Miss Vye conducted me to the bank in my horrid pulpit affair [her walking frame]. She is feeding the fishes but will post this afterwards when she goes out with the dog.
I would have liked to celebrate your return by hanging out flags and letting off fireworks, but suppose I must restrain myself.
I wish you could be keeping your suite at the Westbury. It would certainly make the Steyning dullness easier to endure.
Love as always darling Grub
from your Grub
Prices for the pictures ranged from around £300 to £4000 for ‘The Dying of the Light’. ‘Bettina’ went for £1300, ‘The Three Nifty Nats’ for £1400, ‘Pleiades’ for £1000. Both Yvonne Mitchell and Patrick Gibson, Chairman of The Arts Council, wanted to buy ‘The Dying of the Light’, but Gluck would not part with it. After the gallery took its 33.3 per cent commission and settled her share of expenses, she received a cheque for £10,747 and four pence. As ever, she did not think money a fair exchange for her pictures. She would have preferred them to be in public galleries or in her studio.
A few days after the finish of the show, and before returning to ‘the Steyning dullness’, Gluck slipped in her hotel room alone at night and broke her right wrist. She suffered the pain until morning, then was taken to hospital. The next day she went home with her arm in plaster. It was a symbolic return, for her painting days were done and her broken wrist and swollen hand were the literal expression of this finish. Trivialities she professed to abhor consumed her attention again. Something was wrong with the Aga and Miss Vye was off on holiday. Gluck and Edith packed to spend the month of July with Nesta, the travel arrangements all seen to by Louis. It was to be Edith’s last holiday. Nesta arranged for a physiotherapist to treat Gluck’s hand three times a week: ‘I am very upset to think that I shall perhaps be a nuisance over this but it is apparently crucial to my recovery for painting or even perhaps living’, Gluck forlornly told her (11 June 1973). She still had the same unwavering desire to create, but the blaze of glory was over, though the longing for a truth she could live and the desire to reach the haven of death with a prize in her hand stayed with her until the end.
TWENTY
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
Romantic optimist that she was, Gluck hoped for new glory after the triumph of her 1973 show, as she hoped that after death would come redemption in the sky. The Fine Art Society directors were diplomatic about her future. They knew she was old, frail, inordinately ambitious and painted slowly. They also knew that hope about her work was her one antidote to depression. Realistically, a follow-up exhibition, though much discussed, was unlikely. She was nearing eighty, frail, arthritic, with a weak chest and troublesome heart. A number of unexhibited pictures, retained at the gallery, deserved a viewing, but there were not enough to match her comprehensive retrospective show. The mooted plan was for a new exhibition called ‘Summing Up’, based on a group of new paintings to do with the law. These would form the caucus backed up by existing pictures.
Gluck made a few visits to the Law Courts and took notes, but not much came from them. There were problems about organizing cars, arranging lunch, leaving Edith, and the exhaustion and disruption of it all. Her spirits plummeted when she realized how remote new achievement was. The 1973 exhibition was her swansong. It highlighted her talent, popularity and limitations – she had not and could not produce enough new good work to satisfy her public.
Her relationship with The Fine Art Society was though successfully reestablished. She called it her second home. Andrew McIntosh Patrick and Tony Carroll visited Chantry, were liked by Edith and Miss Vye, sent large bouquets of flowers on Gluck’s and Edith’s birthdays and gave Gluck the warmest of receptions when she visited them in town. Her pictures were included in subsequent mixed exhibitions: ‘Ernest Thesiger’ and ‘Mrs Sawyer’ in a Christmas show along with works by Whistler, Turner, Lady Butler, Augustus John and Henry Lamb, and, in the gallery’s centenary exhibition in 1976, Gluck’s early drawings of Craig, ‘Bettina’ and ‘Rage, rage.…’ She wrote the catalogue note to an exhibition of Dod and Ernest Procter’s work – her personal memories of them from her Lamorna days – and in 1976, an exhibition of Romaine Brooks’s work included the portrait of Gluck ‘Peter, a young English girl’. ‘Have terrific reception’, Gluck noted of her welcome to the party for this show. She sat beside her portrait, which intrigued visitors to the gallery.
Through The Fine Art Society, too, she met Keith Lichtenstein, an art collector and admirer of her work. He had bought many of the best of her paintings and invited her to see them in his home. ‘How happy I felt’, she wrote to him (4 April 1974),
when I saw my pictures looking so ‘right’ and at ease – I could not wish for a better home for them and it gives me a sense of peace to visualize them with you. How difficult it is to express such complicated emotions as are aroused by seeing, what is after all a part of one’s self,
