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

year when the white craze reached its height, a craze epitomized in the look of the film star Jean Harlow, ‘who appeared to have been constructed of equal parts of snow, marble and marshmallow’.2 Constance wrote of white flowers:

It is in the interplay of light and shade, colour and shape in a thousand variations, that the delight of white flowers lies. It is subtle and distinct, cool yet brilliant and is a matter for endless experiment and pleasure.3

Her assistant, later co-director, Val Pirie did the arrangement for Gluck. She drove to Bolton House at the appointed time with a Warwick vase and a box of white flowers; anthurium, amaryllis, arums, tulips. The maid showed her in. It was all very grand and she waited until Gluck came through from the studio in smock and trousers ‘looking extremely handsome and cross at being disturbed from painting’.4 Val Pirie asked for a pedestal and water, then got on with the job. It presented no problems to her for it was a familiar way of using flowers. Suddenly she was aware that Gluck had stopped painting and was scrutinizing the arrangement. This kind of composition was new to her, she was extremely impressed by it and wanted to paint it right away.

It was to be the most painstaking of all her pictures so far. Months followed of replacing each bloom as it faded. The finished picture ‘Chromatic’ was the most spectacular of all her flower paintings. It was about five foot square and formed the centrepiece of her 1932 show. It was bought by a Mrs Ella Reeves who lived in The Mansion, Leatherhead. After her death it was sold to a dealer. Gluck tried to persuade him to sell it back to her, but he would not part with it. Constance was hugely impressed by ‘Chromatic’ and wrote of it in her book Flower Decoration:

Gluck’s painting of this group exemplifies the delicacy and the strength, the subtleties and the grandeur of white flowers. It has another point of interest to those who admire the paintings of the old Flemish masters, since here we have a modern artist painting flowers in a spacious and decorative manner, but with the same delicate precision and feeling that characterized the work of these men.5

‘Chromatic’ was only the first of a series of paintings which reflected Constance’s ‘genius for flowers’. In all manner of ways the relationship that developed between them influenced Gluck’s work and furthered her career. Before they met, she painted cyclamen growing in a pot, camellias or tulips in a glass, poppies in a painted vase. ‘Chromatic’ and many of her subsequent flower paintings were of arrangements in the Constance Spry manner. Gluck’s knowledge of flowers and their characteristics also increased. If they were grand she painted them in marble vases or alabaster urns. Her subsequent notes on flower painting reflected the extent to which she was influenced by Constance’s ideas.

Always give your flowers a setting in keeping with their essential characteristics, just as you would a portrait. If you had a queen to paint you would see that her surroundings were as regal as they could be. Flowers have these degrees of flamboyancy and simplicity and to be arbitrary about your setting is to be as stupid and unreceptive as to set a … coal heaver in a sitting room.… Be very quick at first essentials of character. As much character in a flower however tiny as in a portrait. Same principle as in everything else, but always be on the extra qui vive for the special delicacy of flowers. Impermanency. Feel the direction of growth …6

Constance’s arrangements were light years away from carnations and roses in glass vases. Other florists were tradespeople who delivered sprays, wreaths and bouquets as ordered. She treated flower-arranging as an art and went in through the front door. Many of her clients became personal friends. Each scheme was unique, assembled where it was to be displayed, not below stairs, and often in an ornamental vase or cup from her own collection. She arranged nasturtiums or Roman hyacinths in pearly cockle shells, heaped papier mâché dishes with grapes and gardenias and filled china cabbages with green tulips and orchids.

Her arrangements for the windows of Atkinsons, a perfumery in Bond Street, were a weekly showpiece. The shop was designed by Norman Wilkinson. It was a glittering interior with engraved glass columns, mirrors, and a fountain of tubular glass. Constance filled huge vases with ever changing displays of lichened branches, wild arum lilies, or moss studded with primroses. The window, spotlit at night, was a conspicuous display, on show to the world of wealth, luxury and fashion.

Constance took Gluck into that world. She recognised her talent and how well her paintings would fit into fashionable interiors. She introduced her to her friend and client, the interior designer Syrie Maugham, who was Mrs Somerset Maugham, though not for very long. Syrie Maugham was famous for her all-white drawing room which was featured in the fashion magazines and copied for a decade. ‘Ever since Mrs Somerset Maugham made her white room in Chelsea, one has felt that parties require to be bathed in light,’ Vogue wrote in 1932. ‘White satin drapes, mirrors in white rococco plaster frames, dining chairs in gold and white, white ceramic cockerels, white electric candles, white birds on rings in the windows, silver and white ceramic ashtrays.’

‘Our grandmothers’ wrote Homes and Gardens in August 1933,

in the fashion of their day sat in dark rooms with draped mantelpieces. Our own most up-to-date interiors have been described as rooms in which a white piano would be inconspicuous. Floors, furniture, fabrics, china, have been bleached to complete candour, or, at least, to the ghosts of their former selves. Like the countryside after a hard frost, our interiors shimmer with plate glass and chromium steel against pickled or limed panelling, with fabrics in the natural shantung shades of silks and unbleached linen and cotton.

The article ran a picture of a showroom, at