Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  C.F. Bell was to have a profound influence on Clark’s life in three ways: he introduced him to Bernard Berenson; he suggested the subject of his first book; and he allowed him free run of the drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the Ashmolean. He gave Clark a copy of J.C. Robinson’s 1870 catalogue of the drawings, and instructed him to annotate it, which was ‘the finest training for the eye that any young man could have had’.21 Clark always professed that Bell, more than anybody else, was responsible for his education in art, by forcing him to look at drawings. Bell also took Clark to visit private collections such as that of Dyson Perrins,*4 where he could inspect the Gorleston Psalter. But all this came at a heavy price: Bell wrote Clark long letters that he felt incapable of answering adequately. Later the relationship was to sour, and Bell became Clark’s most vociferous critic both in private and in public.

  If Clark was still more at ease with older men, he did make some effort with his contemporaries at his own college, and to be part of university life. He joined the Gryphon Club, the Trinity paper reading club, and soon became its secretary – he appears in a 1925 club photograph. Bobby Longden and John Sutro22 were also members, and Clark attended the annual dinners. He also wrote lively art reviews for the university periodicals the Cherwell and the Oxford Outlook.23 He was still sporty, and enjoyed playing tennis and golf.24 However, there were two distinctive features of Clark at Oxford that drew him away from university life: he owned a motor car, and as Bowra observed, ‘he cultivated young women when there were few about, but kept them from his friends, since they did not yet form part of the Oxford scene and he was not sure how they would be received’.25 Where women were concerned, Clark was already starting to compartmentalise his life.

  What sort of impression did Clark make on his contemporaries? He spent his first year at Trinity in the New Building, designed in the Jacobethan style of 1885 by T.G. Jackson. Colin Anderson26 was on the same staircase: ‘As you got up to his floor, it was not Shangri-La exactly, but it was detached from the world’: the furniture had been changed, the pictures were real paintings (including a ravishing Corot), and the room was strewn with beautiful objects. Clark had an up-to-date gramophone on which he played Bartók, Mozart and Beethoven – all his visitors were struck by his enormous record collection, in which he was helped by Eddie Sackville-West, an aristocratic musicologist with a fin-de-siècle disposition.27 ‘He was cocooned in a civilisation of his own up there,’ noted Anderson, adding, ‘he took very little part in the life of the college’.28 At some point Clark’s rooms suffered the attentions of college hearties, and were wrecked in a manner not unusual for an aesthetically-minded undergraduate to suffer.*5

  Anthony Powell remembered Clark at Oxford as ‘intensely ambitious, quite ruthless…he was a ready bat for a brilliant career…he was one of those persons with whom one never knew whether he would be quite genial or behave as if he had never set eyes on one before’.29 Peter Quennell, the most admired undergraduate poet in the university, described this as Clark’s ‘Curzonian superiority’. One contemporary who became a close friend for life was the Cambridge medieval historian David Knowles. Sligger Urquhart owned a chalet in the Savoy Alps, to which he would take reading parties, and he invited Clark alongside Knowles in the summer of 1924. Clark did not enjoy these Spartan visits any more than he enjoyed holidays with his parents in Scotland. Knowles’ impression was that he was ‘incredibly learned, fastidious, almost cold’.30

  During that summer Clark turned twenty-one, and for the first time we have surviving letters to and from his parents which provide a window into his home life. His father paid for him to receive a newspaper, but Clark had to admit, ‘I am afraid my “Times” has not been a success. There is no time to read it and for that matter very little of interest. It goes straight into the waste paper basket.’31 This surprising lack of interest in newspapers was to endure all his life.

