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Lot Essay
The Three Nifty Nats were part of C.B. Cochran's first great dancing show 'On with the Dance'; Gluck painted scenes from the show, and included thirteen pictures in her exhibition Stage and Country at the Fine Art Society in 1926. The stage and country representing the two distinctive and very different parts of her life - a life in Hampstead in a large house with staff, and a painting studio in Cornwall. Her uncle Montague, who co-owned the J. Lyons café chain and from which Gluck received a private income, had asked C.B. Cochran to stage a cabaret in the grill room of the Trocadero in Shaftesbury Avenue. Cochran later recalled in his memoirs that 'In my career as a showman there is no association which has given me greater pleasure than that with Messrs Lyons'. (see D. Souhami, op. cit., p. 65). Gluck's family patronage of the top acts of the day staged by Cochran gave her easy access to the roaring twenties in all its glory.
Diana Souhami comments (op. cit., p. 13) that Gluck 'used the visual vocabulary of the decades through which she lived in an unselfconscious and personal way: like the 'Odeon' style of her painting, done in the twenties, of 'The Three Nifty Nats' doing a song and dance routine; or the thirties craze for all-white interiors reflected in her flower paintings ... Her paintings linked to her inner feelings and to events, people and places in her life. In a sense she painted her life, from which her work was indivisible. But she was also rooted to the spirit of her time and in the best of her work to all time'. Gluck herself considered the present work to be one of the true art deco paintings. The stage set was by Gladys Calthorp who often worked with Noel Coward.
Diana Souhami comments (op. cit., p. 13) that Gluck 'used the visual vocabulary of the decades through which she lived in an unselfconscious and personal way: like the 'Odeon' style of her painting, done in the twenties, of 'The Three Nifty Nats' doing a song and dance routine; or the thirties craze for all-white interiors reflected in her flower paintings ... Her paintings linked to her inner feelings and to events, people and places in her life. In a sense she painted her life, from which her work was indivisible. But she was also rooted to the spirit of her time and in the best of her work to all time'. Gluck herself considered the present work to be one of the true art deco paintings. The stage set was by Gladys Calthorp who often worked with Noel Coward.