On a drizzly Sunday morning last month in Medina County west of San Antonio, I found myself in an old church house with no pastor, parishioners or even a roof to keep the rain out and the gospel in.
I doubt a homily has been delivered in St. Dominic’s Church in Old D’Hanis in 100 years. The little settlement of Alsatian immigrants who built the church came and went pretty quickly in the 19th century. They raised some goats for cheese, plowed some, tried to ferment grapes for wine and kept themselves busy with a dozen other labors that came easy in the Moselle Valley back home. But this was south Texas, and full of cactus, rattlesnakes and mounted Comanches who had not agreed to give up that part of the frontier yet.
The townspeople gave it a go for a few decades. But there was a better, and no doubt safer, life to be lived just east in Castroville or San Antonio. The ruins of St. Dominic’s Church and the interesting little cemetery there is about all you will find left of the town. Go see it sometime. It’s the perfect thing to paint plein air, sitting perfectly still there with no complex colors and no one kindly asking you to move on.
It’s impossible to paint the old church without thinking about one of the enthusiastic promoters who recruited European settlers to sign up for a great new life in Texas in the 1840s, the painter Theodore Gentilz. He worked as an architect and general flunkie for Henri Castro, who was determined to recreate his homeland and get rich selling real estate in the Republic of Texas.
But Gentilz’s real passion was sketching and painting in oil and watercolor the people and things he saw around him in South Texas and Northern Mexico. Gentilz was the original Texas “Sunday painter”, a dilettante who doesn’t make a living painting but enjoys it greatly nonetheless. Painting was the perfect past-time for Gentilz and he was good at it.
Back home in Paris, his contemporaries were redefining painting with color, light and new subjects. Gentilz was a long way from home. He painted highly-detailed pictures in the old style, small town scenes of crumbling Spanish missions and horsemen blocking traffic on Soledad Street playing a funny game of watermelon-football. This was not the kind of art people in those times collected, even in the posh neighborhoods of San Antonio. Gentilz painted them anyway. Later in life, he taught young people art at St. Mary’s school there but he was never a celebrated artist. After a long life, what Gentilz left behind on paper and canvas was priceless; an artist’s interpretation of what his part of the world looked like in the wilder times before cameras and bluebonnet paintings.
Theodore Gentlz no doubt attended a service or two in St. Dominic’s Church in Old D’Hanis. He didn’t live there, but it was the most ornate building in the little town he helped found. The way he was, he may have thought “This church would be a great thing for me to paint . . . but it’s too new.” I thought about him as I painted the church’s window and a heap of dressed limestone blocks from the fallen wall. “C’est bon!” he might say, looking over my shoulder.
