Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  * * *

  *1 At the time Clark wrote: ‘The Prime Minister’s actual words were “Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island.” ’ See Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime, p.31, and also letter from Downing Street, 1 June 1940 (reproduced p.16), which calls into question Clark’s more picturesque account in his memoirs.

  *2 ‘Water for the ropes.’

  *3 This was a mischievous misunderstanding – Jane had taken gym classes, but she was never a gym teacher.

  *4 Clark, Another Part of the Wood (p.273). It should be remembered that Churchill was not yet Prime Minister.

  18

  The National Gallery at War

  A defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis.

  HERBERT READ (1941)

  The historian of the National Gallery warns us that we should approach ‘war-time folk memories gingerly, nervously aware of the important role the Gallery played in raising morale’.1 Bound up as it is with national myths of the Blitz and Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, the story of a defiant gallery at the heart of the capital, keeping alight the flame of high culture, is indeed moving – and sometimes in danger of being sentimentalised. It certainly presents a paradox, in that the gallery achieved a higher level of popularity with the public when it was emptied of its treasures. Nor had any of the components of its new success been planned: not the concerts, the Picture of the Month, the hub for war artists, nor the exhibitions of art and post-war planning that were to give the place such a central importance in wartime London. With brilliant pragmatism, Clark in each case simply identified new opportunities as they arose and seized them, for the circumstances of war perfectly suited his activist outlook and his readiness to take quick decisions. As he told James Lees-Milne on the station platform at Bookham in Surrey, during a visit to Polesden Lacey: ‘to accomplish anything today a man must be resolute and ruthless, and must act and think afterwards’.2 Clark believed that art and culture were central to the very values that Britain was fighting to defend, and that they should therefore be marshalled to articulate those values. In short, he wanted art not only to raise morale, but to show the public what they were fighting for. As Michael Levey observed, it was through the war that ‘Clark’s eyes were opened to the power of art, in its widest sense, over supposedly ordinary people’.3

  Conscious that the civil service was scheduled to take over the National Gallery’s buildings, Clark had devised no plans for their use. But when it became apparent that the government had no idea what to do with them, he seized a new proposal that chanced to come his way, and expanded it into something of an institution. London had only just evacuated its children, closed down its entertainments and newly draped itself in blackout curtains when into his office stepped the large and much-loved international concert pianist, Myra Hess. Only the previous weekend Hess had been speaking of her desire to bring music to the capital, in response to which a friend had suggested the National Gallery as a venue. Although neither of them really believed in the possibility, Hess wasted no time in introducing herself to Clark, cautiously proposing the idea of a concert every three weeks. ‘No,’ Clark responded. ‘Every day!’ The most surprising part of the story is that government departments ‘in their strange, stiff way behaved well’ and authorised these now famous concerts to go ahead. When the gallery trustees offered no objection, the first was scheduled for 10 October, only five weeks after the outbreak of war.

  The first concert was publicised on the BBC, and advertisements were placed in newspapers; all profits were to go to the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. The main problem was finding enough chairs, and five hundred were eventually procured, some of which were still arriving as the audience gathered. It was expected that perhaps two hundred people might come, but in the event a thousand people formed a patient queue – office boys, servicemen and women in uniform, and civilians with their gas-masks. Everyone was to be charged a shilling, and when the first person presented a half-crown coin (two shillings and sixpence) there was no change. Eight hundred people were crammed into the gallery, far exceeding the Home Office limit on numbers in public places; the rest, to Clark’s great sadness, had to be turned away.

  Both Clark and Hess had agreed that the concerts should be primarily of German music. The opening concert began with Scarlatti, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Brahms. Clark wrote of it: ‘The first concert was given by Miss Hess herself, and the moment when she played the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” will always remain for me one of the great experiences of my life. It was an assurance that all our sufferings were not in vain.’4 Hess was fearful that her German name might give rise to booing, but she became in every way the heroine of the hour – her radiant smile (which sometimes reminded people of Queen Elizabeth) and presence won every audience over. For her encore she chose Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, which was to become her signature tune.

