An occasional look at former Loomis Chaffee community members whose work helped shape the school: René and Germaine Cherúy.   

Not to name drop, but read on, and you’ll come across Mark Twain, one of the great writers who for a time lived in Hartford, Conn.; his buddy Charles Dudley Warner, one-time editor of The Hartford Courant; former French President Charles de Gaulle; Morgan G. Bulkeley, the first president of baseball’s National League and a former Connecticut governor; and Auguste Rodin, considered by many as the founder of modern sculpture. 

They are all famous and, of course, have their own Wikipedia pages. That’s a sign you made it. But so did the subjects of this article, who each have their own page. René and Germaine Rouget Cherúy, married in 1924, were teachers at Loomis Chaffee. He taught French; she taught art. Together they produced student plays. They had a yearbook dedicated to them. 

Even a place in which they lived after their teaching days at Loomis has a Wikipedia page: Casa Cherúy. The Cherúys were part of the Old Fort Lowell artist colony in Tucson, Ariz. They expanded an adobe house that was built in the 1920s in part from the ruins of the 1870s Fort Lowell quartermaster corrals and stables. The Cherúys built more living space and a studio. Casa Cherúy was restored in 2017, according to The Arizona Daily Star, and contains furniture and art made by Old Fort Lowell artists.  

Today you can book a stay there. The main house and detached studio include three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and is an “alluring Tucson retreat offering history, luxury, and privacy ... available for adventurers seeking the true west,” according to casacheruy.com. About $1,750, before taxes, gets you a minimum two-night stay and “an unobstructed view of the Santa Catalina Mountains,” as well as other amenities, according to an Airbnb listing. “Every window is like a framed painting,” said a review by someone who stayed there. The property is on the National Register of Historic Places. 

René, who first came to the United States in 1909 as a private teacher and lecturer, was appointed to the faculty in 1914 but did not begin teaching until after World War I, in 1919. He had moved back to France, serving with the French Army, and was attached to the British Army from 1914 to 1918 as an interpreter. René was awarded the French croix de guerre with palm and the British military medal, each for bravery in the field. In April 1964 he was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor by Mr. de Gaulle, the French president at the time, according to René’s obit in The Hartford Courant on May 28, 1964.  

An article in The Courant on September 10, 1915, described construction starting on Founders Hall. Oftentimes in that period an article contained multiple headlines, and this one included “Faculty Member In French Army” and “René Cheruy Last Heard From Six Months Ago.” Those headlines grabbed you, but there was only a brief mention of him in the article — a reference to a new teacher who would be taking “the place of René Cherúy ... who was detained in France by the war and was last heard of about six months ago as fighting in the French army.”  

René would return to Loomis and head up the French Department until retiring in 1940. He came out of retirement to teach during World War II before retiring for a second time and moving to Tucson. 

He led the Cercle Français at school, the 1920 Loomiscellany noting the production of two plays as well as “the weekly meetings, with their conversation and occasional lectures by masters, and even the feeds, have done much to make the understanding of French easier for the fellows. Besides this, many of the members have enrolled in the International Educational Association for correspondence with French boys, thus making possible the interchange of ideas with the real French people.” 

Both René and Germaine were well known beyond Windsor in their time at Loomis. René gave four lectures in the homes of Hartford women interested in the French people before he left for the war. One was in the home of Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner, another at the home of Mrs. Morgan G. Bulkeley, each among the Hartford elite. 

René, an 1899 graduate of the Sorbonne, always had a lot to talk about, whether it was French art, music, or the language. Or Rodin, the famous sculptor known for many works, including “The Thinker.” René had been secretary to Rodin for seven years, not the easiest job in the world. During a six-month vacation, Rodin tried five other secretaries, according to an article in The Courant in which René described Rodin thusly: “An outlandish mixture of the satanic, the comic, and the exasperating, a man of many paradoxes, a peasant with the head of a god and the hands of a woman, a man with his soul bent on accomplishing what was predestined for him — this was Rodin as I knew him.”  

A woodcut portrait of Rodin, drawn by René and engraved by Germaine, is in the Graphic Arts Collection of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University. 

Germaine taught art at Loomis and, before coming to the United States in 1924, was stage and costume designer at the Theatre du Vieux Colomier in Paris. She started the Art Club at Loomis in 1931, and the 1934 Loomiscellany noted that it was one of the most active clubs at the school. By 1935 the club was painting scenery for the Dramatic Club, student work was provided for the Loom and Loomiscellany, and multiple exhibitions of outside work were sponsored. One of her students at Loomis was David Park, a pioneer of the Bay Area figurative movement of the 1950s. 

Germaine exhibited her work in galleries in Hartford, New York, and Boston, and at Yale and Harvard. In 1937 she had a show at the Stavola Galleries in Hartford in which more than 40 of her paintings — some in color, some in wash — were exhibited. The Courant review noted: “It may be indiscreet, though I cannot feel it is unjust, to remark that the average woman painter is not exceedingly vigorous in her presentations. It is therefore continually surprising, as well as gratifying, to see in Mme. Cherúy, a dynamic vitality, an intense, temperamental ruggedness. Likewise, such a characteristic is seldom associated with the watercolor medium. It is infrequent that you will find the medium so strongly pursued and pushed as under this artist’s brush.”   

Germaine’s inspiration for her work came from “an eclectic group of sources: Rembrandt’s drawing, Claude Lorrain’s paintings, and the wood block prints of an early 19th-century Japanese artist, Hokusai,” according to an historical article in the Loomis Chaffee Archives. Once the Cherúys moved to Tucson, which also became an inspiration for her work, Germaine and René were surrounded in the Old Fort Lowell artist colony not only by other artists but also by writers and poets. The Cherúys opened their home there to many, hosting receptions. Ma maison est votre maison.