An appetite for public service, born out of the ethos of Winchester, informed Clark’s life; a belief that the elite justified their position through pro bono public works. What was unique about him was his position, through which the creative and academic worlds met those of power and influence. As early as 1959 the Sunday Times thought that ‘It will be difficult to write the definitive history of England in the twentieth century without some reference, somewhere, to Sir Kenneth McKenzie Clark.’8 His role in public life, broadcasting apart, is less obvious to us today; the evidence lies in the minutes of meetings preserved in archives such as Bournemouth (the Independent Broadcasting Authority) and Kew (the Ministry of Information). There are, however, the astonishing outcomes: his hand helped build and guide arts institutions that we all take for granted today: the Arts Council, the Royal Opera House, Independent Television, the National Theatre and countless others. Everybody agreed that his writ ran everywhere: ‘K Clark doesn’t think much of it’ was a knockout blow in debate.9 His success on committees was based on an exceptionally careful reading of the papers, an acute analysis of the options, and a well-thought-out response. He would rarely be the first to speak, and waited to be asked his opinion, which was usually the one that counted. Everybody wanted to know what Clark thought. This was rarely predictable, and in writing this biography I have found that it was impossible to be sure what Clark would think on any subject. Anita Brookner wrote of the ‘unshakeable fairness of outlook [which] may have been his most extraordinary achievement’.10 Clark, however, rarely looked back with satisfaction, and even had a sense of disappointment with his contribution to most of the institutions and boards he joined – except for Covent Garden and the Scottish National Gallery.
What is certain is that Clark never wasted a minute more than he wanted to with people, subjects or institutions. He was extraordinarily disciplined with his time. Everything was timetabled – even friendship and love affairs. He was a master of disengagement. His only relaxation was to write, and what a master of prose he was. If his books are still read today, it is as much as anything because of the pleasure of reading about art described in such beautiful language. Books, lectures, essays and letters poured from his pen in those snatched moments when he was not engaged in public life. The constant question I asked myself while writing this book was, how on earth did he manage to do it all?
Clark always portrayed himself as something of a loner; he honed his lecturing skills as a child, soliloquising on country walks. But he needed an audience; he was a natural teacher who could make any subject interesting. When he was not lecturing to the public, his audience was invariably female – Clark was always most at ease with women. His greatest pleasure in life was to share his interests with a woman. The first of these was his wife Jane. What an extraordinary figure she was: moody, mercurial, expansive, generous, clever, rash, destructive, fascinating, pathetic and magnificent. No single description could ever remotely describe Jane, who Clark needed as ivy needs oak. Her unusual powers of sympathy were exercised on everyone from Margot Fonteyn to the station porters at Sandling, and were matched at home by a shrew-like anger of astonishing force. She is the key to understanding Clark – she was to support him and persecute him, and this cycle was the pattern of their life together. Clark and women are inseparable – they fascinated him, and he made the second half of his life unusually complicated by a series of amitiés amoureuses. But Jane was the greatest love affair of his life, however strange this may appear as the story unfolds.
Clark’s sharpest critics were drawn from his own profession. As the Burlington Magazine pointed out: ‘It has become almost a habit, among a very small minority, to sneer at Clark’s lifestyle.’11 The fact that he lived in a castle made him an irresistible target, and so did his inability to fit into the world of professional art history. With notable exceptions such as Ernst Gombrich and John Pope-Hennessy, his professional peers increasingly viewed him from the 1960s onwards as a non-academic television presenter and literary figure. He did himself no favours by once comparing their scholarly minutiae to knitting. But to the world beyond the Courtauld Institute of Art, whether highbrow or middlebrow, Clark came to represent the popular idea of an art historian. He became an emblem of art and culture to the public. Clark’s own hero in this endeavour was the great nineteenth-century writer and thinker John Ruskin. His debt to Ruskin can never be sufficiently emphasised, and it informed many of his interests: the Gothic Revival, J.M.W. Turner, socialism, and the belief that art criticism can be a branch of literature. But above all, Ruskin taught Clark that art and beauty are everyone’s birthright – and he took that message into the twentieth century. This is the central point of Kenneth Clark’s achievement.
