Louis Dewis

Family

Louis DeWachter married Bordeaux socialite Elisabeth Marie Florigni (12 August 1873 - 25 August 1952) on 16 July 1896. (1842 - 14 April 1919) and Rose Lesfargues Florigni

Jules Florigni administered the Bordeaux regional newspapers the Girond and La Petite Gironde and was Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the French Legion of Honor).

Elisabeth's brother, Robert (1881–1945), authored some 30 popular novels, several stage plays and at least ten screen plays. He was also a Paris-based journalist on the staff of La Petite Gironde and, like his father, Robert Florigni was named Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

In 1919, Dewis's older daughter, Yvonne Elisabeth Marie, (23 Sep 1897, Toulouse, France - 19 Feb 1966, Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA) a student at the University of Bordeaux where she met and, after a whirlwind courtship, married Bradbury Robinson (1884–1949), a graduate student from America. He was a widowed army officer (a combat veteran of the Great War) and a medical doctor who, after being discharged in the United States, had returned to France to continue his studies. The couple moved to the United States in 1926. They had seven children together, and Yvonne also gained a stepson from her husband's first marriage (his first wife having died in 1914). married businessman Charles Jérôme Ottoz (1903–1993) in 1925, who proved to be less than supportive of his talented father-in-law. the well-known Paris color merchant and art collector (especially of Corots) who loved to show his paintings to visitors at his shop on the rue Pigalle. Ottoz's grandfather was also the subject of the famous portrait painted in 1876 by Edgar Degas.

A serious student of art, Andrée was passionate in her admiration of her father's work. As Yvonne lived in the States during the last 20 years of Dewis's life, Andrée was the artist's only child to witness the most important years of his career. She was so emotionally involved in his painting that one day Dewis wondered aloud whether his daughter would have loved him as much, "if I'd been a grocer." Years later, Andrée tearfully recalled assuring her father that she would. As the eldest son, Louis was expected to take over the family business. This was a duty that his father would not allow him to shirk and which made Louis' dream of life as an artist impossible. For more than a decade, it was Louis' job to move from one place to another in France to open new stores, which would then be run by one cousin or another.

He found a creative outlet as an active and innovative marketer, and ran ads in newspapers; distributed illustrated catalogues; placed advertising on billboards and on trolleys; and published several series of promotional postal cards. Some of the cards featured famous art, others humorous cartoons and another series bore images of Maison Dewachter signage that had been temporarily erected at well known locations.

In addition to the management of an international chain of department stores, Louis was forced to assume an additional burden when a brother lost a small fortune gambling. With his father too infirm to deal with the situation, it once again fell to the oldest son to do his duty and settle the enormous debt. Louis had no choice but to borrow the sum from a very rich relation, something that humiliated him to his core. So, as a matter of honor, he insisted on repaying the loan with 100% interest – over the protests of the lender and everyone else in the family. As a result, the task took Louis several years. The paper somehow obtained a review of Dewis's exhibition for its 22 July 1916, issue. It was placed at the top of the page and titled: "Our artists in France." It expressed sentiments that critics would echo for the next thirty years:

ome "singing" landscapes attract the eye. The brush, soaked in the matutinal coolness or in the blue mist of the windrow, has more freedom and lightness. It emerges from the cliché. This is how he must paint, with no other care than to allow his soul to vibrate like a bird, in the light.

The skies are like ours, changing, full of music ... The subtle movement of the waters seduces the artist; and it renders their undulating countenances a thousand reflections.

In 1917, as part of Dewis's considerable efforts to aid his Belgian countrymen (for which he was honored by both Belgium and France), 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. This event was the first of a series of exhibitions in which the art of Louis Dewis would draw serious attention from some prominent art critics of the era.

Louis Dewis embodies the Flemish spirit, in love with colorings that are warm and harmonious. He treats tenderly the humble motifs reinforcing the simplicity of their soberly translated soul. But he also adores the sumptuous symphonies in which the greens, the reds and the golds sing, as he lets himself be charmed by the veil of a mist. La Petite Gironde; Bordeaux, France; 11 June 1918

The painter Louis Dewis has just made a small exhibition of his works at the Galerie Marguy [Paris], which has obtained the greatest and most legitimate success. This excellent painter, whose talent asserts itself at each new exhibition, this time gives us landscapes quite crowned with success. We must mention in particular: The Reapers, a very luminous work; The Canal at Bruges, of a character well interpreted; St. Jean de Luz, which shines with the sun of the South; The Stone Bridge at Rouen, etc., but we should mention them all. Ève: le premier quotidien illustré de la femme; Paris, France; 17 April 1920

The noted Belgian art and literary critic Henry Dommartin (sometimes spelled Henri) met Dewis at the 1917 exhibition and became a fervent admirer of his fellow countryman's work. Dommartin was the first and most insistent among Dewis's circle of friends to argue that the artist should concentrate solely on his art.

