Clark gave his reasons for accepting the post as ‘vanity and filial piety’. As he later told an interviewer: ‘I thought it would be nice for my parents to be able to say that their boy was doing something. Actually, they were faintly distressed, because it meant that I had less time to play bridge with them.’8 With his usual sense of loss and regret, in his memoirs he described the appointment as ‘the turning point of my life, and I am certain that I took the wrong turning’.9 He believed that by accepting the museum post, ‘administration would prevent me from writing the great books that I already had in mind’.10 The divided man is a recurring theme of Clark’s life; the constant dance between seeking the contemplative life when in the throes of action, and gladly accepting the return to action when he achieved it. It is doubtful if he would ever have been contented with one or other life – he needed the stimulus of both.
Letters of congratulation poured in to the new keeper.11 Sydney Cockerell,12 the director of the Ashmolean’s sister museum, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, expressed the hope that they would be brothers in arms rather than jealous rivals. Ellis Waterhouse*2 wrote an enthusiastic letter, as did Maurice Bowra. The director of the National Gallery, Augustus Daniel, wrote to console Clark on having ‘just got a good house that suits you and to have to scrap it and start afresh’. The architect Lord Gerald Wellesley took the same line, but added, ‘what fun you will have among those thousands of drawings’. The collector Paul Oppé prophesied: ‘I take it for granted that before long you will take on the National Gallery, a period at the Ashmolean will be the most useful preparation.’
Clark’s immediate concern was to be allowed to finish work on the Windsor drawings, and to find a new assistant keeper who would make this possible. The trustees of the Ashmolean indulged him on both points. Bell, who left Clark twenty-one pages of closely written advice on all aspects of the collection, ended his notes by encouraging him to appoint his own assistant. Sir Charles Holroyd put forward Teddy Croft-Murray and Ellis Waterhouse, two exceptionally clever young art historians, but as E.T. Leeds wrote to Clark, ‘As you say, brilliancy is not wanted. A capacity for steady work, which doesn’t shirk drudgery at times, is much more essential.’13 The candidate he chose, I.G. Robertson, was later upset by Clark’s description of him as one who, ‘whatever his shortcomings as a scholar, was a wizard with old ladies’.14
The next priority was to find a new home. Clark wrote to Berenson, ‘We are determined not to live in or too near Oxford & become involved in University Society – which means that grave of so many valuable abilities, University politics.’15 They rented what he described as a featureless modern house with twenty acres and a good view over the Thames valley at Shotover Cleve for £15 a year.16 Rather surprisingly, Clark wrote, ‘on the whole we prefer it to Richmond, where we had bored ourselves with our own boasting. This house is nothing to boast about.’17 Jane was by all accounts upset to be leaving Old Palace Place, which was rented out. Alys Russell was more enthusiastic, and called the new house ‘a delightful white Italian villa with a lovely tame and wild garden’.18
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One of the chief glories of the fine arts department at the Ashmolean is generally hidden – its drawings. These cannot be permanently displayed, but Clark was determined to show more of the rest of the collection. He started by rehanging the paintings, and was revelling in his new life, as he told BB: ‘We have had a busy but an agreeable Autumn. I have enjoyed playing about in my toy shop, which really looks very pretty now. And I am delighted to find how little there is to do. Even though I have rehung the whole gallery I have had plenty of spare time. Most of this has been spent on my Leonardo Catalogue which is now almost finished…Charlie Bell is not returned to Oxford. I don’t believe he ever will, as he couldn’t bear to see the mess I was making.’19
The main problem Clark faced was a lack of gallery space. Soon after his arrival he wrote, ‘unless some extension of the galleries is achieved, it will be absolutely impossible for the University to accept any gifts, bequests, or loans for oil paintings’.20 A second problem was to find funding – during his tenure the keeper’s office was run on a shoestring: in 1931 his entire department budget, including purchases, was £1,400. In order to pay for a new gallery to be built, Clark offered to advance the amount required to the university anonymously, which it was glad to accept. His plans for the partial rebuilding of the museum caused the destruction of Bell’s life work, the Fortnum Gallery; this was another black mark as far as Bell was concerned, and the final breach was near at hand. He vented his frustration with Clark to Berenson: ‘I am afraid I shall never really like him or his wife…not because I am jealous or covetous, if I know myself in the least, but I have an instinctive turning away from the facile.’21 To John Pope-Hennessy, an undergraduate at Oxford, Bell went even further: ‘I stood behind Kenneth Clark on the platform of a bus this morning and could have pushed him off.’22
Clark made some very fine purchases for the museum, starting with two important works by Samuel Palmer, Self Portrait and the artist’s first major oil, Repose of the Holy Family. But his boldest acquisition came in his second year. Piero di Cosimo’s Forest Fire had been in the Italian exhibition, loaned from the collection of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Having no purchase grant, Clark paid for the picture with £3,000 of his own money, and then appealed to the National Art Collections Fund, which reimbursed the entire price.23 He was later to describe it in his book Landscape Into Art as ‘the first landscape in Italian painting in which man is of no importance’.24 As Pope-Hennessy said at Clark’s memorial service, ‘How many undergraduates’ imaginations must have been kindled by that painting since it was acquired?’ It remains, with Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest, the museum’s most popular painting.