2
Edwardian Childhood
I have been reading…your memoirs. What a strange and lonely childhood – a psychologist’s dream.
DAVID KNOWLES to Kenneth Clark, 27 August 19731
Kenneth Clark’s autobiography has one of the most memorable openings in the language: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler.’ His account of his belle époque childhood is a minor masterpiece, both subtle and comprehensive. There are virtually no other sources to challenge its veracity, nor is there any reason to doubt its essential truth; despite lapses, Clark had extraordinary recall, not only for events, but also of his feelings and awakenings. Perhaps in this, as in so much of his life, he was following John Ruskin, whose own autobiography Praeterita told the story of the making of an aesthete. Like Ruskin, Clark was an only child, one who was exceptionally sensitive to the visual world and for whom the act of recollection was a reconstruction of his inner life. He was to paint an elegiac picture of his childhood, and even the parts he found distasteful (such as the pheasant shoots) are described with a poetic eye.
When Clark described his childhood he frequently changed his point of view. His children believed that he was unhappy, the victim of dysfunctional parents. His younger son, Colin, summed it up: ‘My father felt very strongly that his parents had neglected him. He thought of his father as a greedy, reckless drunk and always described his mother as selfish and lazy.’2 Yet to others, Clark painted a sunny picture of solitary bliss.3 Both positions can be demonstrated to be true; there were moments of great happiness, and periods of melancholy solitude. It was by any standards a peculiar upbringing. What is perhaps most striking is that young Kenneth had no friends of his own age to play with, and in consequence never learned to relate to other children. Even in infancy he started to build around himself the carapace that Henry Moore later called his ‘glass wall’.
‘I am the type of local boy makes good,’ Clark once wrote to his friend Lord Crawford, ‘like Cecil Beaton as opposed to the Sitwells.’4 As he came from an extremely privileged background, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford, this statement might seem puzzling, but there is a truth behind it. The Clark family were in the mezzanine floor of English society – no longer trade, landed but not gentry. They played no part in traditional county social life, and drew their friends from a raffish band of Scottish industrialists, entertainers and shooting boon companions. Clark was brought up with none of the hereditary culture of the Sitwells. His parents were without any intellectual interests, and he could justifiably see himself as self-created. In practice what his parents failed to provide he sought elsewhere, and few young men have attracted so many mentors or used them to such good effect.
—
‘Family history has very little charm for me,’ Clark told his biographer. ‘I find I always skip the first ten pages of a biography.’5 He dismissed his own in about five lines. But the Clark family story in Paisley was very remarkable. Paisley, today a suburb of Glasgow, was effectively a company town of the cotton industry, and was dominated by the Clark family. After Clark’s great-great-great-great-grandfather William Clark, a farmer at Dykebar, died i
n 1753, his widow had moved with her children to nearby Paisley, where her son James (1747–1829) started a business as a weaver’s furnisher and heddle twine manufacturer. The shortages of imports arising from the Napoleonic blockade stimulated the development of a new English cotton that was as smooth as silk, and Clark’s son, another James (1783–1865), laid the foundations of the family fortune with the invention of the cotton spool. With his brothers he built the enormous factory that established Paisley as a world leader in manufacturing cotton thread. Paisley grew into a town of consequence, with grand public buildings presented by the Clarks and their commercial rivals, the Coats family: the town hall (Clark), infirmary (Clark), and art gallery and library (Coats) as well as schools and churches. By what Kenneth described as ‘the not very exacting standards of the time’ the Clarks were conscientious employers, and their philanthropy probably conditioned his belief that humanitarianism was the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century.6
In 1896 the family sold out to J&P Coats for the enormous sum of £2,585,913 (about £2.5 billion today). This fortune was divided between four family members, including Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1868–1932), who was to become the father of Kenneth. Clark senior had been brought up in Paisley, and left school in Greenock at fourteen; according to his son he had a very good brain, although it was untrained and undisciplined. He was sent to Australia and New Zealand, and adored both, and on his return at the age of twenty-two he took up a position as a director of the family business. After two years it became evident that his love of sport and the bottle was distracting him; he was effectively sacked, and from that moment onwards devoted himself entirely to pleasure. His main occupation became building and racing yachts on the Clyde, naming three of them Katoomba, after the chief town of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (his racing yacht was named Kariad). The family, as his son later explained, ‘were big frogs in the small pool of Clyde yacht racing’. All through his life, Clark senior never cut his links with Paisley, and was always generous with charitable subscriptions: he was fondly remembered as the ‘news-boys’ friend’, providing them with an annual outing and dinner.7 He also never lost his Ayrshire accent.
