This is the second article in a three-part series detailing the life and work of painter Diane Esmond, whose surviving collection lives with her son, Victor Wallis, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Its details are pulled, substantially, from interviews with her descendants and writer and researcher Eloise Duguay; excerpts of letters she wrote to her son; and information published by art historians working to uncover collections plundered by Nazi forces during World War II. Readers should begin with part 1: Expectations of a Woman.
By the time German soldiers were picking through Diane Esmond’s studio, she, her son, and her parents had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and were settled in New York.
While she tried to make a home for herself on a new continent, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)—the Nazi agency focused on plundering cultural assets from the cities they invaded—had taken up residence in her parents’ home, a multi-unit building with a shared courtyard where the Esmonds had lived surrounded by extended family. In cleaning out number 54 Avenue d’lena, the ERR were impressed by the contents of Esmond’s studio. Many of her works, they decided, would be fit to ship home as trophies of war. They inventoried 43 of her paintings, stashing them in the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, a section of the Louvre Museum.
There, they rested, undisturbed for three years.
In 1943, German forces began to sort and destroy much of the artwork stored at the Jeu de Paume.
On July 20, 1943, the ERR took knives to a first round of paintings, stabbing through the works of André Masson, Salvador Dalí, and collections by others, including Esmond.
On July 23, 1943, the ERR lit a fire in the garden of the Louvre museum. Between 500 and 600 paintings that had been stored in the Jeu de Paume were its kindling. The flames burned from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
New York 1940 - 1956
New York drained Esmond, sapping her of who she was. She was not inspired by its buildings or its people. She did not paint what she saw there. She had lost more than just her home; she had lost her studio, materials, and the objects she used to arrange still lifes.
As years passed there, Esmond’s family grew by one—another son, Spencer Wallis. Her boys, who were raised not knowing they were Jewish or that their family had escaped Nazi capture, were at home in New York. So, too, was her husband. Soon after the war ended, her mother and two sisters headed back to France—her father had died in May 1945, just before they departed the United States—but Esmond lingered, bound by the roots her young family put down.
She did make frequent trips back to Europe, during which her creative energies were temporarily rejuvenated. A review of her work published in the journal “France-Soir” in 1950 described her workflow during these years. “The artist … spends three months a year in Europe collecting “impressions.” Returning to New York, she works with furious intensity (“I never leave my studio,” she says) to reconstitute them. The result of this process is a work stripped to its essentials, in which no line or color is superfluous. Finally, we see an artist whose painting reflects a rich inner life.”
Review - “L’Aube” 11.29.1950
“Diane Esmond moves by leaps and bounds beyond her earlier influences, with very good results. She has now taken the royal road chosen by all true painters. Her compositions are as good as ever, but they are now nourished with color. Her palette has been magnificently enriched. And her work has gained from this, both in its strength and in its humanity. Bravo!”
Esmond did not feel the same richness in her life as her paintings evoked in her admirers. Her overseas trips may have fueled manic bursts of productivity—even resulted in stunning works—but they could not keep her content for long after her return.
In 1956, after over a decade of withering in New York, Esmond made a choice to honor herself. She divorced her husband and shipped off back to Europe. Her boys stayed behind.
Rediscovering personal freedom - 1950s
On Victor Wallis’ 17th birthday, Esmond wrote to her son. “I am torn between 2 countries. The one, where my home should be, where you & Spencer & Papa are, & the country where I need to be, to be able to thrive, where I am myself, where my heart & soul go into my work. I have chosen Paris. I can’t grow in New York. In doing this, I have failed as a mother.”
With her eldest son, she transitioned gracefully from her role as Mother to friend and confidante. The two wrote back and forth regularly and she assured him, “if you have no mother, you have the greatest friend you could possibly have—a friendship which, even if you do not feel it, is full of the deep love of a mother.”
In this new era, Esmond was happier. She was once again able to feel inspired and to pour herself fully into painting. She wrote, “I am working very well, & actually producing a lot. I am for the time being constructive & have painted about 8 or 9 good canvases since the middle of Sept. Haven’t been in despair once! I can’t think why! I had better make hay while it lasts!”
She traveled, living in Paris, but making frequent trips to less-populated villages, the countryside, and seaside communities. She rose with the sun and retired by 5:30 p.m. some nights.
Esmond was pleased with her trajectory. Her creativity was free flowing and it was showing up in her work and people’s reception of it. In 1956, she showed a collection at a New York exhibition, where she found an approving audience and several buyers.
