Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  But by the end of the decade the Clarks were forced to have a card printed, explaining that over the past few years they had made over a thousand loans, and could not lend any more. They made a generous gift instead of works by living artists to the Contemporary Art Society. This was the body for which Clark had bought the Henry Moore Recumbent Figure before the war. Alan Bowness thought that ‘the CAS might not have survived World War II had it not been for the presence of the young and energetic Kenneth Clark’.23 In 1946 the Clarks invited Denis Matthews of the CAS, along with Sir Edward Marsh and Sir Jasper Ridley, to come to Upper Terrace House to make the selection from pictures brought up from the cellars. The gift, made without any conditions, initially consisted of seventy-five works by thirty-four artists, with important groups by Grant, Kessell, Piper and Sutherland.24 They were distributed to over thirty regional galleries in Britain, and also, interestingly, to Australia and South Africa. This donation was supplemented by another smaller gift in 1951. To Clark’s annoyance it later turned out that few of these pictures could be traced.

  By the 1950s, the collection had reached its peak. There would be only one major addition after this, a late Turner seascape,25 but several depletions through sales. The Marlborough Gallery was circling, and frequently approached Clark to lend his Seurat Le Bec du Hoc and the Renoir. It persuaded him to sell the Seurat for £15,000. This was stopped for export, and eventually went to the Tate in 1952. The Turner, sometimes called Folkestone, would remain with Clark for the rest of his life, and became his favourite. It perfectly demonstrates all that he liked in the artist’s late style.

  One underestimated part of Clark’s collection was the library. He had been a book collector since Winchester, and enjoyed nothing more than browsing in second-hand bookshops. In 1937 he became a member of the Roxburghe Club, the world’s premier bibliophile club. In time-honoured fashion, he invited the members to Hampstead to inspect his library, which was strong in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian books and French eighteenth-century illustrated volumes.*4 Some of these reflected his professional interest in Alberti and Leonardo, but others – like the Bizzarie of Giovanbatista Braccelli (1624) – were unusual curiosities. He was to leave about a hundred of his most important books to the Morgan Library in New York, on the grounds that most cultural benefactions tended to be from America to Britain, and he wished to redress the balance.*5

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  During the 1940s and 1950s Clark’s private life became very complex, as the world of Golly and his adoring ladies became a reality. The most tragic story was that of Mary Kessell, whose hopes were always to be dashed: ‘I had so hoped, that when the Peace came – you’d ring me up – & somehow include me in whatever you were doing. It’s a lonely time anyway – & we met through the war…I am a sort of back door person coming to see the children – or have a drink before dinner…I am never coming inside your house again – either to see you – or the children…unless you can change all this. This I do mean.’26 Clark visited her as often as he could, and an uneasy truce was reached with Jane. He provided Mary with an introduction to Berenson when she was visiting Florence, which was an enormous success. Clark had made his own joyful return to I Tatti in 1947, writing afterwards to BB: ‘Our visit to I Tatti was one of the great experiences of my life and I cannot tell you how moving it was to find you so well and so calm in the midst of that hortus conclusus of civilization. We shall never forget the kindness and affection with which you received us. It was particularly good of you to give up a morning…and to pour out your wisdom to us in such abundance.’27 Mary’s visit came three years later, and not for the last time BB fell for one of Clark’s girlfriends (the actress Irene Worth was another). He was enchanted by her: ‘I greatly enjoyed Mary Kessell. Such candour, naturalness and intelligence all combined, and so much warmth. How I wish she was living here!’28

  Mary was invited back to I Tatti on several occasions, on one of which Clark happened to visit at the same time, and Jane found out. Clark always swore that this was a coincidence – which may well have been true – but for Jane it was the last straw. For the first and only time in her life she seriously threatened to leave him, unless he stopped seeing Mary. Clark was forced to sit down and write to Mary. His letter is missing, but not her reply: ‘Words can never tell you how terrible your news was to me. Well you know from my letters how unhappy I have been feeling & this is the last bitter blow – but I do understand…If I have made [Jane] sad I am sorry…I shall always love you…dear lover that was, write to me and keep in touch with me as my patron I beg of you. & tell me where to write to you sometimes. This will be the last time I shall speak of my love: but all the best I can do is yours.’29 Her subsequent life was not a happy one – her heart was broken – and she became an alcoholic. As Clark once ruefully observed, ‘All the ladies I love take to the bottle.’ When Mary died in 1977 her last words were, ‘Will I see K in the next?’30

