Gluck: the lesbian rebel of pre-war painting in pictures | Art and design

Hannah Gluckstein, aka Gluck, born to a wealthy British family, became an artist with a string of high-profile lovers and created emotive, humanistic paintings Wed 8 Feb 2017 07.00GMT Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 15.21BST

Gluck: the lesbian rebel of pre-war painting – in pictures

Hannah Gluckstein, aka Gluck, born to a wealthy British family, became an artist with a string of high-profile lovers – and created emotive, humanistic paintings

Main image: Medallion (YouWe), 1937 by Gluck Photograph: Gluck/Courtesy of The Fine Art Society

Wed 8 Feb 2017 07.00 GMT Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 15.21 BST

  • Sketching on the Moors, 1919

    With her lesbian relationships and works taking in everything from portraiture to floral painting, Gluck was one of the most singular artists of the early 20th century. An exhibition, Gluck, is at the Fine Art Society, London, until 28 February. All images: Gluck/courtesy of the Fine Art Society

  • Before the Races, St Buryan, Cornwall, 1924

    Born in 1895 into the wealthy Lyons food empire, Gluck chose to become an artist. In keeping with her personality, however, she refused to identify with any particular school or painting movement

  • Ernest Thesiger, 1925-26

    She studied at St John’s Wood School of Art in London, before joining an artist’s colony in Lamorna, Cornwall

  • Baldock vs Bell at the Royal Albert Hall, 1927

    Gluckstein took on the name Gluck, with ‘no prefix, suffix, or quotes’, she asserted, resigning from a job at an art society after she was referred to as ‘Miss Gluck’

  • Portrait of Miss Watts, 1932

    Gluck painted various portraits of glamorous upper-class women

  • Lords and Ladies, circa 1936

    She also made floral studies, sometimes from arrangements by florist Constance Spry, who also became her lover

  • Medallion (YouWe), 1937

    Spry introduced Gluck to American socialite Nesta Obermer (pictured here in a dual portrait with the artist), who she fell in love with. This painting was later used as the cover of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, about a lesbian relationship

  • Ephebe – a Tunisian Boy, 1937

    ‘My darling own wife,’ Gluck once wrote to Obermer, ‘my divine sweetheart, my love, my life. I made straight for the studio and tried to be busy and have more or less succeeded, except that everything seems so utterly unimportant that isn’t us or connected with us’

  • Edith Craig in Uniform, 1949

    Craig was a friend from art school with whom Gluck had gone on an inspiring first visit to Cornwall many years earlier

  • Orchestra, 1967

    Obermer didn’t divorce her wealthy husband, and while she and Gluck remained a couple, Gluck lived with another lover, journalist Edith Shackleton Heald (who had in turn been the lover of WB Yeats in his final years)

  • Cottages Below the Downs, 1968

    In the 1950s, Gluck initiated a campaign for better quality oil paints, eventually ensuring a new standard from the British Standards Institution. However, the battle meant she did less painting until the 1960s

  • Credo (Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light), 1970-3

    She died in 1978. ‘I am living daily with death and decay, and it is beautiful and calming,’ Gluck wrote of this late painting. ‘All order is lost; mechanics have gone overboard – A phantasmagoric irrelevance links shapes and matter. A new world evolves with increasingly energy and freedom soon to be invisibly reborn within our airy envelope’
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