Gluck
Page 7
It did, however, annoy the neighbours. Mr Brousson from Fenton House, over the wall at the end of Gluck’s garden, said it overlooked his garages. His house was grand and old and he disliked the ‘modernism’ of Gluck’s new workplace. He maintained that because the new studio was so different from the old pony stable Gluck had forfeited her right to ‘Ancient Lights’. He had, he said, no wish to be unneighbourly; but he threatened to put up a new building or hoarding, just for the sake of it, in front of her studio windows. Maufe challenged him to do his worst, which in the event he did not.
And Gluck in turn panicked when, in 1932 Geoffrey Toye, director of the Royal Opera House, and his American wife, moved into Volta House, adjacent to Bolton, and proposed annexing a music room to her studio. Gluck appealed to Maufe for additional insulation, which he thought unnecessary and he in the mildest of ways dissuaded the Toyes from their enterprise.
The elegance of Bolton House and its studio inspired much admiration. It was a far cry from a simple cottage with the ‘Auntie’ in the garden. Homes and Gardens ran a three-page article in July 1935 on
Miss Gluck, the well-known painter, [who] is the happy possessor of an unspoiled Georgian house and a completely modern and efficient studio, separated from it only by a paved courtyard, with flower beds reflected in a shallow lily pool.
It gave numerous details: the upholstery in tea rose and apricot silks, the pigeons in ivory porcelain, the Broadwood piano in Spanish mahogany and ormolu, Gluck’s collection of glass walking sticks, the vase filled with arums on a gilt console.
Hampstead in the early thirties offered extreme comfort, a rural landscape, the peacefulness of a village, the liveliness of a special club – and all a cab drive away from the West End. From the windows of Bolton, Gluck looked out over Admiral’s House where John Galsworthy lived until his death in 1933. A year or so before he died she painted her view of his house, nestling among mature trees, with one of her typical romanticized wide skyscapes, looking like a country manor house with acres beyond.
Among Gluck’s Hampstead friends who lived close by were the composer Arthur Bliss, Eleanor Farjeon whose musical comedies The Two Bouquets and The Laughing Elephant were on in town, the actor Stephen Haggard, praised for his performances of Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment and Constantin Treplef in The Seagull, and whose portrait Gluck painted, and the artist Arthur Watts. The rich and creative lived in the big houses and the tradespeople in the small terraces. It was unremarkable for there to be a Society painter, a woman of independent means, who looked like Ivor Novello and appeared at soirées in a dinner jacket and black tie. In wider society, lesbianism was neither condemned nor condoned. Victorian legislators, when devising punitive sentences for homosexual men, made no reference to homosexual women. The story goes that Queen Victoria did not believe that women behaved in such a way, so there was little point in outlawing what did not occur. Nor was the donning of men’s clothes seen as an act of defiance or subversion. The sexes were polarized in appearance so the assumption was that lesbians who wore men’s clothes were simply women who aspired to be men. Many a well-to-do family had one, living somewhere in the country with a ‘wife’ in skirts, reading the financial pages of The Times, drinking brandy after dinner and seeming to appropriate the supposedly male domains of intelligence and activity.
There was none of the intrigued portrayal of an alliance between sexual subversion and power as existed in, say, Berlin at the same period. Analysis was not encouraged, nor the facts of sexual desire mentioned. The Well of Loneliness caused a stir in 1928, but was swiftly banned. ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this book’ wrote the leader writer in the Daily Express. (Gluck had read it by 1940.) The book’s author, Radclyffe Hall, a respected member of the PEN Club, dressed in men’s clothes and lived with Lady Una Troubridge, the former wife of an Admiral, but such eccentricities were tolerated provided they did not appear to be connected with sex. Men in skirts (other than on the stage, where all folly was contained) would have been whisked quickly away. For her part Gluck provoked an interesting variety of social responses. She got on extremely well with men of the establishment like Sir James Crichton-Browne, or Edward Maufe, or Sir Wilfrid Greene. They commissioned her to do their portraits and shared with her their conversation, brandy and good cigars. To her family she was the difficult daughter, gifted, but as dependent and unreliable as an adolescent child. To her lovers she was the doomed romantic who merged into their worlds. To art reviewers her talent was frequently commended for its ‘masculine’ strength. As for sexual pleasure of an unorthodox sort, it was thought to be all right for Chelsea and Hampstead.
Arthur Watts lived a few doors away from Gluck at Holly Place. His daughter by his second marriage, Marjorie-Ann, has a clear childhood recollection of Gluck walking the streets of Hampstead in the thirties, with cloak, bow-tie and cane, looking like a small, well-dressed, dandyish Italianate man. Through Arthur Watts Gluck first met Sybil Cookson. He had had a long affair with her in the early twenties. His satirical paintings appeared regularly in Punch and he did illustrations for E. M. Delafield’s Diaries of a Provincial Lady. He gave Gluck a cartoon of his which she kept throughout her life. Captioned ‘The Artist who Loves His Work’ it shows a painter in a studio crammed with paintings, producing more and parting with none. Gluck went to great pains to buy back her own paintings after they had been sold. She sold them because that gave her professional credibility, but thought money a poor exchange for her creations. She wanted them close and felt bereaved when parted from them. On occasion she referred to them as her children.