Finally free to travel as she liked, she took full advantage of it. She escaped to the Caribbean to keep her work steady during the winter of 1956; October of the following year brought her to Vicenza, Italy, where she recovered the stamina of her late teens, writing, “I am really in another world, and working as though I were 17! Yesterday, I didn’t leave my room or my [study of] architecture, except to go & eat a Pizza at 7 o’clock.”
She took short trips to smaller villages, the simplicity of which she found romantic. “When I go off a few miles from [Vicenza], into the hills or mountains, it is not only the beauty of what I see, it is the peace, the atmosphere. The villages, the people working in their fields, a man walking with his goat! Or else just the bells of the cows, grazing in the fields. It is all that I love, all that is human & real. It is what one does not see, but what one feels.”
But she was still tormented by conflicting emotions. Trying to sail in her own direction was a daily struggle when the winds of societal expectation blew in another. In a 1955 letter to her son, she divulged her state of mind. “Hope & despair, passion & hate, all are tearing themselves apart, within me, until I pull myself together & achieve what I think is worthwhile.”
Review - “Arts” 03.20.1953
“[Esmond’s] … still-lifes landscapes, and portraits show the expressive force, the vigorous use of color, and the extraordinary soundness of composition of this artist, whose talent is akin to that of the greatest.”
Having finally escaped New York, Esmond still harbored some disdain for cities—which she called towns. “It is the large towns which ruin people & make them hard & cruel & selfish. I am sure of that,” she wrote in a letter penned from Vicenza in 1957.
Keeping to the quieter regions of Europe as much as she could, she spent the 1960s depicting provençal countrysides—farms, tastefully dispersed homes, and tree-scattered landscapes stretching out in muted colors. But she still mingled in more populated areas, often painting crowds of people, many of them bathers or beachgoers whose simplified figures fill and spill off frame in soft-edged geometric forms.
Esmond also engaged with the theater world, working with Jean-Louis Barrault, Madeleine Renaud, and Marie Bell in France and designing costume and stage sets for a showing of Jean Racine’s “Berénice” on Broadway. She got along well with her thespian colleagues. Later, reflecting back on that work, she wrote that it had been good for her to get out of her studio. “I was always discovering other people, & I do know how to get on with people. It meant me going to the fittings with the actors, getting friendly with all the people behind the stage etc., going to little shops specializing in theatrical things etc … etc … I adored it.”
In other social settings, she found she struggled to connect with others. There, she was often disappointed in people, and thus withdrew. “I can tell you, that I am pretty sure it is because I live in France (or this region of France)” she wrote to Victor Wallis. “I can’t believe that if I lived in a village in England or Scotland that there wouldn’t be some people I could go & have a chat with. Simple people, but human.”
Developing a new style - mid 1960s-1970s
Eventually, Esmond settled back down and escaped Paris. In 1962 she married Jean Don, a man 16 years her elder, and the two moved to Behoust, France, about 30 miles from Paris. She gushed over her new accommodations. “The light is much better & the consequence is that my colours are brilliant as they have never been before.”
Here, she had a small studio built over the home’s garage, which was a converted farmhouse. She had a pool, a guesthouse, a large garden, and an easy-going and adoring husband. She could spend all day painting, interrupting herself only once in a while to play outside with the couple’s pet boxer, Lazy. It was, she wrote, “An ideal life. The only one I like.”
Esmond’s declining tolerance for people and cities showed up in her work, as human forms disappeared from her compositions. “I am striving for colour simplicity, & less “figuratif”, because the latter really gets on my nerves!” she wrote to Victor Wallis in 1965. “Who on earth wants to see pictures of people on the beach! It is bad enough to see them in the summer, let alone live with them year in year out!”
The changes she hinted at began appearing prominently in the style of her work in the 1970s, as her canvases became more abstract. During those years, she began painting tropical forests—inspired by her visits to the Caribbean and Saint Lucia in particular—in bold colors. In these, layered shades of blue create depth and thick smears of paint add texture and angles that catch light differently throughout the day.
From this era, there are also several bright orange canvases punctuated by dashes and shards of blue. These are untitled, but share some of the same patterns as her jungle portrayals. A few pieces like these appeared in her earlier work, but now she created them prolifically and their shapes and color took on a new boldness.
One piece, coated almost entirely in strokes of blue-green, is ripped through by three vertical strips of red as if the veneer on a piece of old metal began to chip away to reveal its past self.
