Claude Marin and my Grandmother

MANY YEARS AGO I was looking through an old truck in the attic of my parent’s home in Somerset. My daughter, Taz (then quite a small child) had asked what was in it, so we opened the lid to take a look.

Inside, we found a number of old clothes, some in quite a parlous condition. Taz immediately started trying some of them on, with great delight! Hidden amongst them was a box of old postcards and letters, which I began leafing through to see who they were from. Amongst these I found an old silhouette, encased in a glassine envelope, of a young woman with short hair wearing a white blouse. It was unmounted, loose in the envelope, but came with a printed backing paper bearing the legend:

PARIS • BUTTE MONTMARTRE, Claude Marin

Intrigued, I took it downstairs to ask my mother who it was.

“Why, it’s my mother, Betty!” came the astonished reply.

“Where on Earth did you find it?”

My mother had no recollection of having ever seen it before, but the significance of the find was not lost on either of us. This was the time in my life when I was just beginning to establish a new career working as a full-time silhouettist at corporate events. I had recently given up my long-held street-art pitch in Covent Garden. To find this ghostly apparition of my grandmother, of whom I had many fond memories (she gave me my first lesson in how to use oil paint), felt like an affirmation from the past – a message that I was on the right track. My mother immediately suggested that I should keep it.

Elisabeth “Betty” Harter (1910–1974)

My grandmother was born as Elisabeth Esplin Stewart in Scotland on 8th September 1910. She spent most of her life living near Chalfont St Giles, in England, where she met and later married her husband Robert James Alexander Harter, around 1937. Robert was an engineer who (among other things) invented a valve to prevent massive fuel spillage in the likely event that fuel pipelines laid across the English Channel during the D-Day landings would be damaged by enemy fire. My mother, the artist Penelope Ann Harter, was the eldest of four children and was born in 1937.

As well as being fascinated by Betty’s likeness as a young woman, I was also very taken by the quality of the silhouette, and the level of cutting skill it represented. I tried to imagine cutting that long, thin sliver of paper which delineates the front of her blouse. At one point it’s so thin that it could break off at any moment! Was this a happy accident, or did the artist often cut this way? At the time, I had never dared attempt such a cut, yet the fluidity of the line suggested it had been cut quite fast.

Looking at Betty’s silhouette, one can see that the bust of the silhouette is attached to the back of the head by just 2.5mm of paper. Less easy to see is a slash line which delineates her hairline at the back of her face. This nearly cuts the whole head in two, leaving the hair attached at the top of her forehead by another daringly thin piece of paper.

I kept this silhouette in a frame for a number of years. This was perhaps a mistake as the backing card began to darken with age, leaving a ghostly, white imprint of Betty’s profile behind. This shows the backing label was printed on cheap, low-quality, acidic paper, commonly used at the time. Today, I keep her in the dark, unframed.

Claude Marin, Artiste Française (1914–2001)

For many years all I knew about Claude Marin was that he cut my grandmother’s silhouette when she visited Paris. My mother estimated the date of the silhouette as being the mid 1930s (shortly before she was born) since Betty looks so young, but having found out more about the artist I now think it’s more likely to have been cut in the late 1940s, soon after the war. Unlike many of the silhouette artists represented in my collection, I’ve been able to find out quite a lot about him.

Biography and Early Life

Marin was born in Nantes, France, on 21st October 1914 and spent most of his youth in Vannes, where he studied with the Jesuits. Reportedly, he was something of a rebel, and had a passion for painting and drawing from the age of four. He later studied painting at the Art College in Nantes where he was the pupil of the painter, Emile Simon. In 1935, he married Emile’s daughter, Jeanne Simon. They moved to Quiberon, on the south coast of Brittany, where they began raising a family of nine children, remaining there throughout the years of Nazi occupation.

Whilst in Brittany, he met the elderly painter Louis Marie Désiré Lucas, who became a formative influence, advising him to paint more quickly and helping him to develop a looser, more painterly stye. He also visited Locronan, in Finistère (the extreme western end of Brittany) where he met the sculptor, Joseph “Job” le Gall, who was in the habit of supplementing his income by cutting silhouettes for visitors to this picturesque town (more about Job later). It was Job who taught Marin how to cut portraits with scissors.

