Gluck Read online

  I am flourishing in a new garb. Intensely exciting. Everybody likes it. It is all black though I can wear a coloured tie if I like and consists of a long black coat, like a bluecoat boy’s with a narrow dark leather belt. It was designed by yours truly and carried out by a mad dressmaker. Utterly loony. She thought I was mad and I was damn certain that she was mad – Still she was very clever and very cheap and as it was an experiment I am glad it turned out so well. It is most old masterish in effect and very dignified and distinguished looking. Rather like a Catholic priest. I hope you will like it because I intend to wear that sort of thing always.11

  While at school Gluck oscillated between art and music as a career. She had a fine contralto voice and ‘cared greatly for music, especially Lieder and early Italian and French songs’. Her singing teacher was impressed enough to offer to continue teaching her free of charge, rather than see her give up singing – and the musical training at St Paul’s was good. Gustav Holst was director of music there. In her extravagant manner Gluck liked to tell of the inspirational flash that determined her choice of future:

  I was very torn between the two arts, but my fate was settled in a dramatic way at the first pupils’ concert at the Wigmore Hall. After receiving most encouraging applause I determined to choose a singer’s life. While waiting for my next appearance I looked at the rows of photographs of famous musicians lining the 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 however I try to forget, I really shall never be able to. Your dear mother is very brave and I believe she suffers in silence to save me pain. She says her temperament is different to mine, but when she talks of you, her temperament is mine. I certainly do admire her bravery in the other case. Perhaps she is wiser than me. Any how we can never tell and I shall always hope for the best because one cannot live without hope.

  ‘Differ and separate and you are undone.’ ‘L’Union Fait La Force.’ All that he, his father, his brothers and The Family had worked for, his daughter had thrown in his face, for the sake of something he could not understand and which seemed to him scandalous. He did not forgive her for it.

  THREE

  STAGE AND COUNTRY

  In Lamorna Gluck felt as free as air, her spirits high. The simplicity of the place delighted her. It was a hamlet of houses in a wooded valley with a stream flowing into the sea at Lamorna Cove. All around were moorlands, standing stones and a rugged coast. ‘If ever a country was “pixielated” and primitive it is Cornwall,’ she wrote.1 She developed a deep love for south-west Cornwall and all her life kept a studio there. ‘My landscapes were the first that truthfully showed the immediate impression one gets there – that of very little land and great expanses of sky.’2 She regarded herself as an English painter, ‘I never want to paint really in any other country, though I
might enjoy them to look at …’3

  Lamorna Birch lived in the old coastguard’s house, Laura Knight worked in the ‘Letter Studio’, Munnings lived at ‘The Wink’, the local inn, and painted at the mill nearby. They gave critical appraisal to her work: ‘Laura Knight is coming this morning to have a private view of the work I have done down here,’ Gluck wrote to her brother (29 August 1918). ‘A very harrowing moment mon cher! Pity me.’

  Her flight to Lamorna was the making of her, as a painter and a rebel. She could be who and how she wanted. It was a bonus to wear chappish clothes and to smoke a pipe. ‘My dear my pipe is a boon and a blessing to me,’ she told Louis. ‘I have had some gorgeous moments with it. It is going a perfectly lovely colour and is the envy of Lamorna. Our sketching permits [needed for working out of doors in wartime] came last night, so work begins. Hurrah!’4 Her brother also gave her a man’s swimming costume, large Italian handkerchiefs and a cloak.

  She painted in a twelve by eight foot hut and rented a primitive cottage to live in with Craig.

  The only drawbacks which have appeared at present are a few woodlice which parade our bedroom and the Auntie. Oh Luigi the Auntie is appalling! It is in the yard not in the house at all. It looks ordinary enough when you approach it but is really an ordinary seat just over ordinary ground and the smell! Lor blimey lor! Otherwise the place is stunning. We have a very comfortable sitting room and bedroom.5

  They spent summers in Lamorna and winters in a flat in north London, in the Finchley Road. Gluck set her sights on producing enough for a ‘one-man show’ at a London gallery. She painted the Lamorna valley and cove, the quarry, the cliffs, the path into the hills and the incoming tide, the sun breaking through rain clouds on fields and a hamlet. She painted white clouds ‘in full sail’ scudding across a windswept sky and the evening star in a moonlit sky. Expanses of ever-changing sky featured again and again in her landscapes, many of which seem like skyscapes with few details of earthly life:

  The sky is a bowl, not a flat backcloth and its colour and light reflect in every blade of grass, every twig … the colour of the sky permeates the landscape under that sky and for your grass or trees to look as if that colour was the last ever to reach them would mean you had been insensitive to their relationship with the sky and seen them by themselves, isolated in their uncompromising green or brown. Some of the sky must have caressed their leaves or twigs, or be dancing between the grasses, or lying mirrored on the waters, however shyly …

  Wind and weather change continuously, a landscape is chameleon to the light. Are you so truly sensitive to the one you have chosen as your subject that you have caught just the inflections in the voices of the trees and fields when singing to the sky above them? Will this note have reached you so clearly that no matter what changes and interruptions occur you will, like a good tuning fork, continue to vibrate to that note unerringly?6

  She drew Phyllis Crocker who lived with her three daughters in a bungalow near Penzance. Mr Crocker, a dentist and dipsomaniac with a passion for sailing and fishing, would go to the Scilly Isles in his boat, fish there, then arrive home drunk. Phyllis Crocker left him to marry an antiquarian bookseller, who stayed in Lamorna with his Italian business partner, Guiseppe ‘Pino’ Orioli, whom Gluck painted too. He wrote an anecdotal book Adventures of a Bookseller about his travels, and meetings with writers like D. H. Lawrence, D’Annunzio and the poet John Ellingham Brooks, who married Romaine Brooks.

