Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  It was building work at Hampton Court which enabled Clark to have what he called ‘the glorious opportunity of rehanging the pictures’ there. He had previously written to BB: ‘I have always hated palaces as a tourist & I hate them even more as a servant. The exception is Hampton Court, which is of course really a public gallery, tho’ as badly run as if it were private…There are an immense number of pictures tucked away…which…few can have seen since you first went there – chiefly Bassanos, of course, but a few interesting sub Titianesque Venetians.’28 Clark believed that his predecessor had treated the place too much like a public gallery and not enough as a palace. He was fortunate that Philip Sassoon was at the Office of Works at the time, and persuaded Lord Duveen to pay for the redecoration of the state rooms with red and gold brocade. The result was that a very moribund palace came back to life, and Clark’s rehang was much admired.

  However much Clark enjoyed his role as artistic chevalier servant to the Queen, he found the courtiers and palace administrators tiresome and generally ignorant. As he told Gerald Kelly, ‘I was amused by your references to the life of the courtier. It is interesting to find how educated people, when they are in a position of a servant, take on the servant’s mentality with its touchiness, jealousy, etc. Having been attached to the Court myself for about six years, I now begin to think of the domestic servant with more understanding.’29 Clark’s impatience with courts, and the life they sustained, was to emerge again in Civilisation, when he spoke of their ‘odious pomposity’. Although he gave high marks to the courts of Urbino and Mantua, he virtually left Versailles out of the series. When he made Royal Palaces (1966), which was the first time television cameras were allowed into Windsor and Buckingham Palace, his tone offended the Queen and Prince Philip, who found him ‘sarcastic’ – an incomprehensible judgement by today’s standards. Up until then Clark had been welcomed at state banquets, and described one of them to Janet Stone: ‘The state banquet last night was really beautiful – gold is undoubtedly life-enhancing, and I have never seen so much. All the waiters covered with it, all the plates and cutlery made of it, all the walls lined with it. Into the middle of this over-civilised display came the Black Watch Pipers – making this deafening, but to me intoxicating noise. I wept with joy greatly to the scandal of my neighbour…I had an agonising ten minutes with the Q – she was tired and longing to get away.’30

  At the very end of his life Clark suggested to his publisher a new book of essays: ‘I thought of calling this volume “Afterthoughts” and it would include an essay on royalty – a very amusing subject on which I am expert.’31 Apart from the various members of the British royal family, he became well acquainted with Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia, and the King of Sweden. Despite his qualms and the later temporary fallout over Royal Palaces, Clark was a very successful courtier. Apart from being a conscientious curator, he recognised the unifying power of monarchy, which was to become so important during the coming war. Both Kenneth Clark and the royal family were about to embrace paternalistic populism.

  * * *

  * Rowland Baring, second Earl Cromer, the Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household.

  12

  The Great Clark Boom

  We have lots of friends and know the King and Queen and lots of famous people…we are very well off and very happy…also a dog called Tor.

  Diary of COLETTE CLARK (aged six)

  ‘I now come to the strangest period in our lives: what can only be described as the Great Clark Boom. It lasted from about 1932 till 1939, and was as mysterious as a boom in Australian gold shares.’1 In fact there is little mystery about the matter. At a very young age Clark held a commanding position in the art world that required him to circulate in what used to be called society, and Jane was a natural and beautiful hostess. The Clarks were ambitious, young and attractive, and found themselves fashionable. Cyril Connolly, looking back on his Oxford generation, reflected how little politics had impinged on it and how unworldly was his generation, of whom ‘The most realistic, such as Mr Evelyn Waugh and Mr Kenneth Clark, were the first to grasp how entirely the kind of life they liked depended on close co-operation with the governing classes.’2

  Clark portrayed himself and Jane as ‘Innocents in Clover’ (a description which might have been truer of Roger Fry in his shabby suits). The Clarks acquired a grand and elegant London house, where they entertained everybody from the King and Queen downwards. As Clark’s first authorised biographer Fram Dinshaw observed, ‘the point about the Clark boom was that it was the link between society and art’.3 They were an integral part of the more literate end of the beau monde, and the two worlds met at their house – although the Clarks succeeded, in their own minds at least, in maintaining a detachment from the social vortex through his writing and their friendship with artists. For the remainder of his life the latter group was to ground Clark in the values he most believed in.

