The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  When Connie first met Gluck, the artist was thirty-seven, nine years younger than Connie. She had already had two successful ‘one-woman’ shows, one in 1924 and another at the Fine Art Society in 1926. She called this exhibition Stage and Country as it reflected her two worlds: the sophistication and gaiety of theatre life in London and the peace and tranquillity of the Cornish countryside. Alongside landscapes of Cornwall were numerous paintings of café society and backstage life. Gluck spent many hours sketching behind the scenes at the London Pavilion for Cochran’s hit show On with the Dance and his cabarets at the Trocadero, which the Gluckstein family conveniently owned. Her Eton crop, breeches, man’s soft hat and pipe did not look out of place in the theatre environment, where female eccentricities were tolerated so long as they were not obviously connected with sex. Gluck also executed numerous portraits of eminent figures and society names. She painted the American artist Romaine Brooks, though she was never part of the ‘lesbian haut monde’ which included Una, Lady Troubridge, and the author Radclyffe Hall (whose book The Well of Loneliness was published in 1928 and immediately banned).

  After the success of her first exhibition Gluck’s father bought her a house at the heart of Hampstead village. Bolton House was a tall redbrick building with a wide drive entered through wrought-iron gates. Gluck had been particularly pleased to discover that it had once belonged to the poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie, an esteemed member of the literary establishment of her time who was frequently visited by Wordsworth, Scott and Byron as well as by several independent women including the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the scientist Mary Somerville. Baillie herself had had a long relationship with the writer Lucy Aitkin, who lived nearby.

  While only a cab drive away from the West End theatres and cafés, Hampstead in the early Thirties offered the comforts and privacy of village life plus the attractions of intellectual and artistic social circles. Among Gluck’s Hampstead friends were the composer Arthur Bliss and the artist Arthur Watts. One of Watts’s daughters recalled Gluck ‘walking the streets of Hampstead in the thirties, with cloak, bow-tie and cane, looking like a small, well-dressed, dandyish Italianate man’. Hampstead society was more tolerant of ‘deviant’ sexual or other eccentric behaviour, and it was not particularly remarkable to see there a woman painter of independent means who, by Watts’s daughter’s account, ‘looked like Ivor Novello and appeared at soirées in a dinner jacket and black tie’.

  In wider society, lesbianism was neither condemned nor condoned. There was punitive legislation against homosexual men, but female homosexuality was not so proscribed. While the story that Queen Victoria refused to believe that women were capable of such behaviour, rendering pointless any legislation forbidding it, is almost certainly apocryphal, gently brought up women were largely unaware that it was possible. There had always been women who favoured men’s clothing, but they were generally assumed to be merely mildly eccentric. According to Gluck’s biographer Diana Souhami, ‘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.’ However, in some quarters lesbianism was acknowledged – and with revulsion. On the publication of The Well of Loneliness, hardly a graphic account of lesbian sex, the leader writer of the Daily Express wrote: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this book.’

  On the day of her first visit, Gluck waited with some interest for Constance Spry to arrive. The Spry name epitomized refinement and respectability, glamour and high fashion – everyone ordered their flowers from Mrs Spry. Like her friend Prudence Maufe before her, she no doubt expected to receive a grand and elegant lady. But her first impression of Connie was hardly likely to have set her heart racing with desire. It was said that Gluck was attracted to sophisticated women who were glamorous and remote – nothing could have been less like Connie. And yet, despite her air of middleaged solidity, as soon as Connie spoke and smiled and people felt the fire of her enthusiasm and her genuine interest in them, few failed to be seduced by her charm. Gluck was delighted by her honest appreciation of her painting and her home and was immediately drawn to her quiet but confident manner. The mutual attraction seems to have been immediate – they hit it off at once.

  Gluck called her painting of the now many times refreshed Spry arrangement Chromatic. It was the first and most spectacular of all her flower paintings and it took her months of painstaking work. By the time it was finished her relationship with Connie had developed into intimacy and love. It was a true meeting of minds and a genuine collaboration of two artists, combining Gluck’s ‘genius for paint’ and Connie’s ‘genius for flowers’. Connie was hugely impressed with Chromatic, writing 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.’

  With Gluck, Connie was able to escape from the demands of the commercial success she had unwittingly created for herself. She had found someone who was interested only in pure art, someone who understood her flower arranging as an art form that was both something to be appreciated and admired for itself and worthy of being committed to canvas. With Gluck she could discuss her two great loves, art and the natural world; for both Gluck and Connie, landscape and the plants therein were both inspiration and material for their chosen forms of expression. From Connie, Gluck learned about the nature and characteristics of flowers, while Connie learned from her about colour and composition. Many years later Gluck wrote some notes on flower painting which reflected the extent to which she had learned from and been influenced by Connie’s ideas and knowledge:

  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 . . .

  The down-to-earth style of these notes is similar to Connie’s prose style, and there are phrases such as ‘Feel the direction of growth’ that can be found in several of her books. It is interesting to see Connie’s ideas quoted from the painter’s perspective.

