Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  After a few days spent at the St Ermin’s flat (which his parents had given them as a wedding present) the newly married couple took the Florence section of the Rome Express to begin their new life.*4 Mary had arranged a home for them to rent at the Chiostro di San Martino, near I Tatti, which had a plaque in their bedroom to the effect that St Andrew the Scot had died there in 682. Adjoining the property was an attractive church in the manner of Brunelleschi. They inherited an experienced staff, and this would be the background to one of the happiest periods of their marriage. For Jane it was a time of learning about art under a natural teacher, and she entered her new world with the same gusto that she had displayed at Oxford.

  But there was an alarming rite of passage to be faced, the thought of which made Clark feel ill: ‘less than a mile away loomed two ogres’ castles, I Tatti and Poggio Gherardo’. Would they be kind to Jane and accept her? Mary Berenson wrote to her husband from Bern with a report from her sister Alys in London: ‘she likes Kenneth’s Jane who is neither dressy nor smart…I think our policy is to make the best of it, while it lasts, and not speak against either of them. What we say will inevitably come round to them…I hope we can be good friends to him, even if we don’t get what we too hastily imagined we should get.’19

  The first visit was to Poggio Gherardo. It could hardly have gone worse. Aunt Janet was no doubt prejudiced against Jane for breaking off her engagement with her great-nephew Gordon Waterfield, even though his family had never thought her good enough. ‘The old dragon in her best Ouida form, would not speak to Jane at all,’20 and Clark decided to leave the house rather than have a row, an early example of his habit of running away from confrontation.

  Initially, the visit to I Tatti went no better. BB put Jane next to himself at lunch, and then proceeded to talk across her in Italian and German, two languages she did not understand. The fact that this was normal behaviour for Berenson was lost on Jane, who was understandably upset and never entirely got over it, even if she concealed her feelings well. What saved the situation was Clark telling BB the story of her reception by Aunt Janet. This stirred some chivalrous emotion in him (and perhaps some guilt), because he ‘put on a tail coat and silk top hat and went up to Poggio Gherardo to administer an official rebuke’.21 Clark wrote untruthfully to Mary about the visit: ‘Most charming of all was B.B. Jane finds, as I do, that he is not in the least awe inspiring, and that however much one may admire his wonderful intellectual qualities, he is essentially friendly and lovable.’22 Mary later reported the I Tatti view of Jane to Alys: ‘She has absolutely nothing to say although she is very sweet and always looks interested.’23

  Clark thought the early days at Chiostro di San Martino were their happiest. He was engaged in interesting work, and enjoyed showing Jane all the sights of Florence, ‘skipping from picture to picture, from chapel to chapel, in a frenzy of excitement’. Friends came to stay, and were taken up to be presented at I Tatti, firstly John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra. Bowra was a failure, as there was only room for one magus in that court. Cyril Connolly was better received, but his description of Berenson was ambivalent: ‘He talks the whole time and drowns everybody else, and though he has enormous and universal knowledge and is excessively stimulating, half his remarks are preposterously conceited and the other half entirely insincere.’24 He left an equally good account of staying with the Clarks: ‘K is rather easier with Jane added though a bit dogmatic and garrulous before the set of sun. It is a passably nice house with a passably nice view and a good chef and I like the life with its daily drive to some church or gallery or neighbouring town and the Berenson menage looming over like the Big House to the agent’s cottage.’25

  The Clarks took the opportunity of being in Italy to go travelling. They visited Venice for the first time. Charles Bell had advised arriving by the slow boat from Padua so they ‘saw Venice rising out of the sea as Ruskin and Whistler had seen it’. Clark shared his impressions with Connolly: ‘it is certainly a moving though it can hardly be an intimate experience. It seemed to us barely credible, like New York.’ Equally vivid would be their drive home through France: ‘It was a great delight to be out of Italy and we saw many wonderful things. I think Vezelay unsurpassed, don’t you? And Autun very little less good.’26 These were later to be two important locations of the third programme of Civilisation.

  But before that, the cataloguing, measuring and checking of Florentine Drawings continued, and although Clark was beginning to find the work laborious, he was enjoying the life. One day he mentioned to Jane that he would drop The Gothic Revival. She was shocked at the suggestion, and told him he mustn’t give up at this point. There is no doubt that she saved the book, and she became his typist and his first critical reader. Jane always had a great respect for the printed word, and spent much of their later life trying to persuade her husband to write more books rather than make TV programmes. They arranged to spend the summer in Oxford so that he could finish the book.