  The backdrop of the Great Clark Boom was a large house at 30 Portland Place, between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park, on which they took a lease from the Howard de Walden estate. It was like an embassy in scale, with Adam-style reception rooms and a grand entrance hall. Early in 1934 Clark commissioned the fashionable architect Lord Gerald Wellesley to make a report on the house. Wellesley was impressed, and thought the first-floor drawing rooms extremely pretty; he designed modish bookcases for the downstairs library in which the Clarks usually sat and received visitors. The house is surprisingly undocumented. Most accounts focus on the art collection and the elegant curtains, some in yellow silk – others were designed by Duncan Grant (with a pattern of Apollo pursuing Daphne in creamy pinks, terracotta, beige and brown).4 Marion Dorn, the American designer who also acted as the children’s art teacher, created many of the textiles and carpets. The large Adamesque dining room on the ground floor contained a big Matisse painting, L’Atelier, which Clark acquired from the Gargoyle Club.5

  The 1930s was the main decade of growth for Clark’s art collection, and by 1937 the young art historian Ben Nicolson wrote in his diary: ‘On to K Clarks at Portland Place. Talked to Jane about Giorgione whilst K interviewed [Robin] Ironside [for the position of assistant to the director of the Tate]6 upstairs. They showed me the new Cézannes and Renoirs, the collection is now almost as superb as Victor Rothschild’s, and these two wonderful Seurats to cap it all…The Clarks were so charming I wished they were great friends.’7

  Clark always claimed that he was not an art collector in any systematic sense. He once asked himself, why do men collect? He decided that it was like asking why we fall in love, since the reasons were as various. He reduced collectors to two essential types: those who are bewitched by bright objects, and those who want to put them in a series. He belonged in the first category, and most of his purchasing was opportunistic. No doubt having empty walls to fill was a motivation, and during the Portland Place era Clark acquired some of his most important paintings: four Cézanne landscape oils, including Château Noir from Vollard in Paris. He bought Seurat’s Le Bec du Hoc,8 which was later to influence Henry Moore’s two-piece Reclining Figure (1959) when the sculptor saw it in the Clark collection. Clark paid £3,500 for the Seurat, which so pleased the owner that she added a second painting by the artist for free, the beautiful Sous Bois.9 Clark’s favourite picture was his Renoir, La Baigneuse Blonde, which was always given pride of place in his various houses. He would refer to her as ‘my blond bombshell’, and had himself photographed standing in front of her. Clark even included this naked bather – who was in fact the artist’s wife – in his book The Nude, in which he compares her to Raphael’s Galatea and Titian’s Venus Anadyomene, adding that she ‘gives us the illusion that we are looking through some magic glass at one of the lost masterpieces extolled by Pliny’.10 One of his most charming and unexpected purchases from this period was The Saltonstall Family, an enormous early-seventeenth-century family portrait that hung on the stairs at Portland Place and is now at Tate Britain. Yet if Clark’s ambitions had
moved up several notches since his collecting days at Richmond, he was only just beginning to patronise contemporary British artists in a serious way.

  Jane commanded a small army of staff to keep Portland Place running. Her chief assistant in the early days was the secretary, Elizabeth Arnold, who like all Jane’s assistants found her an exacting but generous mistress – she would give her Schiaparelli dresses. There were seven domestic staff including the chauffeur, and if the Clarks’ son Colin is to be believed, three more for the children. ‘We lived in a smaller building,’ he wrote, ‘tacked onto the back connected by a green baize door where we had a nanny, a maid and a cook.’11 When in London the children did not see very much of their parents until bedtime, when Kenneth and Jane would appear – usually dressed to go out for dinner – to say goodnight. They saw far more of them in the country, at a house in Kent provided by Philip Sassoon.