  Interior designers who were using Spry flowers to complete their room schemes were also hanging works by contemporary artists on the walls. Connie saw that Gluck’s flower paintings would work wonderfully well in Syrie Maugham’s all-white interiors. With her generous and enthusiastic nature, she had always taken pride and pleasure in adopting people with talent and in promoting and recommending them to others. Now she drew Gluck into her circle, ensuring that her name became known and her work highly sought after. She introduced her to Syrie and to Norman Wilkinson and Oliver Hill. Lord Vernon, whose house in Carlyle Square was designed by Hill, was one of Gluck’s first clients. She did a painting of lilies set in one of her own patented frames made of weathered sycamore to complement the wood floor and sycamore-lined walls in the white and green drawingroom. Lord Vernon paid sixty guineas for it, hung it over the fireplace and described it as ‘the making of the room’.

  Connie’s own recent experience had taught her that if one or two of her leading customers were pleased with Gluck, her work would soon be in great demand. Gluck’s ‘Spry’ flower paintings graced the walls of numerous wealthy patrons. Soon the artist was bei
ng fêted at cocktail parties and dining with prospective clients. It was through Connie that Gluck’s career really took off.

  Together they visited art galleries, where they studied the Flemish and Dutch flower paintings that had influenced Connie and the French and English landscapes and portraits by Velázquez and Ingres that Gluck admired. They went to the theatre and the cinema and spent long intimate evenings discussing painting and gardening, design and the theatre. At first the relationship was very private. For Connie, the affair was an extraordinary departure. She must have known about female homosexuality and have been aware from the start that Gluck was a lesbian. But so many of her friends and clients were homosexual that this would not have shocked her. And since Gluck described their nights together as ‘very peaceful and sweet’, sex was probably not the predominant force in their relationship. If she wanted the fierce passion of her other affairs Gluck visited women friends such as the Austrian painter Mariette Lydis, Comtesse de Govonne, with whom she spent occasional nights in Paris hotels.

  The sight of the middle-aged, bird-like Connie travelling around with a handsome woman artist dressed in male clothes must surely have raised eyebrows. Gluck’s diary entries leave no doubt as to the nature of the relationship, but did anyone realize? They do not appear to have been particularly discreet or secretive about it. Connie stayed regularly at Gluck’s house, they went on holiday together and travelled around the countryside visiting gardens and staying with friends such as Syrie Maugham in Le Touquet.

  Val, however, certainly knew the full nature of their relationship. Later, she would tell Diana Souhami that when Connie first met Gluck in 1932 the Spry marriage had ‘run into problems’. It would appear, of course, that the problem was Val herself. After Connie’s death Val made considerable efforts to suppress some of Connie’s letters and diaries, and there is no doubt that her version of events is in her interest, not Connie’s, although she never suggested that her relationship with Gluck was anything more than friendship. However, Vita Marr, Connie’s daughter-in-law, recalls a curious conversation when Val said, ‘We could have left her, you know – at any time.’ But they didn’t and, perhaps more to the point, Shav Spry once told Tony Marr, ‘Your mother was the only one, you know, the one and only. The other was just a bit on the side.’

  As ever, Connie’s way of handling a potentially difficult situation was to shoot off in a new direction, hoping to leave it behind her. Her new friend Sir William Lawrence, Treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society, urged her to consider writing a book about flower decorating. Some time before, she had begun to write regular articles about flower arranging for several fashion magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. By contrast, she had written a piece for the journal Women’s Employment that echoed her earlier belief in every woman’s freedom to enjoy and express her taste in beautiful things. She enjoyed writing, and a book seemed an exciting challenge, an escape from the endless round of shop, flower market and clients’ demands, not to mention any problems in her private life. Sir William promised to give Connie horticultural advice, read her manuscript and write the foreword. To her surprise and delight she soon found a publisher – J.M. Dent & Sons, whose managing director W.G. Taylor became another long-term friend and support.

  It turned out to be a good time to write a flower book; in the rapidly expanding suburbs thousands were taking up gardening for the first time, and flower arranging was becoming increasingly popular. In 1932 Beverley Nichols had published Down the Garden Path, a witty, idiosyncratic and very personal memoir of his cottage garden at Glatton in Huntingdonshire. Compared to the theatre, he reckoned writing about gardening was astonishingly easy: ‘It was more like arranging a bunch of mixed flowers, here a story, here a winding paragraph, here a purple passage, and suddenly there was a book.’ It was a huge success. Of all the accolades he received, the two Nichols treasured most came from his friends Vita Sackville-West and Constance Spry, who described him as ‘a pioneer in innovation for his experiment and development of winter flowers’. Nichols, in turn, encouraged Connie to write. He later also wrote a book on flower arranging, describing the art as ‘pre-Spry’ and ‘post-Spry’.