  —

  While Clark was at Oxford, BB came to England and they visited the Ashmolean Museum together. Clark wrote to Charles Bell from St Ermin’s to say how sorry they were to have missed him, and described his first impression of the Royal Collection: ‘Today we have been to Buckingham Palace. It is just what one would expect – like a bad station hotel and the pictures abominably hung. We had the Titian landscape down and it is a very wonderful romantic thing – surely one of a series; if the others could only be found! The Duccio, of course, you know well. There are many other attractive Italian things but the Rembrandts are wonderful; and what a Claude – and Rubens!’27

  In August Jane and Clark went to Shielbridge, which she disliked as much as he did. Their daughter Colette later said that her mother regarded it as ‘the un-chicest place on earth’, and never returned. Although Scots himself, Clark always found his countrymen rather hard to take.*5 That autumn it became apparent that Jane was pregnant, and she went to stay with her mother in Tunbridge Wells, while Clark travelled to Paris. He wrote to her setting out their finances: ‘Most beloved wife…My bank balance is certainly good…£600 in deposit for the spring which will pay for the car and the baby (I put them in order of expense). By April I shall have got another £500 from Coats.’*6 In the same letter he described his visits to the art dealers, and echoed Berenson’s ambivalent view of Picasso: ‘I became very disconsolate till I reached Rosenberg. He really has some fine things…£10,000 for each of his big Picassos and £9,000 for his Douanier Rousseau. They are good things. The Picassos are abstract designs but really very fine as such. Pout! He says he will not sell his 25 finest Picassos at any price because they will soon become so much more valuable. O that I may live to see what happens when this craze ends. What fools they will look! What fun it will be! The pictures are not only dear…yet alas, there is something in his work…I think of you all the time, and sometimes it comes in waves and leaves me breathless still. K.’

  The desire for their child to be born in England precipitated the gradual closure of the I Tatti chapter of Clark’s life. It stumbled on until early 1929, when Mary wrote to Alys: ‘K would like to get out of it and B.B. would like him to, but none of us…dare to put in our oars. B.B. feels sure that K cannot help him, as he needs careful scholarship and not pretty writing…K had said to me that he loathed the pettifogging business of correcting notes and numbers…But all he wants out of it is, I fear, whatever kudos he will get from the association. He has an ungenerous self-centred nature, and B.B. needs devotion.’28 She was essentially right: if Clark was going to do any pettifogging scholarly work, he would prefer to do it on his own account. Clark, however, looked back with profound gratitude at his time spent at I Tatti. As he later wrote to BB, ‘the greatest debt is emancipation from various intellectual fashions of the time. If I had never gone to I Tatti I should certainly have been bound apprentice to Bloomsbury – or perhaps never moved beyond Oxford.’29

  The remarkable thing about the Berenson–Clark relationship is that it n
ot only endured but deepened once the shackles of Florentine Drawings were removed, and they were on more equal terms. Berenson recognised that Clark had administrative and writing skills that he personally did not possess, and suggested that he had ‘a certain faculty for seeing things vertically instead of horizontally’, adding, ‘that is what you should cultivate’.30 He watched the progress of Clark’s career as an admiring schoolmaster might a slightly wayward pupil. If Clark craved BB’s blessing, the older man asked for, and never felt he received, affection and love in return. In 1937 he wrote what he called ‘a cry for the goodwill, and cordial confidence that I miss to a degree that amounts at times to real unhappiness’.31 All Clark could answer was that he ‘came from an undemonstrative family and my feelings are as stiff as an unused limb’.32 He confessed to his friend John Walker that he was never entirely at ease with Berenson, and towards the end of his life he became critical of his commercial shenanigans. BB, for his part, on a walk one day with one of his pupils, Willy Mostyn-Owen, stopped ‘and turned to me and said regretfully “I love K, but, you know, I am not sure if I like him.” ’33

