By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
For many years, a mysterious painting of the French city where I was born had haunted me. The art work is not frightening; it’s quite lovely. Yet, I was in the city for only a short time a long time ago, I had not returned, and I had no idea who painted my sole birthplace “memory” hanging on my wall.
The city is old Orleans in France, not the New Orleans we all know. In the late 1950s, my father was assigned to the 7th Weather U.S. Air Force Squadron at Saran Airfield, Orleans, about sixty miles south of Paris. In May 1961, shortly after my family relocated there, I arrived via special delivery at the American 34th General Army Hospital in the nearby village of La Chapelle-St. Mesmin.
Since about 480 BC, Orleans has been home to Gauls, Romans, Huns, Normans, the French, and many others. During the Middle Ages, the city was a center for learning and religion. Two French kings were crowned there. King Francis II, also royal consort of Scotland after his marriage to Mary Queen of Scots, died in the city’s Hôtel Groslot in 1560.
Orleans prospered during the Renaissance, suffered during the Reformation, and survived the insatiable conquest lusts of both Napoleon and Hitler. My birth hospital had a similarly colorful history, serving previously as a monastery, a tuberculosis sanatorium, a school for orthopedic surgeons, and the engineer headquarters for the occupying Nazi German army in the 1940s.
Just a year or two after I was born, French President Charles de Gaulle, the former World War II resistance hero, invited the American military forces and related personnel to leave his country. Before my mother left Orleans, however, she bought two paintings by an aspiring young local artist whose name she could never remember.
One painting depicts the majestic Cathedral of Sainte Croix, partially blocked by rustic buildings, and just a short ways away down the Rue Jeanne d’Arc. The city’s patron saint, Joan of Arc, worshipped in the cathedral in 1429 while saving the city from an English siege. The English paid her back later by burning her at the stake in Rouen.
The other painting, the one that haunted me, is a slightly more distant view of the Orleans cityscape. The cathedral and nearby buildings sit on a small hill across an arched stone bridge spanning the Loire River. Various subtle degrees of turquoise, blue, brown, and black shades bring the scene to life.
At the time we left France, I was quite young and had no personal recollections of Orleans or its environs. This mysterious painting was, for many years, my only “memory” of my birthplace.
Decades later, when we finally made a long overdue return visit to Paris, we included a side trip to Orleans. It was my turn to disprove the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. Merely going home to Orleans, however, was not enough. I also wanted to solve the mystery of my painting.
I started my quest with a Google image search of the painting, but this effort was fruitless. I next crowd-sourced a photo of the painting on Facebook. The only response was from someone who suggested it likely was cheap mass-produced art sold at American furniture outlets.
Obviously, I needed more Orleans-centric sources of information. I contacted anyone there I thought might help me. I sent a photo of the painting, along with a half-French half-English email message, to local government officials, art gallery reps, and museum curators, asking if they knew who had painted my landscaped memory.
I got several polite responses, but no answers, and had to leave for France with the mystery unsolved. I was not optimistic that I would learn much more, but then good news arrived the day after we flew to Paris.
I received email messages from Jean-Christophe Bernard, the director of communications for the village of La Chapelle-St. Mesmin, and from Pierre Moreau, of the Musee des Beaux Arts in Orleans. Mrs. Veronique Galliot-Rateau from the museum helped too. These kind folks had taken the time to contact local galleries and art experts, and had identified my artist. His name was Andre Besse!
Besse was born in 1922 near Paris, the son of another painter named Raymond Besse. Raymond loved to illustrate life in the French capital city. Beginning in 1923, Raymond’s artistic reputation grew and he showed his works in many Paris exhibitions and salons.
Raymond taught Andre the family craft and the younger Besse studied art in Paris too. Very soon, Andre also was painting street scenes of Montmartre, Notre Dame, and the bridges over the Seine. He developed an impressionistic style like the one his father used.
Andre and his family eventually moved to the Loire Valley. Besse often painted in Orleans, which led to his chance encounter there with my mother one day in the early 1960s. For an unknown amount of francs, she bought two of his completed canvases.
After my family moved to Utah, Besse moved to Montreal and exhibited both his Old World and New World art throughout North America. He died in 2004 at age 81, leaving behind his wife Anne and his daughter Martine. You still can buy some of his paintings online (see: https://www.invaluable.com/artist/besse-andre-p1qne1t49g/sold-at-auction-prices/).
I was excited to learn the story of my artist on the eve of my first visit back to my birthplace. The next day, we taxied to the Gare d’Austerlitz and boarded a train for our day trip to Orleans. We toured the lovely cathedral, shopped, ate an open air lunch in the picturesque town square called Place du Montroi, and listened to a local music festival.
I also spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out where Andre Besse had set up his easel while creating our Orleans paintings. We walked down the Rue Royale and across the Pont George V spanning the Loire. I stood on the south riverbank where Besse likely worked on my painting, examined various sight-lines, and imagined his beautiful landscape slowly taking shape on canvas.
I tried to recreate with my iPhone camera the lovely scenes my artist had immortalized with his oil paints and brushes. My photos are not bad, but when it comes to capturing the essence of the beautiful place where I was born, I am no Andre Besse.
I suspect that we leave a tiny part of ourselves, perhaps wisps of spirit, at all the places we go. When others go there too, the parts left behind somehow connect with the pieces that just arrived. Like magnets, they either attract or repel each other. As a result, we feel right at home, or fearful, or indifferent in places we’ve never really been before.
This was how, after many haunted years, I finally came to know an artist I never met in a city I left half a century before. It was a remarkable way to celebrate my original birthday.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