  The success of the concerts took everyone by surprise. On 6 February 1940, when Hess played Bach, the audience totalled 1,280. The BBC was slow to spot an opportunity, its first broadcast being of the one hundredth National Gallery concert; but then, at the beginning of the war the Corporation had not understood the mood of the nation, and believed that people wanted nothing but light music. To Clark, the concerts ‘were the first sign that we were recovering from a sort of numbness which overcame our sensibilities for a week or two after the war was declared; and they remain proof that although we are at war we do not want an unrelieved diet of hearty songs and patriotic imbecilities’.5 What the concerts also proved was that at moments of national crisis, as Clark correctly perceived, there was a hunger for culture – and this manifested itself in a call for music, literature and art. One of the concert-goers was the novelist E.M. Forster, whose mind wandered to the gallery interior. He thought that ‘the Renaissance decorations of the building, a little complacent in peacetime, are indescribably moving today, they inspire nobility, hopefulness, calm’.6

  The musicians, who called Hess ‘Auntie’, were paid five guineas each, whether they were famous or merely students. They pitted their playing against military bands in Trafalgar Square, bell-ringing from St Martin-in-the-Fields (soon silenced), and during the worst period of the Blitz they performed in icy conditions with blue fingers. The gallery took several direct hits, but the concerts continued regardless, merely being relocated from the Barry Rooms under the dome to the basement. Once, when a delayed-action bomb fell on the gallery, nearby South Africa House offered its library as an alternative venue, and a boy stood outside the gallery redirecting the audience. No doubt encouraged by Clark, the Queen came to an early concert, and returned on several occasions, sometimes with the two Princesses and once with the King. Writing the day after a concert attended by the Queen, Hess described it as ‘the happiest and certainly the prettiest day of my life’.7

  The most memorable concert was held on New Year’s Day 1940, when Clark himself conducted Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony (then believed to be by Haydn). He had no experience of conducting an orchestra whatsoever, and next to none of playing an instrument; but perhaps something of his childhood exhibitionism returned to carry him through. He took advice from Sir Thomas Beecham, who went carefully through the score with him, although the performers did not take the matter nearly as seriously. This brought out the priggish side of Clark when, at an uproarious rehearsal in which famous musicians were larking about, Clark was heard to repeat, ‘Now children!’ As he told the Daily Express: ‘All I have to do is to see that the cuckoos and trumpets and the rest of the noise come in at the right places.’ On the day a thousand people turned up, determined to enjoy the fun. Myra Hess and her fellow pianist Irene Scharrer played on bird warblers, toy trumpets and sixpenny drums; Joyce Grenfell performed the part of a nightingale on a metal whistle. This was probably the most enjoyed of all the concerts, raising gales of laughter every time the stars tried their instruments – indeed,
they could barely play for laughing themselves. The press called it ‘a great lark’, The Times saying that Clark conducted ‘in the spirit of Leonardo’ – or as one critic put it less kindly: ‘The musicians didn’t need a conductor but he kept time with them beautifully.’ One of the nicest letters Clark received as a result of this promising debut was from his old governess Lam, who was now the housekeeper at Chequers. She herself had once played the piano part of the Toy Symphony: ‘the papers were really cheerful – for me at least – this morning and I feel I must congratulate you on your success as a Conductor’.8

  The concerts were designed to last exactly an hour, to fit the office workers’ standard lunch break, and 1,700 sandwiches a day (regarded as the best in London) were provided by an energetic socialite, Lady Gator, and her crew of smart ladies. Clark wrote to Bernard Berenson: ‘We get audiences of up to 1,000 almost every day – people of all sorts who are prepared to give up their lunch in order to escape for a short time out of the ugliness and disorder of the present moment.’9 He was exaggerating a little, as the average audience was nearer five hundred – although eight hundred was not unusual. His secretary at the National Gallery, Nancy Thomas,10 spoke for many when she said that ‘the concerts were a tremendous feature of London life. It was one of the very few things that was happening and they were lovely.’ On 19 November 1943 the half-millionth audience member was declared – a sailor who was about to return to his ship from shore leave. Overall the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund received £12,000 (although there was a hitch when it was discovered that Ronald Jones, the treasurer of the concert committee, had been taking money from the funds and putting in IOUs).

