Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
discovered by Cézanne fils, and sold for an incredibly small sum … I had the first pick out of 120, and I think all of them have a good deal of interest.’ They comprised drawings of Madame Cézanne and the artist, and a series of watercolours of still life, landscape and composition studies which ‘really provide a new basis for understanding Cézanne’.42 Clark found them in Paul Guillaume’s shop just after Cézanne’s son had brought them in. He paid £250 for over fifty drawings, and they were to become the backbone of his art collection. When John Pope-Hennessy visited Shotover, he described it as filled with Cézanne watercolours, Vanessa Bells and Duncan Grants.43 Over the years Clark would give away quite a few of the watercolours to Henry Moore and other friends.
There was one other older figure besides Edith Wharton whom the Clarks befriended. This was Lord Lee of Fareham, who proved rather more useful to them – and much more controversial. A collector who had been on the committee of the Italian exhibition, in which connection Clark described him as ‘the most detested figure of the museum world’,44 he loved making ‘discoveries’, and believed all his geese were swans. As an art-world operator Lord Lee was tactless and overbearing, but he was also partly responsible for the founding of the Courtauld Institute, the introduction of the Warburg Institute to London,* and presenting Chequers to the nation for the use of the prime minister. A frustrated politician, he turned his energies and high-handed interventionism to the art world, where he made friends and enemies in equal numbers. Yet Lee achieved great things, and gained the confidence of austere men like Samuel Courtauld. He had an adorable American wife whose money he used to fund his art collecting; Clark described her as ‘an angel’. The couple took up the Clarks, whom Lee described in his autobiography as ‘our most intimate – almost our only – friends in the younger generation.’45 Clark’s daughter Colette thought that ‘Uncle Arthur’, as Lee was known in the Clark household, ‘fell in love with my mother like everyone else. My father was always very grateful and charming to him but didn’t trust him. He was always scornful about Lee’s art collection.’46
There can be little doubt that both men realised how useful they could be to one another. During most of the period that Clark was at the Ashmolean, Lee was chairman of the National Gallery, where he was on very poor terms with the director, Augustus Daniel. Daniel was probably the most inactive director the gallery had ever appointed, and Lee dreamed of replacing him with Clark. As Clark explained to his own biographer, ‘I think he was genuinely fond of me, but also hoped that I would be his stooge.’47
Clark’s final Oxford triumph was the opening of the new gallery. It was named after Mrs Weldon, the north Oxford benefactress who had presented the museum with Claude’s Ascanius and the Stag, together with a Watteau and a Chardin. The Weldon Room was a top-lit gallery created by E. Stanley Hall to house English and French pictures of the eighteenth century, and designed to blend with Charles Cockerell’s original architecture. There was a grand opening to which, the Oxford Times reported, practically the whole of the university turned out. The newspaper also revealed that the anonymous donor who had come forward to create the extension four years before the university felt it could raise the money was Kenneth Clark himself.48 It fell to Lord Halifax, the Chancellor of Oxford University, to make a speech in which he described Clark as ‘a man young in years but ageless in his love and knowledge of the arts’.49
Clark left the Ashmolean at the end of December 1933, to take up his new appointment at the National Gallery in London on 1 January 1934. Owen Morshead sent him Christmas greetings from Windsor, wishing him success in his new position: ‘Happy & Glorious, Not too uproarious, God save our K.’
* The other side of the story was that Lee’s promised bequest was conditional on his own attributions being maintained, which Bell would not accept.
* One of the keepers at the National Gallery just before Clark’s time. He was considered by Clark to be the ablest of them, and he went on to have a distinguished career as director of the Barber Institute in Birmingham and as a writer on Italian and British painting.
* She died only a few years later, in 1937, and left her godson Colin her library. Clark purloined it, and Colin received no benefit from it until his father’s death.
* It was on the suggestion of Clark that Lee went into action when the Institute and its important library in Hamburg were in danger (see Another Part of the Wood, pp.207–8).
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So in the intervals of being a manager of a large department store I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes.
KENNETH CLARK to Bernard Berenson, 5 February 19341
The announcement that Kenneth Clark would be the next director of the National Gallery was gazetted in The Times on 2 September 1933. Although he was only thirty years old, his appointment was greeted with relief and optimism. David Balniel summed up the feeling: ‘This is an excellent appointment in contrast to both the previous directors. He has youth, enthusiasm, tact and discretion, and more all-round knowledge than anyone else in England. A brilliant mind, lots of money, plenty of friends and ambition. He will do well.’2 Balniel’s father Lord Crawford, however, was less impressed, and recorded his opinion of Clark as ‘a very arrogant little chap, but clever as a monkey’, who fancied himself ‘well able to distribute official patronage’.3 Both views would have validity during the tumultuous years that followed.
The National Gallery had been almost ungovernable over the previous decade, with a continuous simmering row between the trustees and the staff. This was partly because the constitution that governed it had so often been adapted to suit special circumstances. Under the infamous ‘Rosebery Minute’ of 1894, powers of acquisition had largely passed from the director to the trustees. The trustees had become high-handed, treating the curators as mere functionaries to carry out their wishes. Clark’s predecessor, Augustus Daniel (a caretaker appointment), had done as little as possible, and suffered under what he described as ‘the tyranny and malignancy of the Board’. His successor was expected to be the gallery’s deputy director, Clark’s former colleague on the Italian exhibition, W.G. Constable, but Lord Lee had persuaded him to take over the newly established Courtauld Institute of Art Historical Studies. Constable hoped he would be able to do both jobs when the time came. Lord Lee’s term as chairman came to its end in 1933, and he was replaced by the debonair Sir Philip Sassoon.4 Lee had certainly manoeuvred to achieve Clark’s appointment, in part to secure his own reappointment as a trustee. Although some thought Clark was too young, there was a consensus on the board that as an exceptionally bright young man who spoke their patrician language, he could bridge the division between the trustees and the staff. Both sides greeted the appointment warmly, believing Clark to be on their side. As he told BB, he was appointed for his ‘conciliatory disposition’, and it ‘would be the act of a mugwump to refuse’.5
Clark