  A particularly popular element of Nichols’s book was the illustrations by his friend Rex Whistler. According to him, Whistler was at first far from keen to do the job. ‘It’s the Tudor cottage to end all Tudor cottages. Not me at all,’ he said. ‘I’m only good at stately homes with long avenues and lakes in the distance and balustrades and cherubs holding heraldic arms over the roof.’ He picked up a watering-can. ‘What could I do with a thing like that?’ he enquired. Nichols thought for a moment. ‘You could give it to a cherub and by his side you could draw another cherub with a spade.’ This suggestion is supposed to have unlocked Whistler’s imagination and he quickly produced the picture that appeared on the first page of Chapter 1. For the endpapers he drew a plan of Nichols’s garden to stimulate and guide the imagination of the reader.

  This happy collaboration on Down the Garden Path was to continue with many sequels. Connie loved the humour and lightness of touch in Nichols’s writing as well as Whistler’s illustrations – he did several little drawings for her as well. It was exactly the kind of approach she planned to develop in her own book. As she got down to writing it and Gluck prepared for her next exhibition, they enjoyed a happy and fruitful period of mutual support and confiding affection. They relied on each other for guidance, suggestions and helpful criticism. Both emotionally and intellectually, theirs was a union of love and work.

  Gluck’s exhibition was to open in October 1932 at the Fine Art Society. She designed the exhibition room and hung her paintings with enormous care and attention to detail. Inspired by Connie’s dictum that everything must be integral to the whole, Gluck created a personal and uniquely integrated composition of pictures and gallery setting that she called ‘the Gluck Room’. The walls were to be panelled bays and pilasters to echo the stepped effect of her specially designed and built frames. Everything was painted white, of course, and she included two of Connie’s dramatic displays of white flowers. The panelling was built by Mr Lawrence of the Display Centre in Regent Street, who always made the displays and exhibition stands for Connie, who had recommended him to Gluck. But unfortunately Mr Lawrence fell foul of Gluck’s perfectionism. The panels were supposed to arrive on the Saturday afternoon to be set up in the gallery, but the lorry driver went to a football match and did not deliver them until the evening. He brought neither screws nor dust sheets, the pilasters had not been finished, the carpenter was not there and the lorry had been left open in the rain, which meant that the panels had to be dried out and needed an extra coat of paint. Mr Lawrence had given Gluck a verbal estimate of £100 for the job. When he finally sent a bill for £165, relations were strained to the limit and Gluck refused to pay. Prudence Maufe and Connie had to hurriedly intercede and find a surveyor, who inspected the work and Lawrence’s accounts, and negotiated a compromise. Connie was made all too aware of the pitfalls of recommending anyone to an artist of Gluck’s fiery temperament and high standards.

  The private view in October was bursting with famous names from the theatre, photography, interior design, haute couture, fine art, high society, café society, aristocracy and even royalty. The guests were grander and richer than for Gluck’s previous shows and also included many of Connie’s friends and clients such as Syrie Maugham and the Maufes, Norman Wilkinson and Oliver Hill, the Mount Temples, Cecil Beaton, Lord Portland and Lord Vernon, Arthur Watts and the Oppenheimers. To her fury and embarrassment Gluck’s irrepressible mother, whom she called the Meteor, even persuaded Queen Mary to call in briefly for a private view and Her Majesty admired a small picture of tulips. Unfortunately, it had already been sold, but the owner was pressured into giving it up and the Queen graciously accepted it.

  The show was very well received in the press. The Times wrote that the Gluck frames solved the problem of ‘how to hang pictures in the typically “modern”
interior, with its severe lines and plane surfaces’, a view echoed by Syrie Maugham who on 5 November wrote to Gluck saying: ‘Just a line to tell you how much I loved your show . . . The pictures were lovely in themselves and superbly shown. I have never seen an exhibition so beautifully arranged.’ The reviewer for The Lady wrote of her ‘sensitive brush’ and delicate sense of tone, colour and composition: ‘no one who loves painting should miss this exhibition.’ Another critic wrote of her ‘exquisite flower pictures, her breadth of subject matter, her lifelike portraits which seemed about to step out of their frames’.

  The popular press, however, could not resist commenting on Gluck’s eccentric appearance. The Portsmouth Evening News described her as ‘an artist of the Bohemian kind, [who] wears an Eton crop, affects a masculine type of dress and tells you she dislikes the prefix “Miss” and prefers plain “Gluck”’. Such comments inspired Connie to write a spoof of this kind of nonsense. It was clearly meant as a very private joke, for Gluck’s eyes only, and is curiously whimsical and very different from Connie’s usual style, the confident wit and authority of her published books. It is coquettish and punctuated here and there with doubles entendres:

  Excerpt from the Feathered World Society News. November 5th 1932:

  I have just returned from a delightful little chat with the petite and amusing Miss Gluck. I asked her why she had abandoned her patronymic for the delightful pseudonym to which she replied with a charming moue ‘Because I prefer it to cluck or duck.’ So you see she is a wit!