  Berenson’s imprint remained all over Clark. He was always to see things in terms of their origins, which he learned from BB. They both harboured lifelong ambitions to write ‘the great book’, which by their own lights neither achieved. They both adored women and cultivated sentimental attachments, occasionally even pursuing the same prey. Later in life Clark would spend the evenings as Berenson did, writing to his current amours. Saltwood in the eyes of many was Clark’s own I Tatti – when his son Alan was first taken up to Settignano and saw the familiar combination of Renaissance pictures and bronzes with Eastern works of art, he exclaimed, ‘Now at last I understand Papa.’34 Both Clark and Berenson had a love–hate relationship with their own tribe, and both believed (probably wrongly) that they had steered away from their true path – in Clark’s case pure scholarship. Their differences were as striking as their similarities. Clark devoted much of his life to administering the arts, mostly pro bono committee work. Berenson had no such compulsion, although he left I Tatti with its art collections and library to Harvard for use by scholars. He never gave a public lecture in his life, whereas this became the lifeblood of Clark’s reputation. Berenson once prophetically said that Clark would not be able to resist the wish to become ‘un grand vulgarisateur’.35 What he would have made of Civilisation nobody can say – yet by his range and his example he was in many ways responsible for it.

  * * *

  *1 Clark, ‘Aesthete’s Progress’ (John Murray Archive). Caroline Elam points out that this statement is very questionable – apart from the faulty chronology (this was 1926, and BB didn’t start until the 1890s) – and perhaps reflects Clark’s old-age view of the matter. BB had invested so much of his scholarly capital in the project that it is unlikely that he was not interested.

  *2 Clark’s daughter Colette.

  *3 Two fashionable concepts at the time, the first offered by Berenson and the second by Clive Bell, to explain the aesthetic value of works of art.

  *4 According to this letter (Cumming (ed.), My Dear BB, p.12), Clark was planning to take Jane to Sospel. A less romantic place could hardly be imagined.

  *5 Years later he told Janet Stone: ‘The Scots are really odious, so noisy and tactless, no sense of privacy. They grasp one with one hand and point over emphatically with the other, and shout in one’s ear. I loathe them – but I love Edinburgh, and I recognize that their lack of restraint is partly due to warm-heartedness.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 9 August 1955 (Bodleian Library).

  *6 Clark was to depend on shares from the family cotton business, Coats, all his life. Letter to Jane, 10 November 1927 (Saltwood).

  7

  The Gothic Revival

  ‘Blessed are those who have taste,’ said Nietzsche, ‘even although it be bad taste.’

  Quoted by KENNETH CLARK in The Gothic Revival1

  Kenneth Clark’s first book, The Gothic Revival, was completed on almost exactly the same day that his first child was born, 13 April 1928. Jane had been taken to hospital the night before, and at first all seemed well. However, it turned out to be a difficult birth on account of the baby’s enormous head, and Jane suffered accordingly. Clark made light of the matter when he wrote to Mary Berenson: ‘I believe she is much better today, though still stiff & weak. As for the baby, no one seems to bother about it, so I presume it is perfectly normal. It seemed to me abnormally ugly, but people with more experience assure me that it’s beautiful. School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very close to the one in the André picture.’2

  The baby was christened Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, and to everyone’s amusement ‘hiccoughed gently while we gave solemn promises that he would shun the flesh’.3 Alan certainly never heeded this undertaking. His godparents were two of Clark’s Oxford friends, Bobby Longden and Tom Boase,4 the latter a curious choice who does not even rate an entry in Clark’s autobiography. He and Boase had met at Sligger Urquhart’s chalet, and perhaps Boase’s mild, uncompetitive character – Maurice Bowra later ridiculed him as ‘a man who has no public virtue and no private parts’ – made him an acceptable choice of godfather to Jane, who may have been alarmed by the alternatives.

  The boy was taken back to St Ermin’s Hotel. It was not until the following year that the Clarks bought their first house, at 56 Tufton Street in Westminster. This joyless dwelling, paid for by Clark’s father, was furnished with many of the heavy left-over pieces of furniture and pictures from Sudbourne. Clark wrote with his usual breeziness to the Berensons: ‘This house is very much to my taste. The decorations are quite unadventurous, and of a kind most unpopular just now – mahogany furniture & large gold picture frames of the kind called Edwardian. But I grew up among such surroundings & would not be comfortable in the shiny rooms now fashionable…Jane is very well, despite a great deal of work and worry…Our first experiment in servants was a failure, the cook refusing to attempt an omelette, owing to the complicated nature of the dish.’5 Jane had their bedroom redecorated with William Morris wallpaper – this was to become a feature of all their future houses – and Kenneth commissioned the then comparatively unknown Bernard Leach to make tiles for a fireplace. He hung his drawings in the study and bragged to the Berensons, ‘They include an enchanting Correggio & a ravishing Beccafumi which I managed to snatch out of the teeth of the dealers here. Soon I shall believe I own Leonardos & Michelangelos.’6 Despite having a setting for their things, neither of the Clarks liked what he later referred to as ‘a nasty little house in Westminster’, and within a year it was sold.

