Dewachter) until after his father's death and the conclusion of World War I. Dewis managed the store in Bordeaux but there were Maison Dewachters in cities across France and Belgium, usually managed locally by one cousin or another.
Because he didn't need the money — and because of his father's opposition — Dewis did not promote his art in his young adulthood.
Finally, A Career Begins
Dewis began to exhibit about 1916, shortly after his father's death. He was 44 years old.
In 1917, he helped organize Le Salon franco-belge in the Bordeaux Public Garden. It was a charity event for the benefit of Belgian war refugees sponsored by the Belgian Benevolent Society of the South West and the Girondin Artists. It was at this exhibition that the art of Louis Dewis would first draw serious attention from some prominent art critics of the era.
Early reviews noted Dewis' "warm and harmonious" use of color and his "marvelous play of light and the most entrancing symphonies".
From this period until his death in Biarritz in 1946, Dewis' landscapes were shown regularly at major exhibitions across western Europe. They attracted favorable reviews in the international press, purchases from major museums and the highest decorations from the governments of three countries.
However, the highest achievement of fame eluded him.
True, Dewis had finally escaped the dictates of his overbearing father that had stymied his career for three decades. He was now free to focus much more time on painting. He was spending more and more time in the studio in his family's large apartment at 36 Rue de St-Cathérine over the Maison Dewachter in Bordeaux.
But, his career would be marked by uncommon misfortune. As his daughter, Andrée, would say many years later, "Dad had hard luck!"
Of course, two World Wars claimed what would have been many productive years. But, perhaps the hardest blow came just as Dewis was gaining national fame and high critical praise.
George Petit Takes Notice
by Louis Dewis
The influential French art dealer, Georges Petit, was impressed by the Belgian's work in Bordeaux. He said of Dewis, "oh, he's a gentle one".
Petit's support could be life-changing. Here was a man who had attained the highest degree of success and influence in his profession. Petit's historic Expositions internationales de Peinture had featured works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and James McNeill Whistler.
Petit scolded Dewis that he was wasting his life "selling clothes". He urged Dewis to sell his interest in Maison Dewachter and move his family from Bordeaux to Paris. The renowned dealer and owner of Galerie Georges Petit told him, "come paint for me in Paris and I will make you famous".
Dewis relented. He sold his business and relocated to Paris. But, within weeks of his arrival, Georges Petit was dead at the age of 64. Dewis was on his own... and he was no self-promoter.
Dewis lacked an insatiable appetite for fame. Family, friends and art journalists remembered him as an unusually generous, kind and even timid man. "Gentle", as Petit had said.
Dewis told his family, "I paint as the bird sings"... for the pure joy of expressing his emotions. He was perfectly content painting what he wanted to paint... and not producing what was in fashion or what art promoters thought would "sell".
Dewis' work was highly regarded and well reviewed, but it was never heavily promoted.
Family
by Louis Dewis
by Louis Dewis
Louis Dewachter married Elisabeth Florigni (1873 - August 25, 1952), the daughter of Joseph Jules Florigni (1842 - April 14, 1919) who was the publisher of the Bordeaux regional newspaper, Le Petit Gironde (and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur) and Rose Lesfargues Palmyre Florigni (1843 - September 11, 1917).
His older daughter, Yvonne Elisabeth (1898 - 1966 in St. Petersburg, Florida), married a young American army officer and medical doctor just after World War I and eventually moved to the States.
In her memoirs, Yvonne remembered that in thne early years of Dewis' career, her mother regarded her husband's painting with benign indifference. She writes that Elisabeth was pleased with her husband's choice of "hobbies" in one sense, commenting, "at least it's not noisy."
As the year's passed, Elisabeth took more interest. It was she that maintained Dewis' scrapbook of ritical reviews for a period of 30 years.
