Flora’s Cloak is thought to be the only painting by Gluck of a nude figure. It was painted when the artist was in their late twenties, after Gluck had returned to north London (where Gluck was born, to an affluent Jewish family) following a close attachment to the landscape and artistic scene of West Cornwall. During the early 1920s Gluck lived and worked in London, first living in a flat in Finchley Road and working from a two-room studio in Earl’s Court; from 1926 Gluck owned Bolton House in Hampstead, which had its own studio. Throughout Gluck spent summers in Lamorna, Cornwall, where they continued their association with the Newlyn School of Painters. In the countryside Gluck was especially struck by the effect of light upon the sky and landscape, writing later how ‘a landscape is chameleon to the light’ (Gluck, ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, undated [1940], quoted in Souhami 1988, p.