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

his wife, John Kemble, Letitia Landor, Mrs Siddons … and indeed all the leading men and women of letters of the time, for Joanna Baillie, besides being a poet and dramatist of great note in her day, had a genius for friendship and captivated all who became acquainted with her. She wrote ‘Plays on the Passions’, but there never was an authoress of sweeter disposition or better balanced mind.1

The man in the flesh conjuring the phantoms was Sir James Crichton-Browne. His granddaughter Sybil Cookson, a journalist and writer of romantic novels, moved with her two young daughters into Bolton House with Gluck in 1928. sir James had been the ‘Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy’, for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Chairman of the National Health Society, a staunch Scot, editor of Brain and author of such works as Dreamy Mental States (1898), The Nemesis of Froude (1903) and Prevention of Senility (1905). He set up the Crichton Institute in Dumfries, a ‘lunatic asylum’ as such establishments were then called. His family was entitled to a room there in perpetuity.

He visited his granddaughter often at Bolton, admired Gluck’s paintings and commissioned his own portrait. Though his wife thought Gluck’s pictures made him look stern, he was delighted: ‘I am stern,’ he said. He confided to Gluck that he felt like the creature of a remote past, but that ‘friendly messages, like those she sent him, helped to keep him alive’.2 In 1930 she sent out as a Christmas card her self-portrait in braces and tie. ‘I am glad to possess it,’ he wrote, ‘on account both of its personal interest and of its artistic merit. It does not flatter, but it is very expressive and I shall introduce it to good company in my study here.’

He was assiduous in sending Gluck all the details he could unearth about Joanna Baillie’s years at Bolton House – how her uncle, Dr William Hunter ‘the first great English teacher of Anatomy’, left her the legacy that enabled her and her sister to live there, how her brother Dr Matthew Baillie was a leading physician of his day and how Sir Walter Scott, who admired her plays, always stayed at Bolton when in London. Sir James suggested that Gluck give a ‘unique literary entertainment’ called ‘An evening with Joanna Baillie’, with actors reading scenes from her plays and someone singing her songs, such as ‘Wooed and married and a’, and ‘The Chough and Crow’, but Gluck’s soirées were not of that ilk and the evening never transpired.

As for his granddaughter, Sybil Cookson, she was about five foot six with green eyes, chestnut hair and thirty-two inch hips. She wore the clothes of a willowy model of the time called ‘Gloria’ – a Twiggy of the twenties. She had separated in a good-natured way from her husband Roger Cookson, a racing driver with the Bentley team – who drove cars which by 1930 could go at 130 miles an hour. In later years she lived with him again. She was a socialite, a product of the twenties and had a lot of light-hearted love affairs. She published three romantic novels under the name of Sydney Tremaine: Eve, The Auction Mart and The Broken Signpost and she edited and wrote for a chic weekly magazine called Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial.3 She ran a spread of Gluck’s pictures in this after her ‘Stage and Country’ exhibition of 1926. She thought Gluck a genius, wanted to foster her talent and liked being seen with her at parties and shows for they made a theatrical, showpiece couple.

For the magazine, she wrote a column on wedding engagements, show dogs and beauty problems, a satirical weekly page called ‘Nights Out’ about a wilful society girl called Philippa, and pieces with titles like ‘Eve and Her Car’ and ‘Eve’s Golf Bag’. Articles for women advocating self-sufficiency were popular in the 1920s. Universal franchise had been achieved and the 1914–18 war killed off so many young men that one woman in three had, by force majeure, to manage alone. In her weekly review of current films she found ‘no cohesion and little coherence’ in Grand Hotel, thought Lionel Barrymore ‘deplorably ill-cast’ and drily remarked that ‘Buster Keaton will amuse his own particular public’.

She had passes to all the opening nights and invitations to the parties. She was far more sophisticated than Craig who had not, until she met Gluck, so much as drunk champagne. She took over the running of Bolton House. When her two daughters came home for the school holidays there were simultaneous parties for the children on the ground floor and for the grown-ups on the first. In summer the four of them went down to Lamorna, to the ‘Letter Studio’ and the girls stayed in a caravan in the garden. In Lamorna in 1931, Gluck did a portrait of Sybil’s daughter, Georgina. It was intended as a surprise for Sybil, but she did not like it and it was sold at Gluck’s 1932 exhibition. A Brigadier General Critchley bought it to hang in his breakfast room, remarking that it was such a funny face it would put him in a good mood for the day.

Nothing more delightfully ludicrous has ever been put on canvas than ‘Gamine’, the great granddaughter of Sir James Crichton-Browne, who looks out at you with a pert saucy smile from under a perky felt cap

wrote the syndicated provincial papers. Gluck had painted an earlier picture of ‘Georgie’ aged about ten in beret and fur coat.

The Tatler of October 1932 commented on Sydney Tremaine’s, alias Sybil Cookson’s, ‘polished journalistic pen and contribution to criminological literature’. The law, along with the theatre and the peace of the natural world, were recurring themes in Gluck’s work. In the forties and fifties she did a number of portraits of eminent judges: Sir Wilfrid Greene, Sir Cyril Salmon, Sir Raymond Evershed. In the late twenties she painted two legal controversies of