Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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her sister Alys in London: ‘she likes Kenneth’s Jane who is neither dressy nor smart … I think our policy is to make the best of it, while it lasts, and not speak against either of them. What we say will inevitably come round to them … I hope we can be good friends to him, even if we don’t get what we too hastily imagined we should get.’19

      The first visit was to Poggio Gherardo. It could hardly have gone worse. Aunt Janet was no doubt prejudiced against Jane for breaking off her engagement with her great-nephew Gordon Waterfield, even though his family had never thought her good enough. ‘The old dragon in her best Ouida form, would not speak to Jane at all,’20 and Clark decided to leave the house rather than have a row, an early example of his habit of running away from confrontation.

      Initially, the visit to I Tatti went no better. BB put Jane next to himself at lunch, and then proceeded to talk across her in Italian and German, two languages she did not understand. The fact that this was normal behaviour for Berenson was lost on Jane, who was understandably upset and never entirely got over it, even if she concealed her feelings well. What saved the situation was Clark telling BB the story of her reception by Aunt Janet. This stirred some chivalrous emotion in him (and perhaps some guilt), because he ‘put on a tail coat and silk top hat and went up to Poggio Gherardo to administer an official rebuke’.21 Clark wrote untruthfully to Mary about the visit: ‘Most charming of all was B.B. Jane finds, as I do, that he is not in the least awe inspiring, and that however much one may admire his wonderful intellectual qualities, he is essentially friendly and lovable.’22 Mary later reported the I Tatti view of Jane to Alys: ‘She has absolutely nothing to say although she is very sweet and always looks interested.’23

      Clark thought the early days at Chiostro di San Martino were their happiest. He was engaged in interesting work, and enjoyed showing Jane all the sights of Florence, ‘skipping from picture to picture, from chapel to chapel, in a frenzy of excitement’. Friends came to stay, and were taken up to be presented at I Tatti, firstly John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra. Bowra was a failure, as there was only room for one magus in that court. Cyril Connolly was better received, but his description of Berenson was ambivalent: ‘He talks the whole time and drowns everybody else, and though he has enormous and universal knowledge and is excessively stimulating, half his remarks are preposterously conceited and the other half entirely insincere.’24 He left an equally good account of staying with the Clarks: ‘K is rather easier with Jane added though a bit dogmatic and garrulous before the set of sun. It is a passably nice house with a passably nice view and a good chef and I like the life with its daily drive to some church or gallery or neighbouring town and the Berenson menage looming over like the Big House to the agent’s cottage.’25

      The Clarks took the opportunity of being in Italy to go travelling. They visited Venice for the first time. Charles Bell had advised arriving by the slow boat from Padua so they ‘saw Venice rising out of the sea as Ruskin and Whistler had seen it’. Clark shared his impressions with Connolly: ‘it is certainly a moving though it can hardly be an intimate experience. It seemed to us barely credible, like New York.’ Equally vivid would be their drive home through France: ‘It was a great delight to be out of Italy and we saw many wonderful things. I think Vezelay unsurpassed, don’t you? And Autun very little less good.’26 These were later to be two important locations of the third programme of Civilisation.

      But before that, the cataloguing, measuring and checking of Florentine Drawings continued, and although Clark was beginning to find the work laborious, he was enjoying the life. One day he mentioned to Jane that he would drop The Gothic Revival. She was shocked at the suggestion, and told him he mustn’t give up at this point. There is no doubt that she saved the book, and she became his typist and his first critical reader. Jane always had a great respect for the printed word, and spent much of their later life trying to persuade her husband to write more books rather than make TV programmes. They arranged to spend the summer in Oxford so that he could finish the book.

      While Clark was at Oxford, BB came to England and they visited the Ashmolean Museum together. Clark wrote to Charles Bell from St Ermin’s to say how sorry they were to have missed him, and described his first impression of the Royal Collection: ‘Today we have been to Buckingham Palace. It is just what one would expect – like a bad station hotel and the pictures abominably hung. We had the Titian landscape down and it is a very wonderful romantic thing – surely one of a series; if the others could only be found! The Duccio, of course, you know well. There are many other attractive Italian things but the Rembrandts are wonderful; and what a Claude – and Rubens!’27

      The desire for their child to be born in England precipitated the gradual closure of the I Tatti chapter of Clark’s life. It stumbled on until early 1929, when Mary wrote to Alys: ‘K would like to get out of it and B.B. would like him to, but none of us … dare to put in our oars. B.B. feels sure that K cannot help him, as he needs careful scholarship and not pretty writing … K had said to me that he loathed the pettifogging business of correcting notes and numbers … But all he wants out of it is, I fear, whatever kudos he will get from the association. He has an ungenerous self-centred nature, and B.B. needs devotion.’28 She was essentially right: if Clark was going to do any pettifogging scholarly work, he would prefer to do it on his own account. Clark, however, looked back with profound gratitude at his time spent at I Tatti. As he later wrote to BB, ‘the greatest debt is emancipation from various intellectual fashions of the time. If I had never gone to I Tatti I should certainly have been bound apprentice to Bloomsbury – or perhaps never moved beyond Oxford.’29

      The remarkable thing about the Berenson–Clark relationship is that it not only endured but deepened once the shackles of Florentine Drawings were removed, and they were on more equal terms. Berenson recognised that Clark had administrative and writing skills that he personally did not possess, and suggested that he had ‘a certain faculty for seeing things vertically instead of horizontally’, adding, ‘that is what you should cultivate’.30 He watched the progress of Clark’s career as an admiring schoolmaster might a slightly wayward pupil. If Clark craved BB’s blessing, the older man asked for, and never felt he received, affection and love in return. In 1937 he wrote what he called ‘a cry for the goodwill,

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