In addition, Clark acquired a Virgin and Child from the workshop of Botticelli that once belonged to Ruskin, and a purchase well ahead of its time – an elaborate Burges cupboard of which he wrote, ‘though not acceptable to present-day taste it will always remain an important document’.25 However, his favourite acquisition was not a painting but a ‘ravishing’ ivory of Venus and Cupid by Georg Petel, which may have been owned by Rubens. He also persuaded Lord Duveen to lend a Resurrection then attributed to Andrea del Castagno.26
Clark’s tenure at the Ashmolean is still regarded as important. It could not be claimed that he was in any way populist, which might not have been particularly appropriate to a scholarly university collection, but ‘he will be remembered for the brief period between August 1931 and December 1933 when, with his characteristic mixture of arrogance and energy, he transformed both the collections and their display’.27
One of the obligations of the keepership, which Bell had ignored, was the giving of lectures. Clark enjoyed this task. He also invited Roger Fry to talk on Cézanne, although sadly no record of his lectures survives. Given Fry’s recent rejection as Slade Professor, this invitation was seen as provocative in some quarters – especially by Bell. Clark described the visit to Berenson: ‘We had Fry down to lecture in Oxford (in the face of bitter opposition) and he developed violent influenza which the doctor feared would turn to pneumonia. He was staying with us. We had to send away Alan and call in two nurses…we were fully prepared for him not to recover. However he did, in a fortnight. And no sooner had he left us than Jane had a motoring accident. She ran into a lamp post, when driving her small car, at such a speed that she upset the lamp post, and overturned the car. The car was smashed to atoms and it is a miracle that she came out alive.’28
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The Clarks entertained a good deal at their new house, and according to Alys Russell kept a staff of ten. Isaiah Berlin recalled to Clark’s daughter Colette, ‘I used to be invited to marvellous evenings at Shotover, and there met gifted and delightful people by all of whom I was dazzled and some of whom were sympathetic.’29 Jane was a perfect Oxford wife, entertaining Clark’s friends and being charming to the elderly university grandees. In that world she cut a very strikin
g figure. Edward Croft-Murray described her driving her car up to the main entrance of the Ashmolean and appearing in a round white hat and riding breeches, ‘looking frightfully smart’.30 Jane, however, was always more complicated than she appeared to be, and anybody who knew her well soon realised that she could adopt several very different personalities. She had a destructive side which became more apparent later in life, with frequent temper tantrums and a growing dependency on alcohol. The first manifestation of these rages took place one night at Shotover, when she made such a violent scene that Clark had to leave the house. He spent the night walking the streets of Oxford wondering whether he had made a terrible mistake in marrying her.31 This was the beginning of a pattern of difficult behaviour. It was widely believed later that Jane’s erratic temper was a response to Clark’s infidelities (which had not yet begun), and no doubt they were a stimulant, but the Shotover episode suggests that long before there was any evidence of her husband’s affairs, her personality was unstable.
Clark’s ambitious book projects – other than the Windsor catalogue – had by now stalled, and he found a collaborator for what he referred to as ‘a history of classicism in European art’. Roger Hinks was a highly intellectual art historian whom Clark later described as ‘the rudest man in the world and very clever’.32 (Hinks was later to take the blame for the controversial cleaning of the Elgin marbles at the British Museum.) Clark characterised the plan – with echoes of Riegl and Wölfflin – as ‘our Antike-Mittelalter-Renaissance project’. This was almost certainly Motives by another description. Hinks asked Clark to subsidise three years’ research, but Clark’s funds were fully stretched in advancing the money for the new gallery at the Ashmolean. In the meantime, Owen Morshead was already beginning to plot Clark’s next move, writing in confidence to advise him that Charles Collins Baker would soon retire as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.33 Ellis Waterhouse was generally considered the front-runner to replace him, but it is evident that Morshead preferred Clark.34 In the event Collins Baker took a great deal longer to retire than Morshead expected, but it was a marker for the future.
