Francis Lagrange : imposture by the pen, testimony by the brush

 

If Flag, a pseudonym, seems like the name of a fictional character, that is because, like Henri Charrière, alias Papillon, Francis Lagrange (1900 – 1964) played with the truth all his life, using a great deal of imagination in an effort to explain the uncomfortable situations in which he found himself.  An autobiography written with the American journalist William Murray recounts his story.  Although this work contains numerous fabrications, several times retold, the archives allow us to see this character’s life trajectory more clearly.  

 

 

Francis Lagrange was born in Lille on March 29, 1900.  His father, Alphonse was an artisan: he manufactured and restored furniture in a shop on the rue du Palais de Justice. Francis was barely six years of age when his father died. An illegitimate child, he was first taken in by a tutor before his mother recognized him.  She too died a few years later, during the Great War.  Left to himself, the teenager got involved in petty delinquency, extortion, and identity theft, which earned him a series of prison sentences until 1920 when the War Council convicted him of corresponding with an enemy state. To redeem himself, he asked to join the African disciplinary battalions, or the “Bat d’Af,” from which he ended up escaping in 1922. There is no trace of him for the following five years, although some archives suggest that he had a wife and daughter. He was rearrested in June 1927 in following new swindles in Paris and Rouen. In 1930, after a last appeal, Lagrange, the multi-recidivist, was banished to Guyana.  

 

 

Francis Lagrange was fundamentally a rebel. After several attempts, and notwithstanding a successful escape from prison, he was back in the system in 1932, sentenced to ten years of hard labor for forging currency. This ushered him into the ranks of ‘hard boiled’ common criminals.  It seems he produced his first creative works during his decade-long stay in the Ile de Salut penal colony known as Devil’s Island  – but he may have started drawing before his sentencing; unfortunately, the sources here are scarce. In 1936, the penal administration appointed him painter of interior decorations. Two years later, he painted the frescoes of the Ile Royale chapel at the request of the chaplain.  He signed these works with the nickname Flag. Liberated in 1942, he continued to fulfill painting commissions for the authorities and for private clients.  When the penal colony closed in 1953, Lagrange remained in Guyana and took up residence in Cayenne.  This is where Raymond Vaudé, another famous inmate who turned from crime to art restoration, commissioned two series of canvases depicting “scenes from the penal colony.”  The first, acquired by the American Bailey K. Howard, is now in the collection of the University of Missouri at Columbia. The second, acquired first by a private collector and then by the Space Center of Guyana, was finally donated to the Department of Guyana in the 1970s. After the publication of his book, which he probably wrote in the United States, Francis Lagrange relocated to Martinique where he died on August 10, 1964. 

 

 

In-depth work on Francis Lagrange's creative output still remains to be done, but it is nonetheless possible to draw a relatively complete overview of his production.  Working on paper, canvas, and silk, he reproduced illustrated views of Guyana, and drew everyday scenes as well as characters representing the diversity of the Guyanese population.  Part of this production was meant for tourists, another part, notably the portraits, fulfilled private commissions.  The frescoes of the Ile Royale chapel became well-known; in addition, Flag completed other works on non-religious themes, especially in Fort-de-France where he painted municipal buildings in 1961

 

 

Lagrange drew and painted places, moments, landscapes.  Through the portraits of his famous or not so famous comrades, he expressed his own feelings as well as the feelings of his companions in misfortune.  While the themes are the same from one technique to another, he did not simply produce more of the same.  Nostalgia  is the main theme in the image of nighttime in a cell, with his comrades around him and a guitar playing, or at a moment when he is alone, facing the sea on the Ile du Salut.  There is always humor in scenes that follow a household helper  watching his mistress putting the laundry out to dry, or accompanying the family’s little girl, unfailingly smiling despite being burdened with a multitude of obligations.  These are powerfully evocative images.  Francis Lagrange is not the only convict–artist. and although his work should not be taken at face value, he has nonetheless left us with an image of a sincere and singularly authentic life story.