Both Arthur Watts and his eldest daughter Margaret, who became a costume designer, admired Gluck’s work. ‘Note how modernity is presented frankly, but free from malice, in the sophisticated figure of “Miss Margaret Watts”’ wrote the Morning Star, 3 November 1932, of Gluck’s portrait of her as a student at the Central School of Art. The reviewer described the painting as ‘an uncommonly clever study of the tyranny of up-to-date fashion’.
Margaret Watts had a difficult childhood. Her father went to fight in the First World War soon after she was born. When she was ten her mother died and she was looked after in a haphazard way by a variety of ‘aunts’ – including Sybil Cookson. When she was fourteen her father remarried. She found no place for herself within this new family and it rankled with her to see the furniture and things her mother had chosen melt into their identity. It provoked her father when she came back from Art School dressed in snappy clothes, wearing a lot of make-up and smoking cigarettes. There was tension and at eighteen she left to make her own way – at the time Gluck painted her picture. Gluck understood her need for self-assertion and sympathized with her. They spent a long time discussing the pose of Margaret’s tapering fingers. She went on to become a fashion designer, first working for Motley,7 the stage designers in St Martin’s Lane, then setting up on her own and costume designing for films. Lion in Winter and Anne of a Hundred Days were among her big commissions. She lived in some style in Kensington, divorced her husband Roger Furse, the theatre designer, had no children and kept an air of reserve and impenetrability.
By 1932 Gluck seemed to have the best of all worlds. She had the perfect studio and was working toward an autumn exhibition at The Fine Art Society. Her talent was respected and appreciated. She could enjoy the fruits of The Family’s efforts without having to conform to The Family’s demands and expectations. She had a place in smart society which made few moral judgements and was sexually tolerant. She had the acceptance and company of distinguished men of the Establishment. She could escape, whenever she wanted, to the simplicity of the countryside, the open fields and the clear sky. And yet at heart she seems to have been insecure, as if she had no point of balance, no safe hold on what was hers, no way of reconciling the contradictions in her life. She wanted to be independent, yet was tied to her family for her material needs. She extolled the virtues of the simple life, yet lived rather gran
dly. She thrived on excitement yet longed for peace. The smallest of everyday transactions raised questions of integrity, yet she showed no moral qualms about infidelity or affairs with other men’s wives. The strain told and she was to lose, at different points in her life, her lovers, her sense of home, her relationship to her work.
Gluck painted the people who were close to her, the view from the window, the landscapes that moved her, the flowers from her garden, the news that intrigued her. She chronicled her life in paint. The products of her time with Sybil Cookson were to line the walls of the Fine Art Society in 1932: ‘Sir James Crichton-Browne’, ‘Gamine’, ‘The Rouse Trial’, ‘Miss Margaret Watts’. Sybil moved out of Bolton House in a flurry shortly before the exhibition. She found Gluck ‘in the wood-shavings’ of the unfinished studio with Annette Mills, the designer of children’s shows, and later known nationally as the creator of ‘Muffin the Mule’.8 Sybil left Bolton with her daughters then and there and took a house in Cheval Place, Knightsbridge. The children, used to moving, were unperturbed.
FIVE
WHITE FLOWERS
Gluck never went for long without a woman in her life and when the new one arrived she moved quickly into her orbit. Her close relationships influenced her painting far more than theories of art. While she was with Sybil Cookson, she painted Sybil’s grandfather, daughter, former lover’s daughter and the courtroom dramas about which Sybil wrote. During the years with Constance Spry, from 1932–6, she painted arrangements of cut flowers.
The trade name Constance Spry epitomized refinement and respectability. Monied upper-class ladies turned to her for flower decorations for weddings, churches and coming-out dances. But though her name went with the skills of housecrafts and the polish of finishing schools her own life had not been easy. She endured an unprivileged and not particularly happy childhood, left her first husband who was moody and depressive, had no marked enthusiasm for motherhood and in about 1919, in her thirties, took up with a married man, Shav Spry, whom she married after both he and she had obtained their respective divorces. She met Gluck in 1932 when this marriage too had run into problems. It was Prudence Maufe who effected the introduction:
4 January 1932
Dear Gluck
Three things.
1. The camellias are marvellous.
2. I am sending you herewith a feather of white velour, which I think is lovely.
3. Edward and I are giving ourselves the pleasure of sending you up a ‘Mixed Bunch’ of white flowers for your Studio. I have commissioned my friend Mrs Spry to do it and to ring you up when certain flowers which I have asked for are procurable. She will probably lend you a white marble vase to put them in – she often brings her own when she does not know people’s own vases. I think she has a genius for flowers and you have a genius for paint, so that ought to make for happiness. Anyhow, we send them to you with our love and very deep appreciation of your sympathy in work.
Bless you
Prudence Maufe
Constance Spry had not met Gluck when the phone call came through from Prudence Maufe to her shop, ‘Flower Decorations Ltd’ in South Audley Street. Like her husband Edward, Prudence had trained as an architect. She specialized in interior design and at the time ran a show flat in the Mansard Gallery of Ambrose Heal’s furniture shop in the Tottenham Court Road. She exhibited Gluck’s pictures in the flat and described the flower arrangements supplied for it by Constance as ‘a weekly masterpiece … a genius every Monday.…’1
The ‘Mixed Bunch’ was intended as a fitting present for Gluck’s elegant new studio. Constance was a contributor to the prevailing fashion for white interiors – white walls, upholstery, ornaments and flowers. 1932 was the 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 fashi
on.
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.