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 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 p
eace 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 the time, covered by Sybil in a ‘famous trial’ series for one of the weekly journals. One was the Arthur Rouse trial, also called the ‘Blazing Car’ trial, a dramatic crime of the day. Rouse had a wife and various girlfriends and got himself into a muddle with them all, so decided to fake suicide. He gave a lift to a vagrant then set fire to the car and jumped free. A Colonel Buckle saw him, and Rouse was tried, convicted and hanged for murder. As the sentence was. passed he turned to the public and ran his hand across his throat. Gluck spent days in the courtroom with Sybil following the trial. She did two studies of it:
‘The Expert Witness’ with Colonel Buckle in the box and ‘The Unofficial Jury’, a caricature of the crowds that hang around the courts, waiting to glimpse the accused.
Sybil also wrote about boxing, which influenced Gluck to paint a number of boxing scenes. ‘The Foul’ shows the spotlit ring at the Albert Hall on the night of 22 June 1930. The British bantamweight champion, Teddy Baldock, fighting the French champion Emile Pladner, went down in the sixth round from a blow the referee said was below the belt. Protest against the referee’s decision, largely from fans who felt robbed by the shortness of the contest, resulted in Pladner, not Baldock, being selected to fight Al Brown for the world title in Paris.
Joseph Gluckstein, Gluck’s father, died in November 1930. He preserved to the end an unrealistic hope that his daughter would straighten out and restrained any impulse to punish her financially for the wrong he felt she had done to him, The Family and the name of Gluckstein. He made no special mention of her in his Will, which made her bitter. Knowing he was dying, he put his affairs into order and wrote devoted farewell letters to his wife and his son. To Francesca he wrote:
I hope that our dear Hannah may so develop as to be like her dear mother, which to my mind embraces the wish that she will be a model woman, and as to our dear Louis, I pray he will do well in his profession not only financially but that he will continue to be, as he now is, an upright honourable man and a credit to the name of Gluckstein, which name I feel absolutely sure he will hand down to his children as unsullied as he received it.
I have not made any special bequest for Hannah … what has already been provided for her will maintain her handsomely … if other and less favourable conditions should arise I know that proper provision will be made for her from the family funds, to the same extent as for the children of my Partners and if this is done you should not provide more for her from my Estate as there is a moral understanding that after your death the balance of my Estate shall revert to the family funds, so that the children of all the partners shall be financially equal.
As regards the financial position of our dear Louis, I am happy in the knowledge that he is amply provided for, but I would like him to remember that money has its duties as well as its pleasures and I have not the least doubt that he will do what is right.4
To his son he detailed the financial obligations he wished to see honoured and said:
… And now my dear boy adieu. I am most grateful for all the happiness you have given to me from the day of your birth. You have been a truly model son and I can say that no son has ever given to his parents more happiness than you have to yours.
I pray you may be recompensed by having a very happy life with your sweet Doreen and that your dear children will give you as much happiness.
Your very loving father
J. Gluckstein5
He did not write to Gluck.
After his death, Gluck’s brother and mother became her principal trustees. Louis was, by 1931, a barrister, Conservative MP for Nottingham East, on the Board of numerous committees and the father of two children with a third shortly to be born. The youthful intimacy between him and Gluck had gone. He wanted her however to paint his portrait. He went to Bolton House for a couple of sittings, but somehow the picture never got finished.
Gluck did though, in 1930, paint a portrait of her mother in widow’s black with tense hands and eyes she described as ‘bleached from weeping’. She called it ‘The Artist’s Mother’. It shows the Meteor with overwide eyes and gaunt face and seems to presage the madness that was to blight the last decade of her life. The family disliked it for its gloominess and did not want it on their walls. After her father’s death Gluck wrote to or phoned her mother virtually every day, letters that showed affection, possessiveness, dependency and irritation. They were close but uncomfortable with each other.