  The Gothic Revival was published the following year by Constable, a firm recommended by Logan Pearsall Smith.7 Its genesis was the result of C.F. Bell compiling material on the subject for a study of the ethics of the Revival. He had a habit of collecting notes which he would sometimes hand over to a favoured pupil, and had offered the idea, along with his notes, to Clark for presentation as a B.Litt. to enable him to spend a fourth year at Oxford. The university was still overcrowded owing to the after-effects of the war, and the board of studies required reassurance that Clark would stay the course. Bell, who had volunteered to act as his supervisor, duly told the board that Clark was a serious student and would not default.8 Part of his later bitterness about Clark arose from the feeling that he had cavalierly tossed the B.Litt. to one side, thus causing him embarrassment with the board and ‘concealing the circumstances in which [the book] was in the first instance undertaken’.9 Bell’s weariness with Clark is well expressed in a letter to Berenson: ‘I have my own causes of complaint against K; but I am quite sure that my genuine admiration for him – the sort of admiration which can only be felt by an elderly mediocrity for a young being from whom so much is to be hoped – and his gratitude to me (as exaggerated as it is) for suggesting lines of thought…I have lost more friends through marriage than through death.’*1 Despite Bell’s spiky possessiveness, Clark tried to maintain a cordial relationship a
nd dedicated the book to Bell, who made an unsuccessful request to the publisher to have the dedication removed from later editions.

  Very little had appeared on the subject since Charles Eastlake’s The History of the Gothic Revival in 1872, and Clark thought that this was because the movement ‘produced so little on which our eyes can rest without pain’.10 His Introduction was an apologia for writing about the topic at all, and this ambivalence runs throughout the book. When he set out to write The Gothic Revival he was infected by what he called ‘Stracheyan irony’, and his approach to the subject was one of amused tolerance. It should be pointed out that he had no architectural training of either a practical or a historical kind. The truth is that he knew so little when he started, and learned so much in the course of writing, that he was ‘unconsciously persuaded by what [he] set out to deride’.11 Unfortunately, at the very moment that he began to see real merit in the buildings of the movement, he lost his nerve. Yet the book is not so much about architecture as what he called the ‘ideals and motives’ of the Gothic Revival – it is sub-titled An Essay in the History of Taste. Clark set out to explain in literary and psychological terms the source of the movement and its development towards an ethical and moral purpose. The book was conceived as a literary work, which Clark believed suited the subject, pointing out that ‘every change in form [is] accompanied by a change in literature which helps the writer in his difficult task of translating shapes into words’.12

  The Gothic Revival opens with chapters on literary and antiquarian influences on the eighteenth century: ruins and Rococo from the capricious Strawberry Hill to the fallen legend of Fonthill Abbey. Clark later judged these chapters dull, as he had not yet shaken off the B.Litt. thesis manner. The second, more complex, half of the book deals with the battle of styles and the polemical controversies that followed. It was in his unravelling of the complexities of ‘Ecclesiology’,13 and his account of the two towering apologists of the Revival, Ruskin and Pugin, that everybody agreed that the book was brilliant. Clark had started out with a baleful view of Pugin. In the course of his researches he asked the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the V&A about some Pugin drawings: ‘I am ashamed to trouble you over works so devoid of merit. But Pugin, whatever he was as an artist, is an overwhelmingly important figure in the history of taste. He is, as it were, a Haydon who succeeded – unfortunately for us. We mayn’t like the Gothic revival churches which confront us at every bend in the road. But it is worth trying to find out why our fathers did.’14 But he gradually came under Pugin’s spell, and realised that even if his works were sometimes disappointing he was a genius of sorts. Later he was to write: ‘There are lots of errors in the Gothic Revival, and even more omissions, but…the real point of the book is the discovery of Pugin.’*2