From this period until his death in Biarritz in 1946, Dewis's landscapes were shown regularly at major exhibitions across western Europe. His initial reaction, as he once told Dewis, was "vous êtes un tendre" ("you are tender-hearted").

The support of the owner of Galerie Georges Petit could be life-changing. According to Émile Zola, who knew the Parisian art world inside and out, Petit was "the 'apotheosis' of dealers when the Impressionist market soared and competition among marchands... became intense."

Petit had attained the highest degree of success and influence in his profession. His historic Expositions internationales de Peinture had featured works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Sisley and James McNeill Whistler – and he conducted the sales of the works of Degas, after that artist's death in 1917.

He pressured Dewis – scolding him that he was wasting his life "selling clothes. Petit urged him to sell his interest in Maison Dewachter and move to Paris – telling him, "come paint for me in Paris and I will make you famous."

Dewis's work was never heavily promoted.

The Flemish critic at Het Volk also remarked on the sincerity of Dewis's work after visiting the same exhibition.

No clutter, no affected detail, but rather works of broad design and which, in powerful touches, express the emotions and aspirations of the artist.

Unlike the younger painter of Bordeaux described by his daughter Yvonne – in Paris, Dewis devoted nearly all of his time to painting in his atelier at 28 rue Chaptal or sketching at locations across France and Belgium. He was prolific, selling hundreds of paintings in his career.

His efforts on behalf of his Belgian countrymen during WWI were recognized by the French Republic with the Grande Médaille de la Reconnaissance française (Grand Medal of French Gratitude).

In 1932, France named him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for "more than 30 years of artistic practice."

He was named an Officier d'Académie (Silver Palms) in 1912, when he was still painting as an amateur, and he was named Officier de l'Instruction Publique (Golden Palms) in 1922, three years after relocating to Paris.

Belgium awarded him the King Albert Medal and named him a Knight of the Order of Leopold II.

The critic at the Journal of Biarritz had no trouble finding the word that he felt best described Dewis:

If we have to characterize Dewis's talent in a word, we could say that he was one of the most sincere landscape painters of modern times. Behind the big strokes which he was particularly fond of, a quivering emotion can always be felt, since Dewis painted with his heart as much as his brushes.

A legacy in hibernation Dewis's devoted daughter Andrée had returned to live in her Paris co-propriété (condominium) after the war ended. Except for the period of occupation, the flat in the 17th arrondissement of Paris was her home from 1935 until her death in 2002. Their father, Édouard-Jean Niermans (:fr:Édouard-Jean Niermans) (1859–1928), celebrated as the architect of the "Café Society" and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, married Dewis's sister, Louise Marie Héloïse DeWachter (1871–1963), in 1895. Dewis was very close to Louise

Eventually, the boxes would be transferred to the attic of Andrée's co-propriété in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1998. It was the first public showing of Dewis's art in more than half a century.

Historical perspective Dr. Linda McGreevy wrote essays for the catalogues for the first two Dewis exhibits in America. She described how Dewis's 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.

Now he seems poised, like so many others, to claim a place in modernism's broader trajectory. His contributions to the French version of Regionalism, his luminous paintings from the pristine reaches of Frances arriere-pays (back country), alongside the Corot-inspired images of his native Belgium recovering slowly from the war's ravages, may well receive the recognition their creator deserved long ago.

OMA staged a mini-exhibition of Dewis works beginning in May 2018 and a full exhibit of more than 100 Dewis paintings in January 2019. In the catalogue for that exhibition, OMA Senior Curator Hansen Mulford provided this perspective:

While his earliest works were influenced by Impressionism, he quickly developed a personal style of expressive realism in line with this mainstream in French art of the 1920s and 30s. His paintings of regional locales throughout France featured views that were idealized and imbued with a sense of place. Dewis’s works draw upon classical models of French landscape painting such as those of Camille Corot. His compositions are balanced and orderly, following the conventions of depicting deep space through a recession of forms and aerial perspective. Broad planes of color define the topography, land, water, sky, and architecture, while bold diagonal elements like roads and rivers draw the eye into the scene. His brushwork is often quick and direct, rendering forms clearly without excessive detail. Though his style is anchored in a historic tradition, the simplicity of his best work is wholly modern and aligned with his contemporaries.

While descriptive detail enriches all of Dewis’s paintings, he rarely painted directly from life. Instead, he worked from drawings, which allowed him to edit and distill the expressive elements of each scene. Observed impressions were important, but memory was essential to his practice, allowing him the distance to find his own order in each composition. About this he said, "it is this memory that, transmuted by my sensitivity, gives to my works life and this truth that you love to find there." While Dewis was a realist, he was also interested in creating emotional resonance with his painting that did not require excessive detail, saying "I never seek a slavish copy of nature. This is the fundamental thought of the art of Corot, Cazin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and which the latter expresses through the aphorism: 'In painting there is suggestion rather than description.'”

The Dewis Collection continues discussions with Orlando and recently other cities in the U.S. and abroad relative to the creation of a home for the Collection – to make the Belgian’s work available for the public to enjoy on a permanent basis.