… despite our closeness so often making friction nevertheless it is closeness and I love you.… Bless you darling and thank you.… I am in a great rush to dress and go out – thank God fortified by the clothes you made possible for me …
They were infinitely solicitous about each other’s health and welfare. The Meteor strove to give her rebellious daughter everything she could. Gluck was forever telling the Meteor where to get her teeth fixed, or what concoction to take to ward off colds, or advising her on her diet, or telling her not to work too hard, or more loftily, to spurn material considerations and
… concentrate on the fulfilment of the spiritual possessions of which you have such a tremendous store. Bless you –
… I want to tell you not to pay the Normand Garage for the work they did on my exhaust … The damned thing broke and trailed in the road before I got to the Hanbury’s and I had to have it temporarily fixed with wire to get there …
… The flowers made all the difference to the dining room and the whole place was very cosy and pleasant to come back to. Thank you …
… I should think darling even a break of a weekend at the sea might do you good … the sea is a necessity once a year. Blows all the cobwebs away …
You know I think you eat too many eggs … often I have been astonished at the number of eggs you eat. I couldn’t do it without feeling like hell. They are very liverish.… It is more than sweet of you to have the outside of the house and studio painted.… It means as you say that I can get straight to work when I get back.… You are very good to me about all these things …6
The Meteor was inordinately ambitious for both her children, generous, certain of their abilities and proud of their achievements. She made no further reference to ‘the kink in the brain’ but put Gluck’s unconventional behaviour down to artistic licence. The tactics of stonewalling used for Craig were not extended to Gluck’s subsequent grander lady friends such as Constance Spry and Nesta Obermer, both of whom she liked and respected and with whom she happily took lunch and tea. The Meteor believed, or said she believed, that her daughter had a God-given gift and was something of a genius. She also thought her incapable of managing her own affairs. She acted on the slightest hint that Bolton House might need repainting or the car might need new tyres, or that Gluck might want clothes, or special canvases, or errands run or pieces of furniture acquired. After the death of her husband, she let it be known to the other trustees that she favoured generous treatment for her daughter. What Gluck wanted, after her father’s death and before the outbreak of war, in any material sense, she received.
But despite the closeness and regard between them there was at heart a mistrust. Gluck spoke of her mother as being unstable at centre. Though she showed her all her paintings and introduced her to her lovers and friends, she tried unsuccessfully to ward off her continual interventions, which took away Gluck’s sense of being in control of her own life. As the years passed Gluck became over-assertive about the most trivial things, as if the drawing of a wine cork or the last word of an argument put at stake her credibility and authority.
She made her mother privy to all that went on in her life and then appealed to her not to interfere. Not to try to promote her pictures, or intercede with The Fine Art Society, or organize her domestic affairs without being asked. Time after time these appeal
s were disregarded, for neither of them knew what boundaries to set or observe. Gluck was caught in a familial dependency with which she never really came to terms – by the circumstances of the Trust, by her mother’s attitude and no doubt to a large extent by her own feelings.
When she first moved to Bolton House Gluck worked in a small outhouse, formerly a stable for a pony, at the bottom of the garden. She did a picture of it in the winter of 1930, the path from her house cleared of snow, and called it ‘The Old Studio’. It hung on her dining-room wall. In 1931, on the site of this stable, her friend the architect Edward Maufe, whom she was to paint in 1945, built her a studio which featured in the design journals as a model of its kind. Maufe had that year won an open competition for the design of Guildford Cathedral. Out of 183 designs, his was chosen. Among his many commissions were Morley College London and, after the war, The Runnymede Memorial to airmen who had died, The Playhouse, Oxford, the reconstruction of the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn, the Presbyterian Church of St Columba’s, Pont Street. Gluck paid for the studio out of her own money at a cost of £1500. She walked to it from the house over a stone-paved garden, also designed by Maufe, flanked by flowerbeds and with a central lily pond fed by a concrete fountain.
The design of the studio was economical and elegant. A crescent-shaped entrance with stone columns and double-glass doors opened on to a small lobby with a bathroom on one side and kitchen on the other. Solid folding doors then led to the studio itself, fifteen feet high, warmed by the most modern of slow combustion stoves with a curb of stainless steel and with the whole of the north wall taken up with large metal windows. The walls were insulated and painted in broken white. There were built-in picture racks and bookshelves. The floor was laid in narrow oak boards and the room had exceptional acoustics. Gluck had a small grand piano in there, and her singing elicited compliments from Crichton-Browne, Maufe and the housekeeper, Mabel. At the south end a secret sleeping gallery was reached by stairs behind concealed doors. Artificial lights were all in recessed niches. The studio boasted every convenience and was much photographed and written about.
Gluck Page 6