His younger daughter and only other child, Andrée Elisabeth Marguerite (September 24, 1903 - May 11, 2002 in Paris), married businessman Charles Jérôme Ottoz (also Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur), who proved to be less than supportive of his talented father-in-law.
by Louis Dewis
The 1920s & 30s
Dewis exhibited throughout France and Belgium in 1920s and 30s, as well as in Germany, Switzerland and Tunisia, then a French colony. Collectors and museums from Europe, South America and Japan purchased his work.
His art was honored in Paris' Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937).
Dewis was an associate member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a founding member of the Nouveau Salon and of the Société des Peintres du Paris Moderne and of the Société Royale des Beaux-Arts of Belgium, among others.
Dewis and his family fled Paris for the South West shortly before the Nazi occupation of 1939, initially staying with relatives in Bayonne.
Final Years at Biarritz
By great good fortune in this time of war, they heard of a villa that was becoming available in Biarritz. An American was heading back to the United States and selling a large house with lovely gardens that he had named for his wife: Villa Pat. The family purchased the home and it was here that Dewis would paint for the last seven years of his life.
Biarritz wasn't far from Bordeaux, where Dewis had lived for more than 30 years from the 1880s up to the late 1910s.
He was once again inspired by the countryside of the Pays Basque.
Since travel was greatly limited during the occupation, Dewis often found his subjects within his own garden, in nearby parks and along the Atlantic coast.
Louis Dewis died of cancer at Villa Pat in late 1946. His passing was lamented in major French newspapers and reported in The New York Times. He is buried in the family tomb at Bordeaux's Cimetière de la Chartreuse [[2]](Wikipedia reference in French).
At Dewis' death, his devoted daughter Andrée carefully crated up her father's work, which was then packed away in the attic of their Paris apartment building.
Dewis Rediscovered
by Louis Dewis
Some 50 years later, Andrée and an American great nephew (a grandson of Yvonne) opened the crates and resolved to return Dewis' work to the public… an effort inaugurated in the exhibition Dewis Rediscovered at the Courthouse Galleries in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1998. It was the first public exhibition of Dewis' art in more than half a century.
Linda McGreevy[3], an associate professior of art at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, who has a special interest in French art between the two world wars, wrote essays for the catalogues for the first two Dewis exhibits in America. She described how Dewis' art was rediscovered in the attic of the Paris flat of Dewis/Dewachter's daughter:
"On the walls of the apartment in which she'd lived for over fifty years were works not only by her father but by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. During the course of this visit, and others over the next several months, [Andrée Dewachter Ottoz] recalled that there were probably more of her father's work stored in the attic, though she figured they'd probably all rotted away inasmuch as they'd been there since his death in 1946. What they found were... crates that, while caked in dust, the paintings themselves were in remarkably good condition. And stored in the ceiling were still more rolled canvases, numerous sketchbooks, journals, even his palette.
"Louis Dewis was hardly an unknown artist in his time, but then again, he was no Monet or Degas either (both of whom he knew intimately). Louis Dewis' work resembles most closely that of Corot, who was his strongest influence, except that it tends to borrow from the Impressionists a more resplendent use of color. Dewis painted mostly landscapes, those of the Belgian towns and countryside he knew all his life. But by the end of WW II, the popular art styles of the time had not only changed drastically but the art world he'd known had fled Paris entirely. When he died, it was as if he took his life's work with him, except for less than a dozen examples in family hands in this country, and the few on the walls of his daughter's apartment in Paris. However, thanks to the perseverance of [Dewis' American great-grandson] and... the Portsmouth Art Museum, the work of Louis Dewis, and perhaps his spirit too, have returned from the dead..."
Since their rediscovery in 1995, more than 100 of Dewis' paintings found in his daughter's attic have been cleaned and framed and are lent to museums for the public to enjoy.
Sources
Catalogues for Dewis Rediscovered (1998) and Encore: Dewis Rediscovered (2002), Courthouse Galleries, Portsmouth, Virginia;
L'avenir de la Dordogne, January 5, 1918;
Petit Gironde (Bordeaux), June 11, 1918;
Journal de Biarritz, December 17, 1946;
Transcribed interviews with Andrée Dewachter Ottoz (1995-2000).