Master Art

Black ink and black wash on blue paper.
It was in her early years as an artist in Lamorna in Cornwall that Gluck first developed an abiding love of landscape. Her landscape compositions were almost always characterized by a large expanse of sky above a very low horizon. In some unpublished ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, written in 1940, she recalled of the work she produced in Cornwall: ‘My landscapes were the first that truthfully showed the immediate impression one gets there – that of very little land and great expanses of sky...The sky is a bowl, not a flat backcloth and its colour and light reflect in every blade of grass, every twig…the colour of the sky permeates the landscape under that sky…Wind and weather change continuously, a landscape is chameleon to the light.’ Gluck kept a studio at Lamorna until 1947, and in 1953 acquired a cottage in the nearby village of St. Buryan.

Although it is often difficult to date the artist’s landscapes, or to identify their exact location, the present sheet is very closely related to a small Cornish landscape painting of 1964, today in a private collection, in which an identical church tower – probably the late 15th century parish church of St. Buryan - appears on the horizon.

Arnold Hunt owned another work by Gluck, a small, undated Cornish Landscape, painted on panel and measuring 12.3 x 18.1 cm.