Clark paints a rollicking portrait of his father as an independent-minded, self-indulgent ‘roaring boy’. Attracted to women, he drank too much and delayed marriage until the age of thirty-five, when his choice fell upon Alice McArthur, a puritanical cousin who made it her unsuccessful mission to save him from his alcoholic excesses. Before she married, Alice had been living with her Quaker mother in Godalming, ‘so different to the rowdy boozy world of Clyde yacht racing’.8 ‘Two more different people than my father and mother can hardly be imagined. He was convivial, natural, totally unself-conscious; she was shy, inhibited, and prone to self-deception. They were united by two qualities, intelligence and a total absence of snobbery.’9
Clark’s father was a big man with a drooping moustache, who was burdened by no inhibitions and knew no boundaries. Clark was fond of his father but alarmed by him, and embarrassed by his drunkenness and bad behaviour. He found his mother by contrast cold and sharp, although he was aware that he had painted a particularly unfeeling portrait of her in his autobiography: ‘I have been worried that the allusions to her in Vol 1 were incomplete. Her life was ruined by being in the wrong box. At the end of her life she reverted to being a shrewd, frugal Quakerish lady, living in a bedsitter. That suited her much better than [the family’s Suffolk home] Sudbourne, and she became quite peaceful.’10 He claimed that she never held him as a child, which several photographs show to be untrue. She remains, however, a shadowy and rather mournful figure who only came into her own as a grandmother. Unfortunately, no letters survive from her until her son was eighteen – by which time she had belatedly discovered his genius.
‘Like so many remarkable men he was the only son of two entirely opposite and incompatible parents,’ Clark wrote in his obituary of Cyril Connolly, and he certainly saw himself in these terms.11 Yet despite everything, his parents made a successful marriage, and remained devoted to each other. Theirs was an extraordinarily peripatetic existence. The Edwardian era is often portrayed as an earthly paradise for the rich, and no doubt it was to those who welcomed an uninterrupted social life. The Clarks, however, had no social ambitions, and were too eccentric to belong with comfort to any fixed society. They adopted the conventional habit of the rich and moved from house to house, but for them it was a stratagem to avoid rather than to meet polite society. Alice Clark found herself mistress of a house in Grosvenor Square, a large rented house in Perthshire, an even larger house and estate in Suffolk, two yachts, and soon an additional house at Cap Martin in the south of France. Their life became a progress dictated by the sporting calendar, but to the young Clark ‘my home was Sudbourne Hall, about a mile from Orford in Suffolk’.12 One remarkable aspect of Clark’s childhood is how very well documented it was by good photographs. His father employed a professional photographer to take numerous pictures of all aspects of their life – Sudbourne Hall, the yachts, the shooting parties, and young Kenneth in many poses and costumes. All these are preserved at Saltwood, and suggest that Clark’s parents were not as indifferent as he maintained.
