Fonsie Mealy Auctioneers CHATSWORTH AUTUMN FINE ART SALE 28,29,30 SEPTEMBER 2020

4 E rica de Bary was born in Berlin on 4 January 1907, the only child of Erich Kramer (who died before she was born) and his wife Elisabeth. Her mother’s childhood had been spent in St Petersburg, and Erica inherited from her a love of the culture and traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia. An African doll given her by an uncle instilled in her a yearning to visit Africa. Erica’s mother remarried in 1914 and had two further children; the family lived at Eisenach in east Germany. In 1927, while working in Berlin, Erica met Herbert de Bary; they were married in 1931 and had two children, a daughter Erdmuthe (1932) and a son Harald (1935). They lived in part of the de Bary villa in Frankfurt, where Herbert worked as a wine consultant. Erica attended the university lectures on African culture of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius Herbert and Erica, who both spoke French fluently, spent the years 1941-1944 in Paris, where Herbert was adjutant to a Luftwaffe general, Erica wrote for the German-language newspaper, and they jointly edited an illustrated literary periodical. She met prominent authors such as Paul Valéry and Jean-Paul Sartre and formed friendships with some of them. Here, too, she met literary figures from the French African colonies who were “locked down” in Paris for the duration of the war, in particular the poets Leopold Senghor (later the first president of an independent Senegal) and Jacques Rabemananjara (later vice-president of Madagascar), both of whom were founders of the négritude movement – the promotion of a pan-African culture and identity worldwide. A compulsive writer all her life, Erica kept diaries and notebooks, and published folk-tales, essays, travelogues, poems, and translations of authors such as Ionesco. In 1952 she and Herbert made the first of what proved to be many expeditions to Africa. Their spell in Morocco awakened Erica’s love of the desert and was followed in later years by trips to Algeria, the ancient oasis-city of Ghadames in Libya, the Saharan settlements of Rhat and Tassili, and elsewhere. Erica related closely to the Tuareg peoples, sharing the lives of the women. She kept detailed diaries of these expeditions, which Herbert recorded on camera, and they amassed important collections of African objects, the majority of which are offered offered as lot 1436 in this sale. Through membership of the PEN Club, the de Barys became friends of Heinrich Böll, author of Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal). In 1971 Böll encouraged the de Barys to visit Ireland, and they later bought two former national schools in County Leitrim, one as a studio for their artist son Harald and the other as a second home for Erdmuthe. Several pieces of the family collection, furniture, paintings and other artefacts were removed from the de Bary villa in Frankfurt at this time, and are also included in this sale note in particular Lot 1361. In 1981 Herbert and Erica spent their golden wedding anniversary visiting Glendalough; here Herbert died peacefully. In her widowhood, Erica continued to live in Frankfurt, maintaining contacts with her African friends and visiting Erdmuthe in County Leitrim during the summer. She died on 17 April 2007, just three months after celebrating her hundredth birthday. Julian C. Walton Erica de Bary (1907-2007)