  So much a part of the British wartime scene did the National Gallery concerts become that films made for America and the colonies represented them as part of the war effort, notably in Listen to Britain, produced by Ian Dalrymple for the Crown Film Unit. Like other such films, this was folksy in tone, showing children dancing, tanks rolling through picturesque villages and musicians in uniform at a battered National Gallery playing Mozart – with, in the background, exhibitions of war artists and a shot of Clark sitting next to the Queen and grinning. Other scenes showed the large, echoing galleries with their empty frames powerfully evoking the pictures now far away; the gallery had become a symbol of national defiance.

  During the working week Clark stayed in London, but at weekends he would join Jane at the Hare and Hounds in Westonbirt, Gloucestershire, where they were having to camp out. Upton House was still in very poor shape, and the builders had been called away – as Clark told Berenson, ‘it was being entirely done up inside and when the war came was uninhabitable. Owing to the shortage of men and materials it has taken two months before we can even sleep there, and I don’t suppose it will be in decent order before Christmas. Poor Jane has had to spend her time chivvying workmen and imagining that I was having a very eventful, exciting life at the centre of things in London. Actually I am kept so busy that I see practically no one and hear no news.’11 But Jane was right in believing that Clark had been having a much nicer time than her, as he admitted to his mother: ‘I dined alone with the Queen, the Duchess of Kent and an old friend, Malcolm Bullock. It was the first private party the Q had given since the war began and she was as excited as a child…I don’t see how one can go higher than that in the hall-porter world. We sat talking till almost midnight.’12

  Meanwhile, back in Gloucestershire, Jane was having to look after the children for the first time, which she found tiresome; such proximity brought out the worst in her. She demanded total obedience from them, and responded to their noise and disorder with angry shouting. Romantically, she had imagined that she could settle quietly in the country and enjoy growing vegetables, but in reality she was miserable, and missed the glamour and sociability of London. In November, when Portland Place had finally gone, the Clarks decided to rent a large but snug flat at 5 Gray’s Inn Square, where Jane could come and see her husband.

  —

  The business of the National Gallery did not entirely close down during wartime. Trustees’ meetings continued, although with less frequency, and pictures occasionally came up for acquisition. In 1940 Lord Balniel’s father died, in consequence of which he became the Earl of Crawford and faced considerable death duties; the following year he offered his Rembrandt Portrait of Margaretha Trip to the gallery. This presented two problems: firstly, he correctly insisted on resigning his trusteeship and chairmanship, as these conflicted with his position as vendor; secondly, the gallery already held another portrait of Margaretha Trip – and by the same artist. Clark’s usual resource, the National Art Collections Fund, led by Sir Robert Witt, initially declined to contribute – it had given £8,000 three years earlier for Rembrandt’s Saskia. Clark asked the trustees if he could therefore offer the portrait to Mr Gulbenkian to buy it for them. In the event, the NACF did contribute the funds (made easier by tax remission), and the gallery acquired its second Trip portrait for £20,000. But before he committed to the purchase Clark took the precaution of writing to the Earl of Radnor, stating that the gallery was about to make a purchase that would use up its funds for many years to come; he wanted to reassure himself that Radnor had no plans to sell his Holbein Portrait of Erasmus or the Velázquez Portrait of Juan de Pareja.13