  Clark had in fact been trying to disengage from Mary after she became briefly engaged to the bibliographer Theodore Besterman in the late 1940s. At the beginning of 1949 he had met another artist whose quiet still life and landscape paintings he greatly admired. Mary Potter was a very private person, highly intelligent and a famously good listener, who in 1951 went to live at Aldeburgh, where her life would eventually entwine (after her divorce) with those of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Clark made the first move: ‘It is terribly difficult, in middle age, to make new friends, but I should like to go on trying. So if I may I shall ring you up…next week and hope that we can arrange a meal together. Yours sincerely K. Clark.’31 Their friendship blossomed, and a year later Clark would write: ‘Darling Mary, you are, without exception, the most loveable human being I have ever met. You are the perfect friend, and I am eternally, and undeservedly fortunate in that you let me call you that. Much, much love, K.’32 Mary Potter was to be a stalwart and uncomplicated friend to Clark for the rest of his life.

  Clark had a neglected child’s yearning for love that would never be satisfied, however many women loved him. Sex seems not to have been the main motivation: he enjoyed writing to his girlfriends and basking in their admiration. When Colin asked him about one lady friend he responded, ‘Don’t like her – too lecherous.’33 Perhaps there was also a subconscious search for his childhood governess Lam and the uncritical love she showed him.*6 John Piper shrewdly observed that Clark used women to protect himself from women. Certainly Jane felt a greater safety in numbers. Fram Dinshaw has observed that Clark’s girlfriends were divided between grand society ladies, with whom his liaisons were flirtatious, and artistic women with whom he had affairs. In the first category were Joan Drogheda, Morna Anderson, Princess Kathleen Schwarzenberg,*7 and later Jayne Wrightsman.

  Morna Anderson, the wife of his Oxford friend Colin, and the Clarks’ neighbour in Hampstead, is something of a mystery, as her letters do not survive. But Clark’s letters to her are among the most unbuttoned that he ever wrote. Morna knew about Mary Kessell, and understood Clark’s anguish on that point. Just before he embarked on a trip he saw Morna, and brooded about their encounter: ‘Never in my life has a short meeting produced such a bomb-shell – indeed I think I would have come to believe that it was a dream, if you hadn’t also written your letter – which I carry everywhere to give me strength. I cannot tell you what you have done for me. The relief of knowing that there was somebody who understood and sympathised is so great that I feel completely transformed. Of course I can’t believe, quite, all that you said – and yet I have such faith in your judgement that I know there must be something in it. My dear, I am eternally grateful to you for the courage and for the affection which prompted it. And since lids have come off, let me for once have the satisfaction of telling you, what you know well, that I love you, and have for years, and always shall. There: I shall not refer to it again, but I am glad to have said it the once…What a heavenly earth…and I have recaptured a happiness which I thought had gone forever.’34 It is likely t
hat Clark’s relationship with Morna was sentimental rather than physical, as a second letter hints: ‘It is strange to love you as much as I do and in the way I do, and yet keep up our happy relationship – and I daresay many people wouldn’t believe in it. I must say it sometimes makes me restless. But there it is! I value it more than anything and am grateful…Much, much love, my dear, K.’35 Clark always retained the affection and respect of the Andersons, and this seems to have been a passing phase. He once told Colette that all the women he was in love with began with ‘M’: ‘Morna, Myfanwy, Mary and Mummy’. And he was undoubtedly fascinating to women – the writer Barbara Skelton, who met him in the 1950s, described him as ‘a cross between Edmund Wilson, Bernard Berenson and Rudolph Valentino’.