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During the autumn of 1932 it was family matters that took up most of Clark’s energies. Jane was pregnant again, this time with twins, and his father’s health had finally collapsed through cirrhosis of the liver. Clark had visited him in August at Shielbridge, where his father mistook him for his own brother, Norman, who had died thirty-two years before. Clark told Jane that he ‘spoke much of his death and disturbed my mother terribly’.35 By October, the time of the expected birth, his father was dying. Clark went north to be with him, rushing back to the nursing home in London for the arrival of the twins on 9 October, then returning once more to Scotland to be with his father at the end.
Clark’s father lived to hear of the birth of the twins. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘but there’ll never be another…’ He meant to say ‘Alan’, but in extremis muttered ‘Roddy’, the name of his ghillie. They were his last words. He died on 19 October, aged sixty-four. The widowed Alice Clark was inconsolable and, no longer able to repress the feelings she had bottled up for so long, became hysterical. As her son (who hated scenes more than anything) was to point out, her life’s work was over. She had been left the Scottish estate, and now she relied on Kenneth to make all arrangements for her. The net value of his father’s personal estate in England was £100,780, and in Scotland £414,830, which included Ardnamurchan and no doubt his Coats shares. He left his son the income from £100,000 in trust, and his personal effects. Clark already had an income of £2,000 a year from Coats shares that his father had given him.36 While he was never as rich as people believed him to be, it is possible that Clark could have maintained his lifestyle (including the acquisition of works of art) on this income, combined with his salary and his father’s bequest. He was also soon to receive further capital funds from his mother’s share. The only contemporary reference to his father’s will comes in a letter from C.F. Bell to Berenson in the sneering tone that he now adopted when referring to his old pupil: ‘I have heard nothing direct of the K. Claques but he is announcing that he has inherited 5 houses and no money.’37
The arrival of the twins caused a minor sensation. Clark went to lunch on the day of their birth with the hostess Lady Cunard.38 Feeling understandably elated, he bounced into the room announcing, ‘Emerald, we’ve just had twins.’ ‘Oh Kenneth,’ she replied, ‘how wicked of you to bring more people into this world.’ The architect Edwin Lutyens enquired, ‘Boys or girls?’ ‘A boy and a girl,’ Clark answered triumphantly, to receive the response, ‘Always means two fathers…’39
The twins were named Colin and Colette – a conceit that Colin later thought reflected a rare lapse of taste on his parents’ part – and would be known in the family as ‘Col’ and ‘Celly’ (pronounced ‘Kelly’). They were christened in Clark’s old college chapel at Trinity, and the choice of godparents reflected old and new friendships. Colin MacArthur Clark was given the novelist Edith Wharton, Nicky Mariano, Owen Morshead and the Oxford Classical scholar Roger Mynors. The last proved so negligent that he was later replaced by the composer William Walton. Colette Elizabeth Dixon Clark was assigned Maurice Bowra, John Sparrow and also Nicky Mariano (who was thus godmother to both children). The only person who did not greet the arrival of the twins with pleasure was their brother Alan. Having previously been the sole object of adoration, he had no intention of allowing attention to be diverted. He yelled and screamed, and ‘if he scratched his leg he had to say it had been cut off’.40
Perhaps the most surprising of the godparents was the seventy-year-old Edith Wharton. Clark had met her at I Tatti, where at first she had ignored him, as she sometimes did upon meeting new people. But once The Gothic Revival had been published, she bestowed her friendship upon him. Maybe, as Clark suggests in his memoirs, she recognised a fellow craftsman. He was an admirer of her novels, although he found it difficult to reconcile their pessimism with her fundamentally warm-hearted personality. Soon the Clarks were regular guests at her pretty villa at Hyères in the south of France, where, as he later told her biographer, Edith was a terrible fidget: ‘She couldn’t bear anyone to sit down without a little table beside him, and I used to say that “little tables” should be her telegraphic address.’41 Clark hated writing letters, but he always took especial care when he wrote to Edith Wharton.*3
In December 1933 the Clarks went to Paris for a break. They spent most of their time at the Louvre, and Clark wrote to Wharton, ‘what an inexhaustible old junk shop it is’. He referred to Jane’s purchases at Lanvin, but was much more animated by a haul of his own: ‘I must tell you as it is really rather exciting…it consists of 60 Cézanne drawings and watercolours 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 Institut
e to London,*4 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
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