  Almost as soon as Clark was appointed to the National Gallery, Sassoon began to invite them down to his extraordinary creation at Port Lympne. The house was designed by Herbert Baker in the Cape colonial style, and the garden, which was planned by Philip Tilden, had something of Hadrian’s Villa about it. The interiors were an eccentric jumble of rooms decorated by Josep Maria Sert, John Singer Sargent and Rex Whistler, all converging around a Moorish courtyard. Clark thought the house faintly ridiculous – ‘Sassoon à son goût,’ as Osbert Sitwell quipped – but he admired the architectural gardens, which contained the longest and deepest herbaceous borders. Clark enjoyed the exoticism of his host, whom he found amusing and intoxicating. Sassoon, who was a bachelor, was regarded as a social barometer, and entertained what Clark described variously as ‘unstuffy, new world society’ and ‘the unorthodox Tory fringe’.*1 And yet, as if he were back at his first day at Winchester or Oxford, Clark claimed that ‘none of them gave me a kind word or, indeed, spoke to me at all’, and he refers to the ‘contemptuous young wives of viscounts’. Such occasional bouts of self-pity can be discounted in this case, as Sassoon declared himself ‘crackers about Clark’ and offered him a charming house, Bellevue, on his estate for the weekends. He was also befriended by Philip’s sister Sybil Cholmondeley, but found his cousin Hannah Gubbay unprepossessing.*2 At one house party in 1934, Clark found himself a fellow guest of Winston Churchill, who as an amateur painter sought Clark’s advice and invited him down to Chartwell. What struck Clark most about Churchill was ‘a side of his character that appealed to me strongly, and which appeared frequently in his conversation: the element of the naughty boy’.12 All his life Clark was to have a soft spot for men who reminded him of his father.

  ‘Bellers’, the house Sassoon rented to the Clark family, is a low eighteenth-century brick house which in those days had ravishing views over Romney Marsh. Sassoon had asked Philip Tilden to make some alterations to it while he was working on the big house. These resulted in the creation of one grand interior room and the placing of flanking colonnades on the garden front. The Clark children adored the house. Sassoon was a hero to the boys, and Port Lympne occupied a special place in their family mythology. Alan called it his favourite place in Kent, and later he wistfully recalled how he would ‘sit on the terrace drinking tea limone, and indescribably thin cucumber sandwiches before being sent back to Bellers. Can still look through the glass door at that marbled Moorish interior, black and white floors and arched ceilings.’13 Sassoon had a private airfield half a mile to the north of Bellevue, from which he would take Alan and Colin up in his plane to buzz ‘Bellers’. Sometimes the Clarks would be flown to his other house, Trent Park in Hertfordshire, where their father recalled ‘the children were astonished by a platoon of footmen with red cummerbunds’.14

  Clark expressed his pleasure in Bellevue to Edith Wharton: ‘I write in my new study with a view across Romney Marsh almost as far as Rye…so enchanted to have a house in the country again.’15 They could invite their friends for the weekend – Maurice Bowra, the Graham Sutherlands – and for the children this was to prove the happiest time of their childhood. When the art historian Ben Nicolson was about to join the National Gallery as an honorary attaché, he paid a visit to Bellevue: ‘Drove over [from Sissinghurst] to lunch alone with K Clark at Lympne. He has taken Philip Sassoon’s little house next to the entrance to the aerodrome. It is simply sweet and Clark has of course done it up beautifully with Duncans [Grant] and [André] Masson water colours and Graham Sutherland for whom he has a great admiration…It was all heavenly but I was a little bit frightened of him and he still insists on calling me Nicolson.’*3