  In 1947, John and Myfanwy Piper asked Clark to be godfather to their youngest daughter, Suzanna. A fellow godparent was Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Reynolds Stone. Janet was the daughter of a Bishop of Lichfield, and might have become a professional singer, but devoted her life to bringing up her and Reynolds’ four children in their romantic old rectory at Litton Cheney in Dorset. Always beautifully poised, she dressed in Victorian clothes and presented a striking spectacle. Myfanwy had described her to Clark as looking like a beauty of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and added, ‘I think you will get along.’36 That proved to be an understatement, and it is through his letters to her over the next thirty years that we can follow Clark’s innermost thoughts and beliefs. It was Janet who made the first move, dropping him a note: ‘Dear Sir Kenneth Clarke [sic]. Reynolds and I were in London the other day and would very much have liked to see you. Can we be allowed your telephone number and address, and are you ever free at lunch time? Yours, Janet Stone.’37 This was to turn into the great love affair of the second half of his life.

  * * *

  *1 There is an undated letter from Clark to Myfanwy Piper describing hers as ‘the only writing I am glad to see (except Alan’s & Celly’s)’. He never had much time for Colin (Tate 200410/1/1793).

  *2 Her daughter-in-law, Alan’s wife Jane, remembers a similar scene at Saltwood when Clark asked with a mischievous grin, ‘Would Aunt Betty like some more tea?’

  *3 Postcard from Jane to Colin Anderson, 8 July 1951 (private collection). The Clarks supported Lucian Freud from their Art Fund, bought his early work and gave him a bank guarantee for £500 in 1951.

  *4 Clark planned to present the club with an edition of Turner’s Paris sketchbook that he owned, but he never finished writing the Introduction.

  *5 He toyed with leaving the more valuable books to Winchester, but changed his mind.

  *6 To Clark’s great sorrow, Lam died in 1954.

  *7 Wife of the Austrian Ambassador to London, Prince Johannes Schwarzenberg. Evelyn Waugh in his Diaries describes her as ‘very elegant’ and her husband as a ‘pipsqueak’.

  25

  Town and Country

  Everyone who tries to spread the appreciation of the arts finds himself swaying between hope and despair.

  KENNETH CLARK in The Wykehamist, 27 July 1953

  In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Clark was at the zenith of his influence, the committee man par excellence. As he complained to Berenson: ‘It seems like the best part of a year spent entirely in meetings and public works. Arts Councils, Commissions…Conferences with the Ministry of Works, the Fine Arts Commission and Covent Garden – every day, morning and afternoon.’*1 This period of Clark’s life was to be defined by his pivotal roles in the creation of the Royal Opera House, the extra-ordinary success of setting up Independent Television, his writing The Nude and his chairmanship of the Arts Council. In refusing Ben Nicolson’s request that he should become a director of the Burlington Magazine, he replied: ‘It is true that the duties are not onerous, but that is true of all the other things I am connected with. They all involve only a very few meetings a year but, cumulatively, they weigh me down so that I can with difficulty give ½ an hour a day to writing or reading…I do want in the next ten years to get out of myself anything that is to be got.’1 Yet from the perspective of his family, his most important activity at this time was his purchase of Saltwood Castle. This was to be the centre of his existence for the rest of his life, and the place he loved more than any other. It allowed him an escape from his life of action, just as committees gave him an escape from ennui and family.

  At the end of each decade Clark had always felt itchy feet, and the 1940s were no exception. The problem with Upper Terrace was that his books had long outgrown the library, and as it was by the front door, he had nowhere to retire for peace and quiet. He found it easier to write in his Bentley parked down the lane. Hampstead was also becoming a frustrating place to get in and out of if you were a fanatical time-keeper, as Clark certainly was.