After the liberation of France in 1946, Claude and Jeanne moved to Dinan, in the north of Brittany, with their growing family, where Claude began devoting himself to building a career as a painter. To this end he also rented a small studio in Paris, on Rue Poulbot near the Place du Tertre. To make ends meet he also began cutting silhouettes for visitors to the newly-liberated city, one of whom was evidently my grandmother. When not cutting silhouettes he was painting, making many views of the streets around Montmartre.

Claude liked to describe himself as a bohemian. I don’t how he managed to divide his time between Dinan and Paris, but the arrangement was evidently successful as he continued making silhouettes in Montmarte at least until 1970. However, I find myself wondering about Jeanne, and the life she must have led while her husband was spending so much time in Paris.

Was he a Silhouettist or a Painter?

Once I began collecting silhouettes in earnest I soon began to see many by Claude Marin. They are not hard to find, which indicates to me that he made many thousands of them over the years. They far outnumber his paintings.

Marin is unusual is adding his name to his silhouettes. Most French silhouettists never do this, either because they don’t consider it worthwhile, or because they actively don’t want their name to be associated with such a lowly art. The fact that Marin silhouettes are usually labelled tells me he took his work as a silhouettist more seriously than this, at least for a while.

Marin didn’t date his silhouettes, but others have occasionally added their own dates to their portraits. Using these, it’s possible to identify Marin’s various printed labels and stamps with approximate dates. The label on Betty’s silhouette is associated with his earliest cuttings. Over time, however, it’s hard to see much improvement in his work as a silhouettist. Rather the reverse! The cuttings I’ve seen from the 1960s and 70s are increasingly chunky and brief. Many are single-line cuttings with none of the extra details and internal lines evident in his earlier work. They look to have been cut very fast indeed, probably in well under a minute.

Cutting Faster and Faster

Like most Montmartre silhouettists, Marin never bothered to fix his silhouettes to the backing card. This neatly gets around the problem caused by his later silhouettes often being too large for the card anyway! He always cut two copies at the same time, placing one in a glassine envelope (or later in a cellophane bag) in front of the card, and a second ‘spare’ copy behind. Many of the these spares have been lost, perhaps given away to friends and family, but a few still remain together to show how Marin supplied them.

I’m very familiar with the pressure Marin was under, when faced with a long queue of customers. It’s hard to resist the temptation to cut faster and faster. He could perhaps have made more money that way, at least for a while, but the quality of his work clearly suffered. Did he just want to earn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so that he could put the scissors aside for the day and get on with the real work of painting?

The Real Work of Painting

Marin’s attitude to painting was entirely different. He loved to paint nature, looking for what he called the “colour-reverb effect.” His street scenes are often full of people. However, these are not really portraits, but more like brief indications of a person – squiggly, impressionistic lines of paint over the buildings of Paris. He achieved some level of success as a painter in the 1960s, when his paintings were exhibited in a number of major galleries in Paris (Bernheim, Martin Calle ) and well as in group exhibitions of French art in Mexico, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland. This is the main reason it’s been possible to find out so much about him. In 1985 he received the Grand Prize of the City of Dinan.

The last dated silhouette in my collection by Marin was cut in Montmartre in 1970, although I’ve seen images of others as late as 1972. It’s possible that he gave up cutting soon afterwards, finding himself better able to earn a living by painting alone. He continued painting until 1995, often the help of his daughter Colette Hayes. Then, at the age of 81, he became visually impaired to the extent that he had to stop, which must have been a terrible tragedy for him.

He passed away in Dinan in 2001.

A Conversation with Claude Marin

Like many silhouettists whose work I’ve collected over the years, I would love to have met Marin and had a conversation or two. What did he really feel about the silhouettes which provided his bread-and-butter income for so many years in Montmartre? Would he have agreed to swap a silhouette with me for fun, or would I have had to pay like everybody else? Was it just about the money?

I guess I would tried to persuade him to take the art a bit more seriously. The promise of his early silhouettes, not to mention his paintings, shows a talent which could have been developed. I would love to see a full-length silhouette by Marin, or any more ambitious piece of paper cutting. Instead his portraits became progressively simpler and more perfunctory. I might have suggested to him that there’s real artistic merit in developing such an art, even if many in the art establishment consider it not worthy of serious consideration.

In the end I’m happy that Marin’s portrait of my grandmother is, in the final analysis, one of the best Marin silhouettes I’ve ever seen. I’m happy to have it my possession to remember her by.