Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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She also observed that Logan had, without even realising it, fallen in love with him. It is a measure of Clark’s inscrutability that nobody at I Tatti was certain where his sexual tastes lay.

      Logan lived at St Leonard’s Terrace in London, where he was known as ‘the Sage of Chelsea’. His life was devoted to literary pursuits, malicious gossip and polishing sentences for his collections of maxims. Like Walter Pater, he played with words until ‘they glowed like jewels upon his pages’.20 He was always searching for the ideal literary apprentice, and threw a fly over Clark: ‘I don’t want to force an unwelcome correspondence on you, but I shall always be glad to hear from you, and will answer with due promptness. Only the notion of my teaching you to write seems more and more absurd, since you write so well already.’21 Clark replied offering passages from three of his favourite authors for Logan’s Treasury of English Prose: Samuel Johnson, Walter Pater and Lytton Strachey. Clark was to remain fond of Logan, but it was BB to whom he was apprenticed. He offered Cyril Connolly instead, which was an unexpected success.

      Clark’s interests were never exclusively with the Old Masters. Roger Fry completed what the Leicester Galleries had begun, opening his eyes to Post-Impressionist French and contemporary art. Charles Bell had personally prevented this prophet of modern art from becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford – ‘The old spider did it,’ Fry would say with glee – but for Clark ‘he was the most bewitching lecturer I have ever heard’. His lectures on Cézanne and Poussin at Queen’s Hall, often filled with two thousand people, succeeded in making Post-Impressionism acceptable to the British elite. Clark later pronounced that if taste was changed by one man, it was changed by Fry. It was said of him that, like T.S. Eliot, he drew a new map by presenting Post-Impressionism to London. E.M. Forster thought that Fry changed culture from being principally a social asset – he addressed new audiences, and encouraged them to enjoy art. This was something Clark inherited.24

      Clark had read Fry’s Vision and Design (1920) at Winchester, and was more impressed by the intellectual rigour of Fry’s analysis than by Fry’s friend Clive Bell’s doctrine of ‘significant form’. Fry was a painter who was searching to understand the anatomical structure of compositions. The essence of his ideas was to write about works of art in terms of their form rather than their subject-matter – a method suitable for discussing Cézanne, but inadequate for Rembrandt. Clark was soon to outgrow this approach, which played down historical, literary and iconographical interpretations.25 However, one aspect of Fry’s critical writing which was clearly influential on Clark was his tendency to draw visual analogies between works of quite different epochs and cultures. Clark would apply this to great effect in all his books and lectures. Fry was also a delightful companion, and when Clark bought one of his strangely dead paintings, they became close friends. Clark probably enjoyed talking about art with Fry more than with anybody else in his life, and once confessed, ‘I doubt if I have ever felt clever again since Roger died.’ In addition, Fry introduced him to Bloomsbury, which led to his friendship with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. We owe it largely to Fry that Clark championed modern art when he was the director of the National Gallery.

      Women had played only a background role in Clark’s adult life to date, but that was about to change dramatically. In June he wrote to his mother: ‘I stopped at Newbury to pick up Gordon Waterfield and his young lady,’ the first reference to his future wife, Jane Martin.26 Clark did not have one particular girlfriend at the time, although there are frequent references to an ‘Eileen’ in letters home, and also to Sybil Dawson, of whom he later wrote, ‘everybody expected that I would marry her, but she was too materially minded’.27 Sybil’s father was the King’s physician, and as a doctor’s daughter she did not approve of Clark senior’s drinking, as she tactlessly told his son.28 There were other girlfriends, and it is perhaps surprising that Clark had no grand passion before Jane Martin, the Oxford graduate fiancée of his friend Gordon Waterfield. Jane was a friendly, unpretentious girl, and attractive in a vivacious way. Men had flocked around her at Oxford, where she had read History, admiring her high spirits and natural elegance. Gordon Waterfield was also a dashing figure, whose father was a painter and whose mother, Lina, was a niece of Janet Ross. His fees at Oxford were paid by an uncle in the cotton business (who was interested to hear of his friendship with a member of the Clark family). At some point in the summer of 1926 Waterfield was sent to Egypt to learn about the cotton trade, and unwisely entrusted his fiancée to Clark’s care. Clark began to send her letters, and to perform small services on her behalf, such as acquiring tweeds for her. He consoled himself that Newbury, where she had taken a position as a teacher at a school, Downe House, was ‘only 25 miles from Oxford’.

      When Clark left Oxford in June, he was perhaps already in love with Jane; he had certainly ceased to admire Sybil. He spent the early summer with his parents in Scotland, which ‘was the happiest month I’ve ever spent … it is wonderful that the awful Sybil didn’t cloud it’.29 Back in London, he prepared for a visit to Germany, and in August he and Connolly went down to Logan’s house by the sea in Hampshire, where again he was happy: ‘We all worked on the lawn most of the day, Logan at an essay on Pater, Cyril selecting passages from Jeremy Taylor, I reading all Hazlitt’s art criticism. In the afternoon we sailed on the Hamble and in the evening we bathed. Logan’s blithe and mellow charm engulfed us … I find him tremendously stimulating and I come away feeling I must write on almost every subject.’30

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