A reviewer for the French daily newspaper “le Figaro” commented on her junglescapes in 1978:
What stands out is the extraordinary series of gouaches in which one finds, in all its intensity, the frenzy and the luxuriance of the tropics, with astonishing mixtures or daring juxtapositions of greens and of blues that range from turquoise to violet. We should also mention the large canvases–likewise inspired by the forests of Saint Lucia–in which the dense vegetation is conveyed in its all-powerful embrace by means of an adroit play of almost brutal lines which become tangled in what seems like a chaos of colors. But the eye can admire in all this a talent and a savoir-faire that no longer need to be proved.
She was also painting studios in intricate detail and in various levels of abstraction, the rooms crammed with color and pattern but empty of human occupants.
Her work from this era garnered positive reviews, which encouraged her, but buyers remained elusive.
Hope at the Wildenstein - 1978
A potential turning point arose for Esmond when she was invited to have a solo exhibition at Wildenstein & Co., a prestigious art gallery in London. The show would take place in 1978. For months she worked diligently, fueled by the new opportunity for visibility and the affirmation that she was being noticed and recognized among the highest tiers of Europe's artistic class.
From the moment she arrived, the exhibition was a let down. High society, it seemed, was just as out of touch with Esmond as she was with it. Disgusted by the gaudiness of the room she was presented with at the Wildenstein Gallery, she tore it apart with just two days before the show was set to open.
She replaced beige velvet walls with clean white, threw out Louis XV canapés and blue velvet armchairs, and brought in spotlights to improve views of her pieces. “In the end,” she wrote of the affair. “I got what I wanted & the directors & everyone who works in the gallery congratulated me, because they also found it so much better.”
But opening day brought further disappointment. Many visitors lavished her with praise—interest was so high that the exhibition was extended—but all kept their wallets tucked away; others were more interested in the social aspect of the event. “ ... the people drink champagne … & don’t care!!! But I don’t drink & do care!” she wrote to Wallis afterward.
Review - “the Times” 07.27.1978 (in reference to Wildenstein exhibition)
“The works shown are of a personal and unusual quality in their richness and intensity of colour, and design that can be appreciated alternatively as a surface arrangement of forms and colours or as a landscape in depth. The tropical forest is a theme enabling the artist to extract all the lusciousness that blue and green can yield. A number of paintings show the vividness of her response to the brilliance of atmosphere in the Caribbean. The combination of abstract harmonies and the impression left by actual landscapes is one of which the eye does not tire.”
One person did come through for Esmond. Her close friend Martha Gellhorn traveled to the exhibition, ready to celebrate Esmond’s accomplishment with her. When she arrived, she immediately knew things were off. “I hated the vernissage, thinking it [was] the wrong gallery, the wrong crowd like a society cocktail party, completed by a pushy PR woman who kept bustling people up to Diana who looked strangely small and bewildered,” she later wrote.
It was the evening after, alone together in a small room at the Ritz London, that the women found joy in the experience. “With hilarity, we invented the super-rich sheik who was going to buy [Diane’s] whole collection. Then we wandered out to Piccadilly Circus and ate dinner in a dubious Chinese joint,” wrote Gellhorn.
That was the last evening the two friends would share with each other.
Final years - 1978 onward
The disappointment of the 1978 exhibition weighed on Esmond for some time and, soon after, her health began to worsen. Gellhorn proposed visits several times over the coming years, but Esmond always declined.
Though she continued working, it was with less vigor. Where previously she had shouldered past adversities to get brush to canvas, she began to hold up smaller setbacks to excuse malaise-induced hiatuses.
It was as if she had burned zealously through her fuel stores in anticipation of Wildenstein, then run her tank dry on the way home, miles from the nearest fill-up.
“I had a wonderful year last year, working for my exhibition & now I am at rock bottom!!!” she wrote to Wallis. “Please don’t worry because I don’t care—(yes, I do!). I haven’t done a stroke of work. Thank God I have had the excuse of a bit of trouble with my back …”
Her self-perceived lack of productivity greatly distressed her. “Something might pop up soon, & sooner or later I am bound to get down to work or else I will go stark staring mad!!!”
A snow-covered winter in 1979 kept her housebound and bored, unable to work. With spring came a slow drip of productivity followed by a bout of unfulfilled wanderlust that summer, when she yearned to leave her home and husband for a while to once again find inspiration in travel.
The trip never came to be. In 1981, she suffered a broken hip and later died during its operation.
Read part III of this profile series, A Legacy Emerges.
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