  Around the time Clark first went up to Oxford his parents moved from Bath to Bournemouth, which was thought to be healthier. They bought a large, featureless villa, ‘The Toft’, which is a hotel today. Despite considerable losses from his properties, boats and (as we shall presently see) industrial investments, Clark’s father was still able to afford to buy the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, consisting of seventy-five thousand barren acres of land and a large, gloomy lodge at Shielbridge. Clark went there out of duty, and began a lifelong habit of going for long solitary walks. During these walks he would often soliloquise, and it was to this that he attributed his later ease at lecturing. Through force of habit Clark senior kept a boat on Loch Sunart, which brought one unexpected benefit for his son – the numinous pleasures of the nearby abbey of Iona. This was always to remain a sacred place for him, to be compared with Delphi, Delos and Avila, where he felt the vibrations of the past; emanations that he communicated in the first episode of Civilisation.

  —

  Clark described the Oxford summer term to his mother as ‘a charming vision of white trousers, river-picnics, long shadows in the parks, bathers in the stripling Thames’.32 His parents were already complaining about the vagueness of his future plans, and distressed that he chose to spend the long vacation improving his French rather than with them at Shielbridge. He wrote a rather sanctimonious letter to his mother from the Hyde Park Hotel by way of justification: ‘I cannot pretend that it is going to be any fun being by myself in France. But as I have explained before…and as we have to impress upon the Labour Government (which I shall one day adorn) the vacations were intended to provide time for quiet, independent work and the study of foreign languages. One’s schools depend entirely upon the amount of work done in one’s last long vac.’33 Perhaps this letter reveals more about his mother’s newly formed ambitions for him. She appears to have belatedly discovered her son’s brilliance, and wanted him to become prime minister, or at least a diplomat. Clark spent most of the summer vacation at St Avertin on the Loire, under a tough but brilliant French teacher, ‘Madame’, whom he both loved and loathed. He placed photos of objects from the V&A in his room, and enjoyed the local golf course when he had time off. His father recommended that he should fall in love with a pretty French girl.34

  Normally Clark would have left Oxford after graduation at the end of his third year in June 1925, but he decided to stay on for a further year. He informed his mother that he might catalogue Michael Sadler’s collection of modern pictures35 or study one of the great Italian painters, but the project that he actually adopted for his fourth year was suggested by Charles Bell in the week before his final examinations. It was as unexpected as it was original: ‘Write a book on the Gothic Revival.’ Bell had become interested in the topic as librarian of the Oxford Architectural Society. It was an inspired idea. Here was a subject that surrounded Clark at Oxford, and played to his interest in Ruskin. Moreover, ‘these monsters, these unsightly wrecks stranded upon the mud flat of Victorian taste’ required explanation.36 As Clark said, the Gothic Revival was seen as a sort of national misfortune – like the weather – and he was expected to write something satirical in the manner of Lytton Strachey. He described how undergraduates and young dons would break off their afternoon walk to go and have a good laugh at the quadrangle of Keble, which it was universally believed was designed by Ruskin rather than Butterfield.

  With so many distractions, Clark was doubtful about the likelihood of his achieving a first in his finals. He wrote to his mother, ‘you must prepare for a steady second’ – which was in fact what he received. He was sanguine about the result, claiming to believe that ‘I have not got a first-class mind’ – but nobody at the time or since has accepted that explanation. Sligger Urquhart reminded him that John Henry Newman and Mark Pattison37 both got seconds, and Clark reminded himself of Ruskin’s honorary fourth. A consoling Bowra wrote: ‘I am so sorry about the schools. I am afraid it will mean your family driving you into the business and that would be terrible. Otherwise it has no importance as experts always get secon
ds and journalists usually get firsts…nobody else will think the worse of you for not being officially regarded as a master of a subject which bores you to death.’38 It certainly made no difference to Clark’s career, and if it dented his confidence nobody noticed – but it may have curbed his conceit. He undoubtedly had a powerful belief in his own superior gifts, but this was an early indication that these might not lie in a purely academic sphere. The failure to achieve a first may have had a greater influence on his outlook than was apparent at the time, and he eventually became impatient with scholarship for its own sake.

  At Oxford Clark had addressed himself most effectively to senior members of the university – he had made a deep impression on older men, all bachelors; but he was now about to exercise his Wunderkind charm on somebody as attached to feminine company as himself.

