Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
letter from 10 Downing Street confirmed the appointment, offering him the post for five years, starting on 1 January 1934 with a salary of between £1,200 and £1,500. The letter pointed out (misleadingly) that previous directors had also been on the board of trustees, but ‘the Commission on Museums and Galleries recommended that that practice should be ended, as it has been the cause of some friction which has been experienced with the administration of the Gallery’.6 Clark accepted this apparent erosion of his new position, confident that his powers of persuasion were of greater importance.
The letters of congratulation struck a cautious note, identifying the trustees as a potential source of trouble ahead. Leigh Ashton wrote from the V&A: ‘You will, of course, have a difficult time, but you know your own mind and you must always remember that if you choose you can put your hat on your head and walk out.’7 Ashton believed that the most likely problems would come from Philip Sassoon, who could be charming but then on a whim could become ‘a thorny problem’. He hoped Jane would charm Sassoon with ‘her admirable powers’. Isaiah Berlin wrote on a more positive note: ‘the activity of choosing and buying and arranging pictures when one’s life is devoted to them is as near to Paradise as I can conceive’. But he, like the others, thought Clark’s troubles would stem from the trustees. Anthony Blunt summed it up: ‘May you have plenty of fun with the Trustees – that, I imagine, will be the most disagreeable part of your duties.’ Lord Duveen sent a telegram of ‘Heartiest congratulations’, misspelling Clark’s surname with a final ‘e’; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant hoped he would remove the glass that covered every picture in the gallery; and Monty Rendall observed that he was the first Wykehamist to hold the position. Interestingly, that wise old bird Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, struck a different note from the rest: ‘it appears to me that the Trustees have been maligned and that they are as gentle and tractable as cooing doves’. The gallery staff believed that Clark, a professional art historian like themselves, would fight their corner and not be overawed by the trustees. As with the Italian exhibition, everybody assumed he was on their side. The keeper, Harold Isherwood Kay,8 who was to play such a malevolent part in Clark’s time at the gallery, wrote: ‘Your promised advent, if you will not mind my saying so, is the best news of the year.’9 The only place where the appointment was regarded with less enthusiasm was Windsor Castle, where Clark was already marked down for a future post.
Just before Clark took up his new position he visited Spain for the first time, because, as he told Edith Wharton, ‘I really cannot direct the National Gallery unless I have seen the Prado. I shan’t attempt to see Spain – I shall simply go straight to the Prado, and back, after one large orgy.’10 He confided to her, with regard to his appointment, that BB ‘will be furious … he will say that I will be wholly corrupted, and I will never be able to drink the pure water of scholarship again. Perhaps he is right, but there are no scholars in my family – they were all company directors, and one can’t hope to swim against the tide of heredity for ever.’11
Clark’s predecessor, Daniel, advised him to come in on 1 January, when the gallery would be open and all the staff there to greet him: ‘You will have no difficulty I am sure. Walk straight into your room and ask the Keeper to tell you if there is anything urgent. You will have letters on your desk.’12 Clark duly appeared on New Year’s Day, and noted in his diary: ‘First day at the NG. Deep fog, train late. Tour with Glasgow; not very bright but willing to try innovations … on the whole exciting and agreeable.’13 Waiting on his desk was a minute written by Daniel on 31 December 1933, in which he offered the following advice: 1. He should lay down his own requirements, i.e. if he wanted to see letters, and whether inspection visits should be referred to him first. 2. To use the firms of Morrill and Holder for picture cleaning. After various other specific matters, Daniel recommended ‘the folder … containing the Blue Paper, with the Rosebery Minute and other resolutions of the Board passed from time to time. I consider that an understanding of this is of great importance in the conduct of the Board.’14
Clark put himself up at the Burlington Hotel in Cork Street until he could find a permanent home in central London. The early days were an unalloyed pleasure: the trustees and the keepers made him feel welcome, and surprisingly, owing to Daniel’s inaction, the gallery had considerable unspent funds available for acquisitions. As he wrote to Edith Wharton: ‘Everyone is being very kind to us and making my work as easy as possible and I am forced to conclude that either my predecessors were unresponsive or I am in for a catastrophic change.’15 Over the next few days he was able to find time to lunch with Lady Horner16 and the interior decorator and society hostess Sibyl Colefax. BB enquired to Jane, ‘I wonder how Kenneth is inserting himself into his new charge, how he is filling it with his own personality and whether it is still softly and cosily upholstered, or whether already showing the points of the Nuremberg Virgin.* Not that I hope, altho’ one can scarcely expect roses, roses all the way and never a stab at all. If only Kenneth had the leisure to keep a detailed diary!’17
Clark’s cryptic appointments diary records that on 3 January his new chairman, Sir Philip Sassoon, came to visit. The exotic Sassoon, whose family were of Baghdad Jewish origins, was a Tory MP and Under-Secretary of State for Air. Clark described him as ‘a kind of Haroun al Raschid figure, entertaining with oriental magnificence in three large houses, endlessly kind to his friends, witty, mercurial, and ultimately mysterious’.18 The two men immediately formed a rapport, and Sassoon was to be Clark’s final patron: ‘For seven years Philip played the same dominating part in my life that Maurice Bowra had played at Oxford.’19 He entertained the world of power politics, mostly but not exclusively Tory, at Port Lympne, his rather curious home in Kent, and Trent Park, his country house in Hertfordshire which was by comparison the epitome of Georgian good taste. His own collecting interests revolved around eighteenth-century conversation pieces, whose popularity he did much to revive. When David Crawford joined the National Gallery board in 1935 he judged Sassoon to be ‘an admirable chairman, fair, amusing, brisk’.20
The other trustees were scarcely less colourful. By far the most troublesome was the art dealer Joe Duveen, who had been ennobled in 1933 after his munificent gift of a new gallery to the Tate, and had a dominating position in the international art market, to a degree difficult to imagine today. Lord Duveen had made a very successful career playing the grand seigneur in America and the buffoon in England, for it was difficult to resist his ebullient personality. Lords Lee and d’Abernon had secured his appointment as a trustee; both had made advantageous art deals with him. Clark once observed: ‘It has been well said of the late Lord Duveen that he had got the better of every art dealer in the world except that great syndicate of art dealers, the House of Lords.’21 His position on the board was to cause Clark trouble from the start, for while being naturally generous and socially irresistible, Duveen was also amoral. He was not only incapable of keeping board meeting confidences, but frequently acted on information gleaned from them. Conflicts of interest arose with almost every meeting. Duveen’s supporter Lord d’Abernon was a former diplomat and marchand amateur, whose invariable and almost inaudible contribution to the debates on acquiring pictures was ‘Offer half.’
The most elegant trustee was Evan Charteris, a beau monde figure who was the gallery’s liaison officer with, and later chairman of, the Tate – in those days still a satellite of the National Gallery, which controlled its purchase grant. The most improbable trustee was the Prince of Wales,