Hannah "Peter" Gluck

http://www.dailyartmagazine.com/gluck-and-her-queer-art/

Gluck was born as a woman Hannah Gluckstein in 1895. Her family was Jewish and owned the Lyons catering empire in London. Her parents were against her artistic dreams, but nevertheless, they trusted her a fund on her 21st birthday that allowed the young girl to make a life of her own.

She attended St John’s Wood School of Art between 1913 and 1916 before moving to west Cornwall and joining the artists’ colony in Lamorna where she bought a studio. However, Gluck didn’t want to be a part of any movement and always insisted on one-man exhibitions working her way on her own.

To create Gluck, the young girl chose her own name and to her father’s distress she began dressing androgynously in trousers and ties (she even posed to Tatler society magazine at the beginning of her career). However, Gluck didn’t chase fame, mostly painting flowers and portraits. No prefix, suffix, or quotes, wrote Gluck on the back of each of her prints to make obvious her choice.

"It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be a woman, and it wasn’t that she wanted to be a man. She just wanted to be Gluck," said Cheska Hill-Wood, gallery manager of the Fine Art Society, with which Gluck was connected. In 1923, Gluck met an American painter Romaine Brooks, and the two painted portraits of one other. Brooks’s painting of Gluck Peter (a Young English Girl) was very controversial because of the blatant androgyny of the sitter.