  * * *

  *1 ‘I see mainly Bobbie and Piers with a good deal of Roger and Maurice and a bit of K. Clark – who is usually bearable for the first three weeks.’ Letter from Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, 25 January 1925 (Connolly, A Romantic Friendship: The Letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston).

  *2 G.N. Clark was interested in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and there are echoes of his influence in Civilisation episode 8, The Light of Experience.

  *3 Towards the end of his life the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71) fell in love with the young Swiss aristocrat Bonstetten, who lived near his lodgings in Cambridge.

  *4 Perrins was a distinguished books and manuscripts collector. Years later, when Clark was at the Ministry of Information, he wrote to Perrins, who lived near Malvern, stating that if London was bombed the ministry would be evacuated to Malvern, and asking if in that event he could be billeted at Perrins’ house, where ‘I would be less likely than some other evacuees to do violence to your early printed books and pictures.’ Apart from giving away confidential information, the request was highly irregular. Letter to Dyson Perrins, 17 May 1940 (Tate 8812/1/1/6).

  *5 See a letter of protest from Josslyn Hennessy (3 February 1975) about a curious incident when Clark turned on him at a Beefsteak Club lunch after Hennessy had mentioned their first meeting at Oxford: ‘For you said with what, in contrast to your previous manner, struck me as studied politeness, “Now that you remind me of it, I remember it perfectly,” adding after a pause, “That was the time that you were one of the gang who wrecked my room.” ’ (Tate 8812/1/4/36.)

  5

  Florence, and Love

  I come now to the turning point in my life.

  KENNETH CLARK, Aesthete’s Progress1

  It was an invitation to go to Italy in the summer of 1925 with Charles Bell that was to determine Clark’s future. He later wrote, ‘the idea annoyed my parents “Still going about with school-masters”, but I went’.2 The trip took place at the height of Bell’s infatuation with Clark, and would slowly lead to their disengagement, for in his innocence Bell was to introduce his pupil to another, far more compelling, mentor, whose range and surroundings would captivate him. This seminal encounter would define Clark’s taste and set the trajectory of his career. But it was a grateful pupil who arrived with his distinguished master in Italy for the first time. They stopped at Bologna, where Bell was enough of a Victorian to have a reverence for a school of painting that had suffered an eclipse of taste. It was his eloquent defence, and the knowledge that these great paintings by Guido Reni and the Carracci had been considered as the summit of excellence in the eighteenth century, that forced Clark to make the effort to see their merit, though he never came to love them. As a result he was to be an early encourager of Denis Mahon and the seicento revival of the 1950s.3

  From Bologna they moved to Florence, where they were to stay with the formidable and immensely grand Janet Ross. She had been a great beauty – and allegedly the muse of several Victorian novelists – and now lived alone in the hills above the city, managing her farm. Her villa, Poggio Gherardo, was large, gaunt and uncomfortable. She sat in the middle of a room stuffed with portrait drawings by Watts, and photographs of Tennyson and other Victorian worthies. Whatever first impression she might have made on Clark was dampened by the fact that Bell had fallen very ill on the journey and needed to be supported to bed on arrival. Clark therefore dined alone with this ‘well known terrifier’, fortified by her aperitivo di casa, made from a secret Medici recipe. It was early the next morning on the terrace, observing Mrs Ross supervising her contadini, that Clark first ‘felt that yearning for the long tradition of Mediterranean life, unbroken, in spite of disasters, for over two thousand years that has fascinated northern man since Goethe – dahin, dahin’.4

