Source 1045: Biography

Source Record 1045

Description:

Source Type} Biography

Family History} Olson

"The Official Biography Website of Gounod Romandy".
[No longer available on line, last printed on 8/21/2010.]

Gounod Romandy was born in Coronado, California, on April 18, 1893, the product of musically prominent parents. His father, Dionis de Romandy, passed away when Gounod was four, but not before entertaining Europe and the western United States with "Romandy and His Hungarian Orchestra."

Gounod attended Los Angeles High School and joined the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, becoming the youngest member of that organization. He held the position or concert master in the leading theater orchestras of the city, and gained prominence as a musical comedy conductor. As one writer put it in a memorial article: "His orchestra and violin solos at the El Capitan Theater will be long remembered."

Romandy was also concert master and a lead violinist for Walt Disney Studios, playing in the early cartoons and feature classics of the late twenties, thirties and early forties. While he pursued his career in music, Gounod also loved to paint. He studied art as well as music under J. Bond Francisco, and had further art instruction by Jack Wilkinson Smith, as well as the European artist Louis Hensel.

While many early California painters in his era lived to their seventies and eighties, producing hundreds of paintings that still appear for sale or in museums today, Romandy died at the age of 49, leaving the family with nearly all of his finished work.

Organizations and Accomplishments: Member Painters and Sculptors Club, California Art Club, Society for Sanity in Art, and life member and second vice-president of the Laguana Beach Art Association. In 1935 he wond first award for landscape at the Los Angeles Art Museum.

Gounod's grandson, Patrick Romandy-Simmons, carries on an artistic tradition with The Walt Disney Company working as a master sculptor for the Walt Disney Classics Collection aw well as creating many pieces for the Disney these parks through his association with Walt Disney Imagineering.

Source Cost } $ 0.00
Kind of Evidence} Reproduced copy

Last Updated
by} Karen Hancock

Date Updated} 2 Aug 2023
Date Created} 22 Aug 2010

Repository:

Dan and Karen Hancock
1059 Southridge Drive
Auburn, California 95603-5851

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