Art

From Roppongi to Rouen

Martin Vander Weyer tracked down the history of the picture he bought in a Tokyo junkshop There is something sad about displaced works of art and bric-a-brac gathering dust in the obscurity of the world's junk shops. Everything worth a glance there must once have mattered to its craftsman or artist, his subject or his patron, and might have an interesting tale to tell if only we could dis- cover it. This is the story of one lost object and how it came back into the sunlight.

On the edge of the glittering night-life district of Roppongi, in the shadow of one of Tokyo's thundering overhead express- ways, there is a cramped little antique shop called Ohyama Art. Or at least there was in the mid-Eighties, when I lived nearby. The elderly Mr Ohyama sat day after day watching television in his tatami-matted liv- ing space adjoining a clutter of Korean chests, carved netsuke figures, hibachi bowls, stone lanterns, wood-block prints and assorted paintings. Trade was at best intermittent — apart from myself I never once saw anyone buy anything — but, like many Tokyo residents of his generation, he was doubtless content in the knowledge that the land under his modest building must have been worth a couple of million pounds.

The first time I went in to browse, an oil painting in the dimmest recess of the shop caught my eye. For six months or more I watched to see if it was still there. Eventu- ally I asked Mr Ohyama the price. He indi- cated 18 man (the unit of 10,000) yen. Bargaining is not prevalent in Japan but for such slow-moving stock it seemed worth a try. I offered 11; we agreed at 13, then about £550.

The picture is of an orchard, with a small girl in the foreground. Painted with a free, confident hand, it has a breezy feeling of warmth and light. One fluid brush-stroke creates a distant paddock. It is signed `Bor- des'. The name looked French, the style, well, Impressionist or thereabouts. The name-plate on the ornate gilt frame sug- gested that it had once hung in a gallery or a grand collection. The Japanese taste for such pictures is ubiquitous; in its recent life it had probably graced some corporate presidential drawing-room. I thought per- haps I had acquired a treasure.

It moved with me from Tokyo to Hong Kong and from there to North Yorkshire. Familiar objects have a particular impor- tance for people who move from country to country — in a sense they are your home, wherever you and they happen to be. The picture came to take pride of place in the baggage of that itinerant phase, and I want- ed very much to trace its identity. I suppose the detection would have been mundane to a professional researcher but to me it became a slow-burning source of fascina- tion.

I found, first, the one Bordes (Ernest, 1852-1914), who has ever exhibited at the Royal Academy. His most notable work was 'The Late Major General Sir Henry Colville KCMG', so it seemed unlikely to be him. The authoritative French dictio- nary of artists, Benezit, listed a Bordes de Lapierre, a Bordes-Guyon and, more promisingly, Leonard Bordes, a 20th- century landscape painter of the Rouen school. I knew nothing at all about the Rouen school, so I wrote from Tokyo to the Musee des Beaux Arts there, presum- ing such an institution to exist. It does, and the curator, Marie Jean, wrote back.

Leonard Bordes, she said, was born in 1898 to a Parisian family of musicians his pianist mother was a noted interpreter of Cesar Franck; Leonard himself was for many years a cellist in the orchestra of the Theatre Lyrique in Rouen, his only steady employment. But principally he was a painter gifted with a deep, often sombre, sense of place, particularly for the familiar scenes of Normandy ravaged by the second world war. He rarely worked in a studio 'Mon atelier, c'est la rue,' I found him quoted elsewhere. And he was truly prolific — completing more than 10,000 canvases by the time of his death in 1969. This last snippet reduced my expectation of a windfall. But better news came from a less academic source: Ben Kilpatrick, City trader turned Nightingale Lane art dealer, who came up with recent French auction prices for Bordes canvases. It was certainly worth twice what I had paid, maybe more.

Irrespective of the money angle, Bordes sounded a charismatic fellow. I continued the quest. Along the way I found out who the Rouen school were: a group of land- scapists spanning the turn of the century with strong influences of Impressionism, some later traces of Cubism. Alfred Lebourg was the first and grandest of them; Bordes was the last.

At last I went for a day to Rouen, first to the Musee. Lebourg hangs there beside Sisley and Monet; sadly the two Bordes canvases in the collection are in store. Its library was officially closed but a severe lady let me in to look at the press-cuttings files. Here were 50 years of exhibition reviews, many of them in ponderously over- egged prose from the pen of one Bernard Nebout of the Paris Normandie newspaper: `seduisant pessimisme que tempere une attachante sensualite was the general theme, repeated down the years from 1926 to 1971.

The file ended with a 1989 retrospective in several Rouen galleries, and news of the publication of Dr Robert Evreux's full, illustrated biography. I set off to find the galleries. The first had no less than four works on display with the distinctive, slop- ing Bordes signature, including a memo- rable oil of hunters on a hillside at dusk, and a watercolour, which eventually I bought, of a church near Le Havre seen in A late summer afternoon in a French orchard in 1930, painted by Leonard Bordes the distance between wind-blown trees.

The prices of the oil paintings were sur- prisingly high: good news for my first pic- ture, bad news for the idea of starting a collection. Another Bordes enthusiast hap- pened to be there bantering with the pro- prietor; the painter was evidently a household name amongst Rouen art- fanciers. The profusion of his works had made him a stalwart for the local trade over several decades.

One more gallery; two more landscapes well beyond my price range. In several oth- ers I drew a blank. I set off to walk back to my hotel through the lovely mediaeval streets and alleys around the cathedral, and came by chance upon yet another art shop, with an unpromising display of prints in its window. But the name, Galerie de la Cour d'Albane, rang a bell from one of the yel- lowed cuttings at the library. I went in to enquire. Three women greeted me, one in her eighties, two of middle age.

This was, in effect, the Leonard Bordes appreciation society. They had all three been close friends of his family. The elderly lady, Madame Nocq, had run the artists' materials shop which supplied him with paint and brushes for many years, allowing him credit when he was short of cash, which was often. Her daughter, Madame Née, owns the gallery and deals on behalf of Bordes' two daughters (one of whom had been in the shop only the day before) in the collection left to them, including all the unsigned sketches. The third of the group, Mlle Menuisement, was the daugh- ter of a gallery-owner who had promoted Bordes in the Fifties and Sixties. They were enchanted that someone had traced him all the way from Japan to their shop.

In the basement were more of his works. Carried away by the warmth of the occa- sion, I bought yet another, a strikingly stylised watercolour of a gang of men with ladders, pollarding plane trees in the Place du 39e Regiment d'Infanterie. The compo- sition looks down from the balcony of the artist's flat, his home for many years: he made numerous paintings of the same scene in different seasons. Afterwards I went to look at it, a grey brick building with an air of disappointment beside the grandiose stonework and half-timbered charm of much of Rouen. Coupled with portraits of him — thin-faced, sharp-eyed, always smoking — it gave a strong sense of a hand-to-mouth, bohemian life.

I promised to send the three ladies a photograph of the original painting. In due course it came back to me from Madame Née, signed on the back by both Bordes daughters. The elder of the two, Giselle, identified herself as the girl under the apple trees — aged eight, in the late sum- mer of 1930. They had had no idea where the painting had been for the intervening 61 years.

So there it was, rescued from its Japanese twilight and restored, more or less, to its full significance — which, in truth, is not a lot. A family outing on a sunny day; a picture dashed off with the skill of a man who painted every day of his adult life; one cheerful afternoon in a career more often marked by melancholy. But the real pleasure is the simple one of knowing all this to be so, and, of course, of telling other people.