A Jug of Wine, a Dinner Guest and Art!
The Henri Gadbois and Leila McConnell Gadbois Wine Room
Some conventional people make wine the focus of their wine rooms. Not so Houston artists Henri Gadbois (1930-2018) and Leila McConnell Gadbois. In their wine room, the bottles came and went over the decades, but the really important feature – a very special collection of art – has been mellowing for decades.
For those who may not know them, the couple started their long, active lives as artists in the 1940s. They married in the 1950s, and both continued making art through the decades that followed. Leila is still working today.
Starting sometime way back in mid-century days – neiher Leila nor Henri could be quite sure of the exact year the project started – those lucky enough to get an invitation to dine had to work for their supper. Before the plates were filled - but maybe not before a cork or two had been drawn, and a few glasses poured - each guest had to make a little work of art to join the growing number of others on the wine room wall.
Each lucky diner received a little 5 ½ x 4 ¾ inch wooden plaque lettered with their name, a variety of art supplies and free rein to make use of the two as the creative spirit, and hunger pangs, moved them. Anyone could decline, of course, if they didn’t want to eat. But almost no one ever did decline, and “only one broke into tears.” (I have a suspicion that the kindhearted hosts probably made an exception to the NO DINNER rule for them.)
The result is a treasure trove of tiny masterpieces by some of the storied names of Houston art from mid-century on.
A plaque by Albrecht Dürer that Henri saw in a Nuremberg café, inspired the tradition. The wooden plaques had been the dividers in what had been the cubby-holes of an old post office. Henri and Leila bought it somewhere (neither remembered exactly where) and installed it first in the little house on Bingle they moved into after Robert Preusser moved out when he left Houston for MIT in the mid-1950s. When they themselves moved on in the mid-1960s, the wine room – post office cubbies, vintage bottles, art and all – moved with them to their new home, where it has been ever since.
(Note: Due to a scarcity of wall space and wooden plaques, the collection hasn’t grown much in later years - though a few more recent additions have been made:
What a nourishing time!