Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
age was spent catching up on what old boys were doing from the newspapers. He is one of the greatest and most striking headmasters of his era, in the class of J.F. Roxburgh, the founder of Stowe. Monty Rendall responded to originality and cleverness in boys, and was the first person outside the family circle fully to recognise Clark’s potential. Clark always spoke of him later with affection, claiming ‘he saved me’.
What was Rendall like? Clark thought he combined the muscular Christianity of Charles Kingsley with the aestheticism of the pre-Raphaelites. He was something of an actor, both grave and absurd, who affected a shaggy Edwardian moustache and always wore a tie unknotted but dragged through a key ring. One contemporary described him: ‘Monty was so marvellously, so intoxicatingly, so memorably, so splendidly funny … he came from a generation who had the courage to dramatise itself.’23 Chivalry was the cardinal virtue for Rendall, and he commissioned a medievalising triptych in praise of it, which he bequeathed to the school. He believed, wrote Clark, in ‘that mixture of learning, courtesy and fair play, which seemed to him the ideal of a gentleman either in Mantua or Winchester College’.24 To Clark, as to many Wykehamists, Monty Rendall was always the loveable, inspiring teacher who introduced him to Italian art.*
Rendall set up a study centre at Winchester with images of Italian drawings and paintings. He produced detailed and beautiful wall charts of the painters of northern Italy – Florence, Umbria and Siena – in which he referred to Clark’s future mentor Bernard Berenson. His rooms were full of Italian art and Italianate contemporary art. He even created an Italian garden in front of the headmaster’s house, cheekily known to the boys as ‘Monte Fiasco’. Above all Rendall was an inspired lecturer, and Clark had his eyes opened to the wonders of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Pisanello, Botticelli and Bellini, all presented with the kind of humorous asides that he was later to employ himself. The lectures were a mixture of learning from Berenson, Roger Fry and Herbert Horne, but Rendall had bicycled around Italy and actually seen all the works of art he described, so his lectures had a directness that spoke to the young Clark. Every year Rendall would give his most memorable lecture, on St Francis of Assisi. Fifty years later, when Clark made the third episode of Civilisation and spoke of the saint, many old Wykehamists – and he acknowledged that they were right – heard echoes of Rendall. It was these lectures and exhibitions at Winchester that predisposed Clark to work with Berenson. When he was leaving the school Rendall gave him a copy of Berenson’s A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend.25
There was another important way in which Rendall influenced Clark. He would invite a dozen of the more interesting boys to join a society known as ‘SROGUS’, which stood for Shakespeare Reading Orpheus Glee United Society. They met on Saturday evenings, wearing dinner jackets, in the headmaster’s house, where Clark found himself alongside two future socialist grandees, Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. These readings cemented his lifelong taste for Shakespeare and the theatre, which one day would lead him to play a significant role in the formation of the National Theatre. The parts he asked to read show an interest in character: Justice Shallow, the porter in Macbeth, and Caliban.26
‘The beauty of the buildings of Winchester penetrated my spirit,’ Clark later wrote, and they inspired his lifelong love of architecture. He was bowled over by the cathedral: ‘nothing had prepared me for such a sequence of contrasting styles, each beautiful in itself, and yet palpably harmonious’.27 He later referred to it as the building he had in his mind during the war when he was put in charge of Home Publicity, and was formulating the values for which the country was fighting.28 Clark sketched the ruins of the Romanesque arches in the south transept – he was already aware of Turner – and was encouraged by the greatest architectural draughtsman of the day, Muirhead Bone, a kindly Scotsman who visited Winchester and would later play an important role in Clark’s life on the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. He also admired the fabric of the school itself, the Gothic chantry and its cloisters, and even the nineteenth-century buildings by William Butterfield. There is no doubt that Clark’s love of architecture was ignited at school, and from this later emerged his book The Gothic Revival and his acquisition of Saltwood Castle. It extended beyond the stones: ‘No Wykehamist can forget that Keats lived there while he was writing the Ode to Autumn, and walked every day through the meads to St. Cross: so his poem and letters are mixed up with the most vivid memories of natural beauty.’29 During the 1960s he was to campaign to save the water meadows.
Did Clark make any school friendships? Tony Keswick, who later became an important patron of Henry Moore, remembered his kindness when he had nothing to put up in his ‘toy’.* Clark said, ‘Don’t worry, I have an envelope full of drawings, help yourself,’ and pulled out drawings by Augustus John and William Orpen, which as Keswick recounted, ‘being the dear fellow that he was’, he was allowed to keep for ‘the rest of my career at Winchester’.30 It was in his last year that Clark encountered a fair-haired boy who was three years younger than himself. They met in Gilbert’s second-hand bookshop off the Cathedral Close, which ‘became a potting shed for my mental growth’, where John Sparrow* mentioned that he had just discovered a copy of a lost book, John Donne’s Devotions.31 Their friendship was based on a shared interest in seventeenth-century literature; Clark became Sparrow’s mentor, and the relationship endured. Clark would later inscribe books for him as ‘my oldest friend’, and Clark, Sparrow and Maurice Bowra would form a lifelong friendship triangle.
Clark’s academic progress was steady but not outstanding by Winchester standards, and he eventually became a house prefect. We can follow the improvements in his reports over a two-year period, 1921–22:
‘Fair report … Mustn’t shirk the dull part of work’
‘Coming on in character’
‘Lack of concentration: must take being a prefect seriously’
‘Plenty of intellectual interests but does not let them prevent his ordinary work’
‘Useful prefect’
‘Must keep art as a hobby and keep a sense of proportion’
‘Brilliant report’
Contrary to the impression given in his autobiography, by 1921, his penultimate year at the school, Clark was regaining the confidence so dented by his first year. He became a conspicuous school intellectual, giving art history lectures and vigorously debating international affairs and post-war politics. We begin to observe the future leader of the arts in Britain finding his feet. He gave a lecture about ‘Wall Decorations’ from Byzantium to Puvis de Chavannes – The Wykehamist reported that his ‘style was free, but somewhat spoilt by the frequency of artist jargon’. The greatest surprise, however, to those who have read his own accounts of his obscurity and shyness at school, is the debates. On 8 November 1921 he opened a debate to speak in favour of benevolent despots, and reflected that there ‘might be found perhaps some educated Dukes … but that there were practically no educated charwomen’. In March 1922 The Wykehamist tells us Clark informed the chamber that ‘To argue was great fun … and concluded on a magnificently journalistic note by enquiring if there was anything more pleasant than to really squash (ugh!) your opponent.’32
Clark had come a long way since the miserable first week at the school. It was now his turn to terrify juniors, though he never did so physically or cruelly. One said, ‘My attitude towards him is, I think, best expressed in the simple word “fear”. He was impatient of stupidity, humbug and conceit … his demeanour was one of urbane ferocity.’