  Gluck stayed with the painter Ella Naper in a primitive hut on the Bodmin Moors by Dozmare Pool where the landscape was at its wildest. Laura Knight described Ella as ‘an adorably lovely creature’ who, when she chose, wore workmen’s corduroy trousers, smoked a clay pipe and bathed naked off the rocks.7 Gluck did several pictures of herself and Ella. While Ella washes clothes in the pool, rakes leaves for a bonfire and stands in a meadow in a clinging dress, with her dog Minchi Fu, Gluck watches. They seem like a couple with Gluck the romantic, reflective man.

  Penzance had a makeshift cinema by 1921 and Gluck’s picture ‘All the World’s Darling’ shows Mary Pickford on its screen, ringletted and grinning, in one of her little girl parts, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Daddy Long Legs, ‘with her anonymous audience gazing up’. A few years later, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks came, amid huge publicity, to London. Their on- and offscreen lives were everyone’s affair. They had founded United Artists and lived in ‘Pickfair’, a Hollywood fantasy house. Gluck wrote to offer Mary Pickford her painting. She was summoned to the Dorchester. The World’s Darling hardly gave the picture or its creator a glance but, said Gluck, ‘white talons with blood red nails came out to seize it’. Gluck snatched it back and left.

  A Lamorna woman paid half-a-crown a go to hear her sing and Gluck did a caricature of herself, striding off with hurricane lamp and back-pack for this assignment. She did a commissioned portrait of a Lady Egmont, a family friend who lived in Exmouth and was also keen on music:

  Oh Ludovici! [Gluck wrote to her brother] Imagine what happens when I attempt to sing. The parrot screeches and whistles, the canary trills on one note for hours, Lady E sings snatches of opera and rum tiddle tum songs in a high nasal flat soprano, Gracie hums or sings through her tightly shut lips, her baby gurgles and crows, we are like a mad futurist orchestra.8

  They were happy days. Days of work, of bathing in the sea or walking on the moors, nights of parties with like-minded people, and plenty of encouragement to egg her ambitions on. She went with Craig to the horse races at St Buryan and painted scenes of spectators in cold weather watching the races, crowding the jockey, or playing ‘toss halfpenny’. She got as brown as a berry, cooked her own food and lived ‘a completely savage existence’ until she missed the Russian Ballet too much, the spectacle of Nijinsky and Pavlova, the concerts, theatre and ‘civilization’. Then she went back to London.

  Despite his pain, her father made her freedom possible. In October 1918 he opened a bank account in her name, paid in £100, introduced her to the manager of the St James’s Street branch, and

  told her we would like her to let us know on the first of each month how much she had spent and we would at once pay in that amount to her credit. I said we don’t want details of how you spend the money, but only the monthly totals. She was very pleased with the suggestion …9

  He also opened the first of a series of trust accounts on her behalf. She could not touch the capital, of £6,500, but would get the investment income – an assured six pounds ten shillings a week. ‘I am only doing this’, he wrote to his son (6 November 1918),

  to protect her even against herself and also against me, as I won’t take the risk of her suffering financially, in case I feel inclined, through passion or otherwise, to stop her allowance. I won’t trust myself and therefore intend to get it all settled … I told her I would allow her that amount and even more if she wanted it as my and mother’s sole idea was to make her happy.

  The terms of this, and revised trusts in her name, precluded her from ever having access to the capital. ‘I want to avoid the risk of her marrying some scoundrel who might marry her for her money and then lead her a bad life.’10 In later years, Gluck resented the financial restrictions of these trusts, but at the time she was more than pleased.

  Some of the senior business partners, particularly her uncle Isidore, thought the arrangement over-generous and likely to inspire future individualists in The Family to believe rebellion paid. Gluck’s father had to be diplomatic to get it approved. He met Isidore in Eastbourne for a private talk: ‘… I shall of course be very guarded and impress him, not wicked or bad but just the trend of the times, of a new womankind, I don’t propose to cry stinking fish to anyone.’11

  By the end of the First World War Gluck was wealthy by the standards of the time. She had a guaranteed income of £6.10s a week and a guaranteed monthly balance in her account of £100. Her father, mother, brother and uncles Samuel Gluckstein and John Joseph were her trustees. She had run away from home but had not,
in terms of financial dependency, got further than any of the other members of The Family. With the exception of her brother, The Family thought her behaviour and dress outrageous and the company she kept disreputable. Her father was cut to the quick, her mother simply waited for the phase to pass, but there was no way they would be provoked into denying support to their own daughter.

  The Meteor blamed Craig for Gluck’s errant ways:

  Hig showed me her work from Cornwall and it was very fine, but she was in trousers and that velvet coat and when I see her dressed like that I am sure she has a kink in the brain and I go heartsick. I am sure when she leaves the pernicious influence of Craig all will be well.12

  Even suffragettes wore long dresses and respectable hats – as for that matter did Craig. But still they asked Gluck not to bring her to their home in Avenue Road and complained she could eat any elephant out of house and home and always went to bed too late. When Gluck wrote from Cornwall that Craig had sprained her leg, or had the flu, Gluck’s parents tacitly ignored all mention of her. They hoped that she, and Gluck’s kink in the brain would ‘Please God’, pass. ‘It certainly is nothing but a silly mania’ wrote her father to Louis (12 October 1918),

  for her to practically cut herself off from her own flesh and blood and all who should be dear to her for only one person and that a perfect stranger. What sort of a position will she be in in the future if she falls out with C or if C was to die? She would be alone in the world and must then be very unhappy. It is all so unintelligent and silly for a person who is presumed to have normal common sense. We have decided not to do anything to upset her and I personally have decided to wait til you PG return, as I feel there will be then a chance for your influence and logical arguments to have some effect.