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and he felt lonely: ‘Yesterday I found the strain of never speaking English and having no human relations with anyone rather unpleasant, I was seized with the melancholy. However, I’ve shaken it off by dint of hard work. “If you are solitary be not idle” were Johnson’s last words to Bozzy, when Bozzy went on his European tour.’31

      He was shaken out of his ennui by a visit from his friend Leigh Ashton. ‘Don’t expect a letter for three days,’ he warned his mother, ‘as it is impossible to write when one is with Leigh. He keeps one on the run all day.’ Clark had first met Ashton at Winchester, when he was already on the staff of the V&A, which he would one day direct. He was a flamboyant showman who had a creative rather than a scholarly mind, and like Clark he possessed a vast appetite for works of art. Together they toured Germany, and made subsequent trips to visit collections in Paris and Brussels. The greatest revelation in Germany for Clark was his discovery of the Baroque and Rococo, and he confessed that he was ‘so bowled over by Nymphenburg that forty years later I gave it too much prominence in the ninth programme of Civilisation’.32

      In the last letter he wrote to his mother from Dresden, he broke some important news: ‘I return to England, then … I must go down to Oxford to see Charles [Bell] and my tailor; also to Newbury to see Jane … as you know Jane and I are completely devoted to one another and I must see as much of her as I can. When you wrote that I was not in the least in love with her, I didn’t contradict you … However I have been in love with her for about two years now, and extraordinary as it seems she has with me … I think that unless anything unforeseen occurs we shall eventually get married. I have no gift for falling in love and am not likely to do so again. Nor am I ever likely to find anyone with whom I have so much in common.’ For whatever reason, he had convinced himself that his father would be against the liaison, and told his mother: ‘He must realise that I am, unfortunately very different to him; bachelor joys, parties and late nights and good fellows have no charm for me. I am the least “clubbable” of men and if I am not with intimate friends or at home I am alone; and I hate being alone. Try and impress on him that Jane would be a companion to me … My dear, I look forward to seeing you again more than I ever remember. I have enjoyed Dresden, on the whole, but I was not cut out for an exile.’33 It is significant that Clark’s love for Jane had grown under conditions of distance. He was away much of the time; and Jane was already engaged – both factors that protected him from the pressures of expectation. Besides, having promised Waterfield to look after Jane, Clark had every justification for offering her his companionship and support. Perhaps this ambiguity also kept him from feeling self-conscious about their deepening relationship.

The first question everybody asked in those days, when caste meant so much, was, who is Jane Martin? She was an Irish girl, born Elizabeth (always known as ‘Betty’ in the family) Martin, who changed her Christian name at Oxford. She was brought up in middle-class Dublin. Her father, Robert Martin, was a feckless businessman who never stopped showing off. Clark called him an ‘incredible old fake’. On the other hand, Jane’s mother, Dr Emily Dickson, who was ten years older than her husband, was a distinguished surgeon who gave up her practice on marriage. There were four boys in the family,34 and Jane had a tomboy side when she was young. Her parents eventually separated: her roguish father went to South Africa to run the Durban Cricket Club,* and her long-suffering mother to Tunbridge Wells, where economic necessity forced her back into medical practice – Clark seldom saw her smile. Jane was sent to school in England at Malvern Girls’ School, from where she went to Somerville, Oxford. She was naturally elegant and inclined to break the rules, both of which made her popular. Her academic career was undistinguished; she obtained a third class degree after retakes. Apart from her obvious and slightly gamine charm, Clark and she were both outsiders who would ‘invent’ themselves as a couple. Her father advised her always to subordinate her interests to her husband.

      Clark’s engagement to Jane entailed having to write an awkward letter to Gordon Waterfield in Egypt. He sent it from St Ermin’s Hotel. According to Clark’s account, Waterfield took the news philosophically, but a curious incident suggests otherwise. It happened almost at the end of Jane’s life, during her long and unhappy final illness, when Waterfield came to live at Hythe in Kent, close by the Clarks’ last home at Saltwood. One day, in conversation with Clark’s daughter Colette, Waterfield pulled out of his top pocket the letter that her father had written half a century before. It was on four sides of paper, a smooth, self-justifying document which Clark had concluded with: ‘in the end you will find that this is better for everybody’. It is clear that Jane’s abandonment still caused Waterfield pain, as he turned to Colette and said with feeling, ‘If only she had stayed with me, she would have never have got into this state.’35

* Founded in 1866, the Burlington Fine Arts Club was where connoisseurs and art collectors gathered and mounted exhibitions. Its premises were originally opposite Burlington House (hence the name) in Piccadilly, and in Clark’s day at Savile Row.

* Alois Riegl (1858–1905), Austrian art historian whose masterpiece Spät-Romische Kunst-Industrie was to greatly influence Clark. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), Swiss art historian who taught in Germany, writing major books concerned with form and style in Renaissance and Baroque art.

* ‘Jane’s father was a very charming man, but completely idle. Jane was fond of him and indulged him, but he was a non-stop talker, which became rather a bore to us all. Fortunately she found a way of sending him off to South Africa where he became secretary of the bowls club in Durban, and no doubt could always find a wretched listener.’ Clark to Meryle Secrest, 27 August 1973 (I Tatti).

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       BB

       [Berenson] wanted to respond to works of art as part of an overall experience of life, and he hoped to describe this experience, in all its complexity, as the unifying element in the history of man’s spirit.

      KENNETH CLARK, ‘Aesthete’s Progress’1

      The story of Kenneth Clark’s relationship with BB is one of enduring love and ambivalence. ‘The character of Mr Berenson,’ as he once wrote, ‘was like the sharp ridge of a mountain running from east to west. If you stood on the south side it was fascinating and, in his own words, life-enhancing. If you went onto the north side there were aspects that made one very uneasy.’2 Clark generally experienced the south side of the mountain, but at the time of his arrival at I Tatti Berenson was at the peak of his influence in the art world, and success had made him bombastic and opinionated; the north side often loomed. The fundamental difficulty was that Clark’s presence at I Tatti was based on a misunderstanding. Berenson viewed Clark as an assistant who would undertake the revision work on Florentine Drawings, a project that was as necessary as it was daunting. But Clark, who was unlikely to be anybody’s assistant for long – as Mary Berenson soon realised – saw himself as a collaborator.

      Berenson’s remarkable story has often been told. Born in 1865 to a Jewish family in Lithuania and brought up in Boston, he was an autodidact whose education took place in the public library and at Boston and Harvard Universities. His early interests were in Oriental languages and literature. It was not until he went to Italy that he changed direction and began his lifelong study of Renaissance artists. Berenson fell in love with Italy, and poor as he was, travelled from one dusty village church to another in pursuit of his work. It was in a café in Bergamo

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