This severe profile head appears to relate to a series of designs the artist Gluck made of herself during the war years. Gluck is one of the most fascinating artistic figures of the mid-twentieth century. Born Hannah Gluckstein, she cut her hair short, wore tailored men’s clothes and changed her name to: ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, or quotes’. Encouraged initially by Laura Knight, Gluck produced a series of beautiful still lives, landscapes and allegorical paintings which she showed at the Fine Art Society in a series of one-man shows. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Gluck was in relationships with women, including the celebrated floral designer Constance Spry and through Spry she was commissioned to paint works for the interior designer Syrie Maugham and Molly Mount Temple. Gluck’s androgenous self-portraiture has long been recognised as pioneering and this drawing offers important evidence for this evolving self-fashioning.

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