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

‘Stage and Country’ opened in April 1926. ‘Plus fours, hell’, she wrote on the envelope in which she kept its reviews. They drew attention of course to her Eton crop, breeches, man’s soft hat, name and pipe and there were photographs of her looking like a squire in many of the papers. ‘I addressed him naturally as “Mr Gluck”’, wrote ‘Onlooker’ in the Daily Graphic (9 April 1926).

It was with a considerable shock that I found myself being answered in a soft voice, essentially feminine. I do not know that I should altogether like my own wife or my own daughters to adopt Miss Gluck’s style of dressing her hair or clothing her limbs, but I do know that I should be proud of them if they could paint as well as Miss Gluck paints …

He went on to say that her ‘emulation of masculine virtues’ was ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’.

The critics enjoyed themselves, but were full of praise. ‘A less derivative style I have not seen for many a long day’ said L.G.S. in the Art News (4 April 1926):

It is a curious compound of the masculine and the feminine point of view in art. There is the fine delicacy of the woman artist and the humour and clear-cut vision of the man …

and Drawing and Design ran a four-page feature which spoke of her vivacity of spirit, rhythm of composition, subtlety of design and of the breadth and detachment of her mind.

The forty-four pictures in the exhibition reflected her life: her self-portrait in beret, tie and braces, with a cigarette hanging from her lips; Lamorna at dawn; Ella Naper at Dozmare Pool; the base of a waterfall on the Moors where rivulets of water bubble into a deep pool; the races at St Buryan. And contrapuntal to the light of the Cornish skies, she painted the spotlit world of the theatre. Ernest Thesiger facing his audience, the contrast of ‘On and Off’ stage in a scene from a play at the Duke of York theatre, Grock, the clown about to do a backward somersault. The show confirmed her reputation as a painter of her time. No word was breathed of her Gluckstein connections.

Her father cannot have liked opening his copies of The Tatler and The Sketch in April 1926 and seeing large photographs of his daughter in trousers and a tie. Perhaps he was relieved she had abandoned his name. But at least the world declared her work good. He was suffering with heart trouble from which he died four years later. He had had the consolation of his son’s return home from the war in 1918. Louis lived at home until his marriage in 1926 when he moved to a house nearby. Ever the dutiful son, he did all he could to please his parents. He even made trips with them to Vichy in their quest for health, as he told Gluck (10 August 1924):

We discuss in the most intimate manner the biliary ducts and general intestinal functions.… We are mere units in the liver-cum-kidney brigade which gathers in this small, unpleasantly bourgeois little town … I dislike Vichy. I’m not ill. I don’t want to be made ill and I decline to pretend to be ill … I shall remain some two weeks to calm the parental mind at whatever cost to my feelings and shall return to England towards the end of the month …

Your devoted and somewhat strung up brother,

Luigi

Louis stayed devoted to his sister for some years after his marriage. He bought her pictures for his home and was proud of her success. Conflict happened after their father’s death when he became Gluck’s main trustee. It galled her to have her younger brother supervising her finances. His wife, Doreen, a conventional, well-organized woman found both her sister-in-law and mother-in-law impossible. The coolness between her and Gluck grew no warmer as the years passed and Gluck became combative, though surface formalities were always preserved, reciprocal visits made and no birthday or anniversary went unacknowledged.

In 1926 Gluck was flying high. After her exhibition she went on holiday to France where at dawn she painted the sardine boats at St Jean de Luz. The severance her parents wished for occurred between her and Craig, though they remained lifelong friends. Craig was left in the shade by Gluck’s success. And at the time of Louis’ marriage, Gluck’s capital was increased by her father to £20,000 and he bought her the home of her choice: Bolton House in Hampstead. It cost £4000. Gluck moved in with a housekeeper, a maid and a cook. She had her own car to drive to Lamorna when city life became too fast. The Fine Art Society wanted to stage her next exhibition as soon as she could produce enough pictures. She was thirty.

FOUR

BOLTON HOUSE

Bolton House, Windmill Hill, a tall, red-brick Georgian building on three floors, with a wide drive through wrought-iron gates, was – and is – in the heart of Hampstead village. Gluck favoured houses and communities that offered a pledge to the creative life. By the late twenties she owned Laura Knight’s studio in Lamorna, Whistler had formerly worked in her Chelsea studio in Tite Street and Wordsworth, Byron and Sarah Siddons had all stayed at Bolton:

When I dine with my friend Miss Gluck, at Bolton House, Hampstead where she resides, besides those in the flesh seated at the table, there are present the phantom memories of distinguished people who gathered there in the fifty years during which, as the plaque on the front of the house announces “Joanna Baillie, Poet and Dramatist lived here 1801–1851”. In the dining room – parlour she would have called it – a quaint little room eighteen feet by thirteen, panelled from floor to ceiling … have assembled many a time and oft a goodly company – Sir Walter Scott and his daughter Ann, Lockhart and