  If Bellevue was a retreat from London cares, Portland Place was a stage on which the Clarks performed. At their grand dinners they brought together socialites, artists and writers. Clark later wrote rather condescendingly: ‘I have been told by several society people that this was the first time that they had met artists, and were surprised how “civilised” they were.’16 When he asked himself why the socialites, with whom he and Jane had so little in common, came to Portland Place, he thought it was ‘perhaps to enjoy the vivacious and intelligent company of my wife’.17 For Jane was the key to the Great Clark Boom; she was at least an equal partner, as their daughter Colette explained: ‘For the first 20 years of their marriage they were known as Jane and K…everybody was paying court to her and Papa was almost the dear old professor in the background actually.’18 Left to his own devices, Clark would not have pursued such a grand social life. Their friend Lord Drogheda underlines this in his memoirs, believing that Jane did much ‘to promote his talents and aid his self-confidence’. He describes her large blue eyes and very dark hair, and her generous and considerate nature. ‘Without her influence his career path would have been different, and less I think in the public eye. Together they were a formidable combination.’19 Jane devoted her considerable talents to the service of her husband; she read and commented on his work before it was published, she invited the guests, and protected him from unwanted attentions. Those who knew her at Oxford were fascinated by the transition from the amusing, penniless girl they had known into the grand figure they now encountered. Peter Quennell wrote: ‘I sometimes found it difficult to recognise her as the smart & fashionably dressed great lady whom she afterwards became.’20

  Jane’s elegance and dress sense were much admired. She favoured the house of Schiaparelli, and wore its gowns to great effect, along with jewellery specially designed for her by the sculptor Alexander Calder. Guests found her bewitching, and according to Colin, when in the presence of great men ‘she would open her eyes very wide and gaze at them with genuine admiration’.21 She might indeed sometimes hero-worship, but Jane could also be sharp. To a dinner guest who had murmured about possessing some yellow Sèvres she is said to have coolly responded, ‘Yes, but you’re rich.’22 Entertaining was very much her forte. Without Jane, Clark would have been quite happy to have remained – in Max Beerbohm’s great division of mankind – a guest. People wanted to be invited to Portland Place: it was chic. To the diarist and socialite ‘Chips’ Channon, who complained that they had never asked him to dinner, Jane smiled sweetly and said, ‘But Chips, we don’t know anyone grand enough to invite with you.’23 Jane was naturally extravagant where her husband was frugal (except in buying art). She would send everybody she met, from her hairdresser to the royals, expensive presents. It was part of her generous and warm personality.

  The Clarks were in demand and invited everywhere. As Maurice Bowra, in a parody of a popular church hymn, wrote: ‘Jane and Sir K is all around I see.’ They were enjoying what Logan Pearsall Smith used to call a ‘swimgloat’. Jane’s diary entry for 9 April 1937 is typical: ‘We lunch with the Kents, Belgrave Square. I sit between [Gerald] Chichester and Ivor [Churchill]…’24 The Clarks may have had the intellectuals’ horror of the landed gentry, whom they considered bores and philistines, but it was necessary for the director of the National Gallery to make an exception for the inheritors of the great art collections. They would stay at Drumlanrig Castle and Chatsworth with the Dukes
of Buccleuch and Devonshire, and the Clark archive preserves press cuttings of a house party at Chatsworth for the Princess Royal to which they were invited.25 In his homme du peuple moments Clark liked to give the impression that this was a passing phase: ‘With the approach of war the grand people returned to their country houses and the artists remained our friends.’26 This was not the whole story, as he remained close friends for life with such great châtelaines as Molly Buccleuch and Sybil Cholmondeley.

  If the Clarks did not generally like the upper classes, their son Colin believed that ‘they didn’t like the middle class any better. “How dreadfully bourgeois” was one of their favourite ways of dismissing something.’27 Clark’s fastidiousness would occasionally emerge: after a Mediterranean cruise he wrote to Edith Wharton: ‘There was not one person on board who spoke English with an educated accent, and in most cases the lack of polish went deeper than pronunciation.’28 But for Clark there was one group who could do no wrong: the artists. His patience with them exceeded anything possible in the other compartments of his life. The painter Graham Bell came to live on the top floor of Portland Place; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Ted McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn, and the Graham Sutherlands were all regular dinner guests. Indeed, the two artist couples who would become the Clarks’ closest friends, John and Myfanwy Piper, and Henry and Irina Moore, had no interest at all in grand social life, but accepted their friendship with gratitude and affection. Colin later wrote: ‘The sweet kind gentle artists were a complete contrast to our parents’ usual circle of friends. None of those socially important people would ever have taken any notice of children.’29