Named after his grandfather, Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square in London on 13 July 1903. He was delivered by Caesarean section, which in those days meant that he would remain an only child. A year later his father acquired the eleven-thousand-acre Sudbourne estate for £237,500, with a mortgage of £75,000.13 From what followed we may deduce that the purchase was made with his son in mind, and the expectation that the boy would grow up to enjoy the pleasures of a rich man’s sporting estate. This was in fact as far as Clark senior’s dynastic ambitions would ever go: Kenneth once came into his father’s study at Sudbourne and found two men in black coats and striped trousers offering Clark senior the chance to buy a peerage – one of them was the notorious Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s chief agent in the sale of honours – ‘Wouldn’t you like this little chap to succeed you?’ The response was ‘Go to hell,’ and the men drove off.14 This encounter also tells us that the Clarks were in all probability supporters of the Liberal Party.
Even by expansive Edwardian standards the Sudbourne estate was large; it included a model farm and several well-ordered villages. The house was elegant but rather stark, ‘one of Wyatt’s typical East Anglian jobs, a large square brick box, with a frigid, neo-classical interior’.15 It was built in 1784 for the first Marquess of Hertford, and had devolved on his colourful descendants, the triumvirate of art collectors who created the Wallace Collection. The eponymous Richard Wallace, the illegitimate Hertford heir, mainly used Sudbourne for its shooting, and on one occasion entertained the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, there. Clark senior bought the estate in 1904 for the shooting, but found the house cold and uncomfortable, and consequently ordered a makeover. He and Alice went abroad, and returned to their newly minted ‘Jacobethan’ interior in richly carved walnut, which was probably a more suitable setting for their furnishings and paintings. Young Kenneth thought it was all in very poor taste, although he found the renovations more friendly than Wyatt’s original interiors.
Clark’s parents had few connections with the local social life of the county set. One of these was the Suffolk Show, at which his father would show his pigs and his prize collection of Suffolk Punch draught horses. These beautiful animals had their own special stables at Sudbourne, and would be brought out every Sunday morning and paraded on the lawn in front of the house before trotting home ‘as complacent as Morris dancers’.16 The main stables at the side of the house were refitted to hold the collection of motor cars: a Rolls-Royce, two Delaunay-Bellevilles and a Panhard, ‘a quiet, insinuating electric car which had been intended for use in London’.
Clark senior was a well-intentioned if unconventional landlord, who built a cottage hospital in nearby Orford and allowed Coronation sports at the hall in 1911. His main preoccupation, however
, was the pheasant shoot from October until the end of January; the Sudbourne shoot was one of very high numbers and low-flying birds. At first the young Clark enjoyed the shooting parties because they brought female visitors to the house, whom he would persuade to come to his bedroom for a beauty parade of their dresses, which he would judge with care and precision, evincing the first signs of the emerging aesthete. Then at the age of ten Clark had a gun placed into his hands, and we have the recollection of Phyllis Ellis, a young girl on the estate, that ‘Young Kenneth used to get very upset when all these birds were brought in – pheasants and ducks. They looked so beautiful in their winter plumage…He didn’t like shooting – which, of course, annoyed his father.’17 Sometimes as many as a thousand birds a day were shot, which sickened young Kenneth. He gave up shooting as early as he could – Phyllis tells us that after a time ‘he would never go out with the shooting parties’.18 Since this sport was the main point of Sudbourne, young Clark’s reaction was particularly distressing to his father, and this is the earliest external evidence that Kenneth was not going to be a conventional boy of his background. Apart from the shoot, Sudbourne boasted a private cricket pitch and a fourteen-hole golf course, complete with a professional. Clark’s father was too impatient to play a proper round of golf, but in his irresponsible way would encourage visitors to try to hit a ball over the house, causing the inevitable broken windows, which delighted him and pained his son. Phyllis Ellis reported that Alice Clark ‘when alone would play golf on the private 14-hole course with the gamekeeper’s wife’. She cuts a rather lonely figure.
Kenneth Clark Page 2