  Like so many wealthy city-dwellers, he found his dream rural home in the pages of Country Life. Saltwood Castle intrigued him from the photographs, revealing a medieval complex of which he had never even heard, despite the fact that it was only four miles from Lympne in Kent. Much of the building dated from the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and it was, by tradition, the castle from which the knights rode to murder Thomas Becket in 1170. Saltwood had belonged to the Archbishops of Canterbury until the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. Its capricious owner, Lady Conway, put it on the market in 1948 but then withdrew it.*2 Clark had only viewed the castle from across the valley, but fell in love with its Gothic battlements and Tennysonian air. Lady Conway died in 1953, and coincidentally the Clarks found themselves stranded in Folkestone on account of a French railway strike. They decided to take a closer look, drove up unannounced (according to Clark’s unreliable account) and met Lady Conway’s companion, Miss Baird, who told them the castle was very expensive, to which Clark cheerfully responded, ‘Oh that’s all right.’ The sight of the living quarters in the gate tower, the enormous grass inner bailey courtyard, and on one side the great hall (beautifully restored by Lady Conway with Philip Tilden as architect), left no doubt in the Clarks’ minds that this was a most magical place. They were eventually able to buy the castle for £15,000, and the contents for a further £13,000. Clark took out a mortgage until he sold Upper Terrace for £27,250, almost exactly the amount required for both; at the same time he also sold Old Palace Place in Richmond, which had been rented for £7,500. The castle’s contents were of the tapestried, pewter and Gothic statue variety that formed the fashionable medieval castle taste of the 1930s, and the Clarks weeded out about half of them. (They held an auction of the remaining contents from a marquee in December 1953. It raised £8,520.2) To keep a bolthole in London, they acquired a small apartment – or ‘set’ as they are called – at Albany, the Regency courtyard off Piccadilly that has provided a collegial London retreat for so many grand literary and artistic figures.

  It is easy to understand what drew the Clarks to Saltwood (which the family affectionately dubbed ‘Salters’). The castle is intensely romantic, and although close to the small town of Hythe – only a quarter of a mile as the crow flies – it is separated by woods, ravines, high walls and centuries of seclusion. It is a place of Gothic tracery, jackdaws and picturesque ruins. While the outer walls are complete, much of the internal building is ruinous. The gate tower contains the main living area, but the centrepiece is the great hall, which is on the scale of the hall of an Oxford college. Clark turned this noble space into his library, commissioning a Hythe joinery company to fit magnificent oak bookshelves. It was in the great hall that he hung the Lavery full-length portrait of himself as a child, along with a number of Old Master paintings – the overmantel was a large Spanish Baroque painting by Antonio del Castillo of Tobias and the Angel. Penelope Betjeman thought the library should be inscribed with the Persian couplet on the Diwan-I-Khas in Delhi: ‘If there is a Paradise on earth/It is this, it is this, it is this.’*3 Just off the hall was the study where Clark worked, with Gothic windows, sofa, tapestry and desk – although he actually wrote from a chair
in the window with a pad on his knee. It survives today as he left it, the comfortable study of a humanist scholar in which, as Clark might have put it, Erasmus would have felt at home.

  The gate tower, or main house, was decorated in an eclectic manner, with the contents of Upper Terrace and the addition of oak tables and tapestries. John Berger, the iconoclastic critic with whom Clark had a curious relationship (personally warm yet publicly suffused with generational antagonism),3 described Saltwood and its contents in his novel A Painter of Our Time (1958). Berger characterised the collection as ‘certainly impressive, but not because it had been acquired with anything so vulgar as untold wealth. It was impressive because it reflected the discerning, intelligent, catholic taste of a man who had a wide knowledge of European art and enough money to buy about a quarter of what he wanted.’*4 This was certainly true, and Clark’s collecting had already gone into reverse. Saltwood was to prove a hungry devourer of cash, and given a choice between selling the shares on which his income depended or objects from his art collection, Clark always preferred to sell art. The Marlborough Gallery was on hand for discreet sales – Cézanne’s Le Château Noir went for £35,000 in 1958, and the following year Clark wrote to Janet Stone: ‘I had to give up my precious Renoir. She went on Monday and I suppose will never return. I had foreseen this ever since I first saw Salters, and recognised in a flash that I would have to choose between them.’4 At least he still had his Turner seascape with which to console himself. He received £150,000 for the Renoir, from which he gave each of the children a cheque for £20,000.