The Hôtel Baudy guest register

The volume bears an administrative title: “Registre pour inscrire les voyageurs”. It was issued to Angélina Baudy by the Giverny town hall, as to every innkeeper. It runs from June 1887, the opening, to July 1899. It holds some seven hundred entries.

In more than half of them the traveller describes himself as “artiste”, “artiste-peintre” or “peintre”. The rest are sculptors, architects, art students, one art dealer, one model, and the families who signed in separately.

The hotel went on taking guests until 1960. The twentieth-century register, however, is lost: no one knows where it went.

The original is held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. It arrived there by a detour: Madame Baudy had given it to an American collector, Alice Osborn, as proof that Cézanne had indeed lodged with her. The same museum holds, separately from the register, half a linear foot of papers covering 1887 to 1922, devoted to Cézanne’s stay and to the provenance of the canvases Frank Osborn acquired in 1920; it is open for research.

A microfilm copy — reel 4236 — may be consulted at the Archives of American Art in Washington and at their regional offices. The volume was filmed there in 1989, under the Philadelphia Arts Documentation Project. The Archives note that they do not own the original, and that publishing or reproducing the register requires the written permission of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The transcription we quote here is Carol Lowrey’s, published in 1993 in William H. Gerdts’s “Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony”, pages 222 to 227. We have not read the register itself: we read Lowrey, who read it.

The order of each entry is fixed: registration number, name, age, profession if other than artist or painter, place of birth, duration of stay.

The place is therefore not the address one arrives from: it is where one was born. When the register enters John Leslie Breck as “Hong Kong, China”, it is not saying he came from China — it says where he was born, and it contradicts the biographies that have him born at sea near Guam.

The square brackets are Carol Lowrey’s: in them she expands names abbreviated or misspelt. Where she is unsure she sets a question mark, and we keep it.

The same volume carries names that do not yet have a page here. They are in it, and they are waiting.

• Baptist Scherer — 199. Scherer [Baptist Scherer], Hambourg, 14 septembre–4 décembre 1891
• J. Carroll Beckwith — 188. Carrol Beckwith [J. Carroll Beckwith], New York, 8 août–8 septembre 1891
• George Glenn Newell — 187. Mr. Newell [George Glenn Newell], Amerique, 3–4 septembre 1891
• Mariquita Gill — 190. Mlle. Mariquita Gill, New York, 8–30 août 1891
• George Albert Thompson — 514. M. Thompson [George Albert Thompson], 24 ans, Washington, 4 juin–1 octobre 1896
• William Rothenstein — 136. Rothenstein [William Rothenstein], 18 ans, Bradford, Angleterre, 10 avril–13 mai 1890
• Martin Borgord — 226. M. Borgord [Martin Borgord], 26 ans, Norvège, 19 mai–3 juin 1892
• Alexander Harrison — 495. Alexander Harrison, 43 ans, Etats Unis, 15–18 avril 1896
• Kenyon et Louise Cox — 331. M. et Mme. Kenyon Cox [Kenyon and Louise Cox], Etats Unis Amerique, 29 août–10 septembre 1893
• Alexander Stirling Calder — 506. M. et Mme. A. S. Calder [Alexander Stirling Calder], 22 ans, 17–25 avril 1896
• Augustus Vincent Tack — 461. Augustus Vincent Tack, 25 ans, Etudiant, Pittsburgh, E.U., 15 juillet–27 août 1895
• Helen Hyde — 355. Helen Hyde, 21 ans, student, Amerique, 5–[?] mars 1894
• Blanche Dillaye — 528. Blanche Dillaye, 1–21 juillet 1896
• Wynford Dewhurst — 485. M. Dewhurst [Wynford Dewhurst], 24 ans, Manchester, 8–12 octobre 1895
• John Russell Pope — 657. J. R. Pape [John Russell Pope], 42 ans, architecte, New York, 12–14 novembre 1898

It does not say everything. The ages are often wrong — Mariquita Gill is entered as “50 ans” in the year of her twenty-seventh birthday. Names change spelling from page to page: Dessar becomes Dessart, Radimský becomes Radimsky and Kolín becomes Koln. Registration numbers skip or repeat.

And it says nothing of those who did not sleep there. Monet lived a few hundred metres away; he had no reason to sign in. Theodore Butler appears only once, in 1888, because afterwards he settled in the village. The absence of a name proves nothing.

Finally, it stops in July 1899. The whole following generation — Frieseke, Miller, Ritman, Buehr — arrived later, and so could not be in it.