  Although Clark was delighted with the Rembrandt acquisition, it came at the very heavy price of his friend David Crawford’s resignation from the gallery board. ‘Looking back on your chairmanship,’ Clark wrote, ‘I am distressed to think how what should have been the most perfect two years of my time at the gallery was continuously interrupted by outside troubles – first the Giorgiones, then the rows with Kay and Davies, then Kay’s death and then all the bother of ARP and the threat of war.’14

  The Rembrandt story was to have, however, one happy consequence. The eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler wrote to The Times suggesting that the gallery should put its new prize on exhibition. Clark responded that in view of the hunger ‘which many of us feel for the sight of a great painting’, the trustees were going to put the Rembrandt on show for a month, and furthermore they were ‘also considering the suggestion that one picture from the Gallery should be exhibited every week in this way’.15 Thus began the talismanic ‘Picture of the Month’, which became such a major part of the gallery’s wartime legend.16 To excite popular interest in the idea, Clark told an interviewer: ‘I asked people to send me a postcard with the names of some of the pictures they would most like to see again.’ Michelangelo’s Entombment and Piero’s Nativity were the most requested, although Clark considered these too precious to put at risk. In fact nearly all the requests he received were for Italian pictures, which he interpreted as a ‘longing for the sense of order and the noble types of humanity which the great Renaissance painters show’.17 Because the keepers were generally reluctant to accept the idea, it was agreed that Martin Davies should have the last word on which paintings would or would not be allowed up from Wales. Together Davies and Clark settled on pictures which showed the depth of human experience. Among those selected to make the journey were Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, with its nationalistic undertone; Constable’s Hay Wain, with its expression of British values; Bellini’s Agony in the Garden, a study of self-sacrifice; and Titian’s Noli me Tangere. The intensity of the viewer’s encounter with the Picture of the Month hanging on its own in the gallery was expressed by Albert Irvin RA, who said, ‘You didn’t half look at it, you ravished it.’ Even Clark’s wicked fairy, Tancred Borenius, applauded, describing the ‘beehive-like’ activity around each picture. Over six hundred people a day would visit; 36,826 came to see Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, and slightly fewer saw Botticelli’s Venus and Mars.

  The Crawford Rembrandt was not the only wartime offering to the trustees. As well as the gift of the Cook Titian, in July 1943 Clark announced to the board that the Duke of Rutland had offered his Poussin Seven Sacraments series – which Clark recommended against, on grounds
of their condition and their inferiority to the Sutherland series.* Only poverty and the hope of acquiring the Sutherland series (today on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland) make such a refusal comprehensible. However, even this had a happy outcome, because when Lord Radnor offered his – arguably superior – Poussin Worship of the Golden Calf in 1945, Clark was able to make a half-hearted offer to buy it for £10,000 against its valuation of £15,000 – and to everyone’s surprise this was accepted.

  Clark’s royal duties had been wound down with the coming of war. He had sent most of the Royal Collection to Wales for safekeeping, but there was simply too much for it all to go. Hampton Court, which was felt to be reasonably safe from the Blitz, was hung for the duration with pictures that were normally held in store, and Clark considered the result ‘exceedingly attractive and although the pictures exhibited are not as famous or as valuable as the ones we have taken away, they certainly constitute the most imposing collection of Old Masters at present on exhibition’.18 As Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, one of Clark’s main concerns was the safety of the Raphael cartoons (which with the Leonardo drawings are the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection), on loan to the V&A. They were too large to move, and had therefore been marooned at the museum. Sir Eric Maclagan, the director, recommended building a brick fortress around them topped by steel girders, but Clark insisted instead on the construction of tall, narrow doors so they could be slid out in case of fire: to illustrate his point he even made a sketch. His precaution turned out to be very necessary, for the museum took a direct hit in November 1940.19 In the event, the greatest threat to the cartoons’ safety was a plan to create an RAF training school in the building, with cooking and washing facilities for two thousand men adjacent to where they were stored – a scheme that was dropped under protest.