bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1986) — Spring/Summer 1986 // Printemps/Été 1986, pp. 25–26
The splendid retrospective exhibition of paintings by James Wilson Morrice, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, now taking place successfully in several major Canadian public galleries, recalls the consular experience of his reburial in Tunis.
When I was setting forth in the summer of 1966 to open the new mission to Tunisia, I was asked by one of my more cultured colleagues, I think either the late Graham Melnnes or Freeman Tovell, to look for the grave of Morrice, who had died in Tunis in 1924.
Finding the grave turned out to be quite easy. The British Ambassador suggested I go to the Christian Cemetery at Bab- Saadoun. On a lovely clear and calm Saturday morning in October my wife and I visited the cemetery. With the date of death, 23 January 1924, age 58, the office readily produced a modest register, rather like my childhood exercise books, where the entry as to block, row and number of lot was quickly found. Morrice was buried in the Enclave Evangélique of this essentially Catholic Cemetery.
The well maintained grave was in a quiet corner, near a wall, shaded by tall dark cypress trees, all in the best Mediterranean tradition.
I was pleased with the ease with which the visit had been accomplished. We walked slowly down the grand alley looking at the huge family mausoleums, many with Italian names, that reminded me of cemeteries in Italy, particularly the big one in Naples. At the main gate large notices were posted, and being a habitual notice-reader, I decided to examine them, naturally those in French, not those in Arabic.
It had been decided to decommission the cemetery because of the rapid expansion of the urban area of the capital. It was, in fact, situated outside an old city gate, but downhill on the city side of a new residential district centred on the Hotel Tunis Hilton, Descendants were being offered plots in another cemetery to which they could remove remains and headstones.
I quickly decided that the Morrice grave should not be obliterated but saved for posterity. The National Gallery of Canada indicated, in the best bureaucratic manner, that it did not have funds for this purpose, but it did put me in touch with a nephew, David Morrice in Montreal. I had resolved that in any case the necessary would be done and I would treat it as my personal 1967 centennial project, should funds not be found elsewhere.
A plot was provided by the Tunisian authorities in a new rather bleak cemetery, called the European Cemetery of Borjel, alongside the road to the airport. A local funeral enterprise made the arrangements and I was present for the burial of a box of larger bones, including the skull, and the placement of the headstone. Marius Bujold, a young vice-consul on his first posting, and a police officer were on hand as witnesses and the required papers were signed. Everything went smoothly and in due course the total costs, amounting to a modest $80 Canadian, were paid by David Morrice.
Some time later I met David Morrice in Montreal and I asked him if he would like to have the formal documents of the act of re-burial. He said that he and his sister Eleanore, neither of them married, were getting on in years and that the papers would be best kept in the Tunis Embassy. I learned to my surprise that Morrice’s mistress, Léa Cadoret, the dark beauty of some of his portraits, was still alive and residing in the south of France 40 years later. I gathered that she had been well provided for.
I now learn from the Montreal catalogue and the definitive biography of Blair Laing that in a will, written in 1921, Morrice had made her a bequest of $50,000. In 1922 he had bought her a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer. She died at Antibes on November 3, 1973, at the age of 96, having outlived Morrice by almost half a century.
David and Eleanore Morrice, now also deceased, visited the old grave in Tunis and every Christmas sent a small sum of money to one of the cemetery caretakers as a gift and to help maintain the grave in the fine condition in which I saw it.
The Enclave Evangélique had some of the quiet charm of the famous Protestant Cemetery of Rome, which nestles under the shelter of umbrella pines and pencil cypresses inside the Aurelian Wall. It is a place of pilgrimage to the grave of Keats and others and the urn of Shelley. Incidentally, while serving in Rome at the Embassy in the early fifties, I had substituted for Ambassador Dupuy on the board of supervisors of the cemetery along with persons from other countries, mainly Northern Europe but also of Eastern Europe such as Bulgaria and Greece, because of Orthodox graves. The Canadian Ambassador, or one of his officers, has always served on the board.
Not many months after Morrice was safely re-buried the Tunisian authorities decided to cancel, or at least defer for a few years, the demolition of Bab-Saadoun! There had been little response to the offer to provide new plots elsewhere and the destruction of all those enormous tombs were to be a daunting and expensive operation. Time had passed and most of the families of the French and Italian communities had left before or after Tunisian independence in 1957.
I was distressed by what had happened. We had perhaps done the right thing, though too soon, and eventually the new cemetery would not be so austere and bare.
I have now learned from the present Ambassador in Tunis, Witold Weynerowski, that the Bab-Saadoun no longer exists and the new European cemetery has with time taken on a pleasant aspect.
Before leaving Tunis I carefully marked the consular file “Important, to be kept indefinitely” or words to that effect. I had correspondence on this with one successor, Jacques Gignac. These papers are no longer in Tunis, I am informed, and I hope they have found their way to the Public Archives of Canada, where they belong. It may be added that Morrice’s name appears on the monument of the family tomb in Mount Royal Protestant Cemetery, Montreal, with the names of his parents and his six brothers who are buried there, the inscription recording that James died in Tunis and is buried there.
While resident in Tunis I almost captured a travelling show of Morrice prepared by the National Gallery for the Bath Festival in May 1968, which was later displayed in Paris, but it was then decided that Tunis, at the time, lacked the technical and other facilities to handle such a valuable and fragile collection, some of which was from private collections. I also tried to get some reproductions to hang in the chancery or the residence. Morrice’s lovely and appropriate “Afternoon, Tunis” in the Montreal Museum had unfortunately not been printed. I did get a large fine print of “The Beach, St. Malo”, but this is not the ideal subject-matter.
During my time in Tunis I occasionally poked around old shops in the vain hope of finding a Morrice painting or sketch. I thought that in his final illness he might have given a drawing, a pochade, as the tiny oils on wood are called, or something to his doctor, inn-keeper or spirits merchant. There were the stories of Renoir leaving paintings in Italian villages. Nothing came to hand.
Later I ran into René Garneau, a student of Canadian culture, who had been accredited to Tunis from Switzerland just before me. He said I had wasted my time. He had been there ahead of me and his search had been fruitless. However, the hunt continues, as Weynerowski has told me. But Laing has pointed out that, before his last visit to Tunis, Morrice had stopped painting because of ill-health.
In preparing this piece I have been helped in updating the material by our present Ambassador in Tunis, Witold Weynerowski; by G. Blair Laing’s “Morrice A Great Canadian Artist Rediscovered’ McClelland and Stewart, 1984; and the catalogue for the exhibition “Morrice: A Painter with a View”, by Nicole Cloutier of the Montreal Museum, 1985.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1986) — Spring/Summer 1986 // Printemps/Été 1986, pp. 25–26. Read the rest of this issue →
