Louis Dewis
Louis Dewis was the pseudonym of Belgian Post-Impressionist painter Louis DeWachter, who was also an innovative and highly successful businessman. He helped organize and managed the first department store chain.
Early life
He was born Isidore Louis DeWachter in Leuze, Belgium, the eldest son among the seven children of Isidore Louis DeWachter and Eloise Desmaret DeWachter. The father went by Isidore, while the future Dewis was called Louis. The name "DeWachter" has Flemish roots, however Louis DeWachter always considered himself a Walloon.Isidore and his two brothers originated the idea of the chain department store when they formed Maisons Dewachter in 1868, which they formally incorporated as the Belgian firm Dewachter frères on 1 January 1875. For business purposes, they had decided not to use the capital "W" in the family name and because the chain became so famous, published references to the family would also be spelled "Dewachter". By the time of Dewis's death, the family had adopted the spelling "Dewachter" as well.
Maisons Dewachter introduced the idea of ready-made – or ready-to-fit – clothing for men and children, and specialty clothing such as riding apparel and beachwear. Isidore owned 51% of the company, while his brothers split the remaining 49%. They started with four locations: the Walloon city of Leuze, La Louvière and two at Mons. Under Isidore's leadership, Maisons Dewachter would become one of the most recognized names in Belgium and France.
Soon after the company was formed, Isidore and his family moved to Liège to open another branch. It was in that industrial city that Louis established a lifelong friendship with Richard Heintz , who also became an internationally known landscape artist. Heintz is considered the outstanding representative of the Liège school of landscape painting, a movement that greatly influenced Dewis's early work.
When Louis was 14, the family moved to Bordeaux, France, where Isidore established what would be the chain's flagship store. Louis, who had begun his studies at the Athénée Royal Liège, continued lycée at Bordeaux. For the rest of his life, he would remain an étranger – a Belgian citizen living in France.
Family
Louis DeWachter married Bordeaux socialite Elisabeth Marie Florigni on 16 July 1896. Elisabeth was the daughter of Joseph-Jules Florigni and Rose Lesfargues Florigni.There was a feeling among some members of the Florigni family, which traced its roots back to the court of Catherine de' Medici, that "Babeth" had "married down."
Jules Florigni administered the Bordeaux regional newspapers the Girond and La Petite Gironde and was Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
Elisabeth's brother, Robert, 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, a student at the University of Bordeaux where she met and, after a whirlwind courtship, married Bradbury Robinson, a graduate student from America. He was a widowed army officer and a medical doctor who, after being discharged in the United States, had returned to France to continue his studies. The couple would travel around Western Europe as Dr. Robinson oversaw immigrant screening for the U.S. Public Health Service. In 1906, Robinson had gained fame in the United States for having thrown the first forward pass in an American football game. 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.
In her memoirs, Yvonne remembers that in the early years of Dewis's career, her mother regarded her father's painting with benign indifference. She writes that Elisabeth DeWachter was pleased with her husband's choice of "hobbies" in one sense, telling her friends, "at least it's not noisy."
As the years passed, Elisabeth took more interest. It was she who maintained Dewis's scrapbook of critical reviews for three decades.
His younger daughter and only other child, Andrée Marguerite Elisabeth, married businessman Charles Jérôme Ottoz in 1925,who proved to be less than supportive of his talented father-in-law.
Ottoz had his own connections to the art world. He was the namesake of his grandfather Jérôme, the well-known Paris color merchant and art collector 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.
Life as an artist delayed, success in business immediate
Young Louis had displayed an interest in art at the age of 8 – but Isidore was enraged at the thought that his offspring might waste his time with something as useless as painting. In a vain attempt to break his young son of his "bad habit," he would, on occasion, throw away or burn the boy’s canvases, paints and brushes.The youngster's love of art could not be deterred. It could, however, be overwhelmed by business and family responsibilities. 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.
Father and son, however, apparently made a good team. They doubled the number of cities and towns served by Maison Dewachter from 10 to 20 in Louis' first dozen years with the firm. Some cities had multiple stores, such as Bordeaux, which had three. 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.
By 1908, Louis was back in Bordeaux managing the flagship Grand Magasin. He assumed ultimate responsibility for 15 of the Maisons Dewachter.
The reluctant merchant found a creative outlet as an active and innovative marketer. He 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. These responsibilities and World War I combined to condemn him to what was a frustrating life as a merchant, however successful, until after his father's death and the conclusion of the war.
Sunday painter
Throughout his business career, Louis DeWachter maintained an atelier in his home and was essentially a Sunday painter.His few surviving early works were unsigned because his father refused to allow him to sully the family name by associating it with such a frivolous undertaking. In about 1916, Dewachter signed his first work with the pseudonym "Louis Dewis". His nom d'artiste "Dewis" is composed of the first three letters of his last name – followed by the first two letters of his first name – Isidore.
As a wealthy merchant, his interest in art was not financially motivated. His daughter Yvonne wrote that, while living in Bordeaux, he turned down at least one offer of sponsorship – an offer conditioned on him giving up "the tailoring business."
And, Yvonne recalled that the young Dewis made "real artistic success" even more difficult to achieve.
First exhibitions
Dewis began to focus on his art about 1916, which motivated him to adopt the pseudonym "Dewis." He was 43 years old.In the summer of that year, Dewis staged what was probably his first exhibition at the Imberti Galleries in Bordeaux, news of which reached across the trenches that divided France in the midst of World War I – to his native Belgium. Le Vingtième Siècle was clandestinely publishing a one-page edition in German-occupied Brussels. 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:
In 1917, as part of Dewis's considerable efforts to aid his Belgian countrymen, 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.
The noted Belgian art and literary critic Henry Dommartin met Dewis at the 1917 exhibition and became a fervent admirer of his fellow countryman's work. He once served as the State Librarian at Brussels and had heroically engineered the rescue of truckloads of Belgian art treasures from what was almost certain destruction shortly after the Germans occupied Belgium in 1914. 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. 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 almost three decades. He was now free to focus on painting. He could spend more time in the studio in his family's large apartment at 36-40 Rue de St-Cathérine over the Maison Dewachter in Bordeaux. But, his career would be marked by uncommon public relations misfortune. As daughter Andrée would say in English many years later, "Dad had hard luck!"