  The highlight of the journey was to be a visit to Bernard Berenson, usually referred to and addressed by his friends as ‘BB’, at I Tatti, his famous villa near Settignano. Bell held a baleful view of Berenson – ‘He’s really only a kind of charlatan, and all that business of attribution is pure guess-work’ – but to Clark, he was already an idol. Clark’s autobiography is inaccurate about the detail of this most significant meeting, and dramatises the action into one lunch. The facts are as Berenson’s wife Mary wrote to I Tatti’s librarian Nicky Mariano on 12 September: ‘Mrs Ross, Charlie Bell and a handsome Oxford boy were coming to dinner but Charlie is ill and only aunt Janet and the boy are coming.’ The following day: ‘The boy turned out to be a perfect dear. B.B. was enraptured by his intelligence and culture. This morning we walked over to Poggio Gherardo to see Bell and he was worse, and said he was particularly sorry because of his young friend. So I said let him come over to lunch…the chief thing was that B.B. after more talk with him invited him to come and work under himself for two or three years and the young man was enraptured. It all depends on his father who wants him to be a lawyer. He is very rich.’5

  Clark wrote a long letter to his father that corroborates Mary Berenson’s version of events: ‘Aunt Janet and I dined at the Berensons’. I had seen the great man before and had not liked him much. He is very small with tiny wrists and hands, has a large but well proportioned head and a perfect pointed beard. He is always exquisitely dressed and has rather odd…nervous gestures. Intellectually he is far and away the most impressive person I have ever met. His house is amazing; having made masses of money by his books it is perfectly furnished, contains the finest private collection of early Italian pictures anywhere and beautiful Chinese things; he also has the best library of art books in existence all arranged in three enormous rooms.’ Berenson talked exclusively to Clark over dinner: ‘I liked him much better. The next day the Berensons both came up to see Bell and say “good-bye”, as they were leaving for Munich in the afternoon. They asked me to go and have lunch with them.’6

  Clark’s autobiography does not mention the dinner, but describes this lunch as the first meeting: the guests were assembled, when ‘At the last, perfectly chosen moment [Berenson] entered, small, beautifully dressed, a carnation in his button-hole. There was an awestruck silence.’ In this account, Clark took a great dislike to Berenson because of the conceit and vituperation that formed a large part of his conversation. After lunch they moved to the limonaia for coffee, and the great man summoned Clark to come and sit next to him. This was evidently successful, because as Mary was beckoning her husband over to the car to leave he turned to Clark and said, ‘ “I’m very impulsive, my dear boy, and I have only known you for a few minutes, but I would like you to come and work with me to help me prepare a new edition of my Florentine Drawings. Please let me know.” He thereupon jumped nimbly into the palpitating vehicle and drove away.’7

  Berenson’s offer aroused considerable emotions in Clark. This was the realisation of his Winchester dream, and the greatest prize for any young man with his interests, but he felt sure his parents would object. He was not even certain that he would enjoy I Tatti, or BB’s personality. Broaching the subject with his father, he put the offer in rather different terms: ‘I want a secretary; would you care for the job?…please assure your father…that I am not going to m
ake you into an art critic. I am going to give you the chance of seeing people and places that you would not otherwise have seen.’ Clark told his father that ‘the prospect simply stupefied me’, adding, ‘I think I should be mad to refuse it. But it depends on what you think.’8 He had of course already made up his mind, as is clear from a letter he wrote to his mother shortly afterwards.

  Clark and Bell remained at Poggio Gherardo for several more weeks. Bell planned Clark’s sightseeing in Florence from his sickbed. He was first directed to the Bargello, and Florentine sculpture was to be the main theme of his first week, as Bell saw this as the foundation of quattrocento art in the city. ‘Can’t I go to the Uffizi?’ became Clark’s constant refrain. ‘No, not yet, today you must go to Santa Maria Novella…’ Finally he was given permission, but he found it a dismal experience until he came upon Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Piero’s Baptism was already his favourite painting in the London National Gallery, ‘but nothing prepared me for the brilliance and sparkle of the Urbino diptych. I fell to my knees.’9 Clark was often to react with nervous tension to works of art. He could be reduced to tears or shaking knees by poignant situations, overcome by a kind of afflatus of emotion or inspiration. Anthony Powell linked this to his belief that he was going to die of paralysis before the age of thirty, and his recurrent agonies at feeling he was wasting his life.10