Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

walls of the artists’ room. Suddenly I faced the only photograph of a painting in the room – Sargent’s portrait of Joachim. There was a great swirl of paint in this and it hit me plumb in the solar plexus. All thought of being a singer vanished. That sensuous swirl of paint told me what I cared for most.12

She resolved to attend Art School. Her parents and the ‘High Mistress’ at St Paul’s, Miss Frances Gray, wanted her to go to university, despite her total disinclination for this. The head of the Art Department, Miss Flood-Jones, spoke up on Gluck’s behalf:

June 21st, 1912

Dear Mrs Gluckstein

I had a talk with Miss Flood Jones before I saw Hannah the other day, and I find that Miss Flood Jones who is a very capable judge thinks so highly of Hannah’s prospects in the region of art that I am quite inclined to abandon the plan of her going to University. Miss Flood Jones thinks that Hannah has the root of the matter in her and it would be a great pity if she were not allowed to pursue her art studies as far as possible. I shall therefore, unless I hear from you to the contrary, arrange for her to enter the French Seventh next term, to have a good deal of work in the studio and in history of art from Miss Flood Jones and lessons in design from Miss Moore …

Believe me

Yours sincerely

F.R.Gray

Gluck saw the extra year at school as a punishment. Nor was she then allowed to go to some hotbed of liberty like the Slade. St John’s Wood Art School, just round the corner from the family home, was chosen. Her father hoped her artistic yearnings would quickly evaporate and that, like her mother, she would meet a worthy man through whom she might more sensibly define her life and channel her energy. And the principals of the Art School took scant notice of her on the understanding that rich girls dabbled with Art before they became rich wives. Gluck was frustrated: ‘As far as I was concerned there was nothing taught that could be considered “training”.’13

Her frustrations tipped over into rebelliousness. She paired up with another art student who used only her surname, Craig. Together they would sneak off ‘up west’, with Gluck wearing a cloak. Gluck forbade her family to address her as Hannah. Their nickname for her was Hig, which she allowed. At home she painted in a room above the garage wearing an old jacket of her father’s. In an hour, and with a facility that taunted her in later years when painting became a torture to her and it took her months or years to finish anything, she did a bravura portrait of ‘Grandpa Hallé’ looking jaunty with mutton-chop whiskers and in a nautical cap. For a time Gordon Selfridge gave her a room in his department store for her to do more of these ‘instant’ portraits, but she soon abandoned them, fearing she would become slick.

The climate of war added to her feelings of restlessness. Her brother volunteered for active service in 1915 and was called up the following year. The Meteor, organizing shelter and clothes for refugees, was seldom at home. Gluck, though she wanted no part in the war effort, felt herself to be trapped at home, her career stifled. Then, by what she described as ‘an incredible stroke of luck’, her parents allowed her to go with Craig and two other art students to Lamorna in Cornwall. They stayed with the son of the painter Benjamin Leader. ‘It was a wonderful month. My first meeting with genuine artists.’15 Alfred Munnings, Laura and Harold Knight and Lamorna Birch were all living in the village and beginning to make their reputations. Ernest and Dod Procter lived in Newlyn. It was the caucus of what became known as the Newlyn School, painting pastoral, literal scenes of Cornish life. They painted the pools and rocks, picnics and beach parties, the fair at Penzance, the races, each other’s portraits, the sun reflected on the sea. A thread of sensual pleasure and delight went through their work – a deferential nod to the spell of French Impressionism. Students gathered at the School of Painting founded by Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes in Newlyn. ‘… the very bright of life beamed on us’ wrote Laura Knight of her early days in Lamorna. ‘We danced, played games and lived half the night as well as working hard all day.’15 There was room for a talented, exotic-looking, rebellious girl like Gluck. And anyway she could sing like a lark: ‘I was very spoiled by them all because they liked my singing, and we used to have a lot of music in the Knights’ huge studio. Little did I think then that this studio would one day be mine.’16

She determined to run away from home. Munnings liked her work, was sympathetic to her aspirations and offered to help her financially if her parents refused to give her money. He did two drawings of her at this time. When Gluck returned to Avenue Road she found the atmosphere restricting and inimical. Her father offered to build her a studio in the house, but she wanted other company and a world elsewhere. There were rows and recriminations too deep to heal. She left in the middle of a war, with half a crown in her pocket, no ration card and her father’s curse. There followed before long a rapprochement, material and financial help and an effort to find some common ground. But the split was too drastic and outrageous ever to be truly mended. It wounded her father to the core. The unhappiness it made him feel was, he said, ‘sometimes too strong for philosophy’. He wrote of his pain to his son (3 July 1918) whom he felt to be fighting a more honourable war:

I don’t think she will ever return permanently and that will always remain a cancer to me and