A new webpage dedicated to Achilles De Maertelaere - Bentos

One of the outstanding blogs about Ghent is written by Geert Vandamme. It is a very extensive blog, with an unbelievable amount of information about the history of Ghent, about the culture in Ghent, etc. The blog now has dozens of long and exceptionally well-documented pages.

Geert Vandamme is also the author of an interesting book about the Ghent writer Jean Ray / John Flanders (G. Vandamme, Sometimes reality exceeds fantasy. Raymond De Kremer alias Jean Ray / John Flanders. Een biografie, Gent, 2019, Poepsa Publisher).

Based on our own website, Geert has included a long blog about Achilles De Maertelaere on his website Gandavum². This will undoubtedly ensure that Achilles De Maertelaere-Bentos will be better known.
In his blog, Geert brought to light an element that was as yet unknown to us: in the book by A. De Poorter, Gent Cirucusstad. Twee eeuwen circusbezoek, (Ghent circus city: two centuries of circus visits, 1993, Aartrijke, Decock Publisher) a picture of café Bentos is depicted. Café Bentos is the café that De Maertelaere decorated in 1915 with a series of ethnographic scenes. The photo was taken from the street and the doors of the café are wide open. On the back wall of the café, behind the bar, one can see a large painting (Indians on the left and buffalos on the right?) of the same type as the one we know through photos of De Maertelaere, but at first sight, it is not one of these: the canvas with the American landscape that we reproduce on our own web site depicts, at first sight, a fairly similar but nevertheless different landscape, but is clearly placed on a different wall.

In this way, a new, hitherto unknown work by our artist probably reappears. Unfortunately, we do not know what happened to this work later.

Translated with the help of DeepL