Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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around Sudbourne, but Clark’s parents made it clear that they would only buy them a house near London. A solution presented itself when the Clarks were invited for lunch by the British Museum drawings scholar A.E. Popham at Twickenham, beside the river. The house was ‘full of reflected light and children’, and its charms persuaded them to look along the Thames in West London – which was also convenient for Windsor Castle. They found a beautiful Georgian house called Old Palace Place, on the site of the Tudor palace of Sheen, on Richmond Green. Clark wrote to his father, ‘I think I might get it and all the fixtures and a few optional oddments for £12,000 … I am so glad you liked the look of the house and I must tell you that I am truly grateful for your offering to give it to me. I know you say it is only reasonable to give me the money now rather than later, but not all fathers are reasonable with their son especially when their sons have done so little to deserve it. We should be very proud indeed to live in such a fine house.’33

      For the first time the Clarks possessed a house where they could proudly receive visitors and entertain. They knocked through two first-floor rooms to create a long drawing room, with seven tall windows, in which they could display their growing art collection. They hung the walls with old red silk, and at one end placed the lion of their collection, ‘a large heavy portrait by Tintoretto’. With the passage of time Clark came to feel this grand purchase was a mistake, and that the picture really belonged in a gallery. In future he was always to make a distinction between a ‘gallery’ picture and a ‘private’ one, and he eventually sold his Tintoretto.34 He had already formed a group of drawings, many of them acquired from the Fairfax Murray estate in Florence, and these were placed in the downstairs sitting room, where French windows opened onto the garden. Many of these drawings were to remain with Clark all his life, and were on his walls when he died. His favourite was Samuel Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, bought from the sale of the artist’s son at Christie’s in 1928, which was later credited with influencing Graham Sutherland.

      The Clarks were delighted with their new house. Jane wrote to Bowra, ‘your room is ready’, and Clark told his mother, ‘Even in the foggy weather Richmond is delightful … Lam stayed with us and took Alan for long walks.’35 They started giving ambitious dinner parties. Clark described one of them to his mother: ‘Our grand party was pretty good fun – less for me than for Jane who sat next to the PM [Ramsay MacDonald36] and got a lot out of him. I think you would like him, especially if you talked to him about France … about France he rivals my Father.’37 It was not only the great that they received. The young John Pope-Hennessy, then a schoolboy at Downside, has left an account of a visit: ‘When I rang the bell at the Old Palace, the door was opened by a young man of extraordinary charm, confidence and suavity … he showed me his drawings. Would I like him to tell me who did them, he asked, or would I prefer to form my own impressions? I said I had rather be told … I felt then (and for some years afterwards) that he was everything that I aspired to be.’38

      Clark was enjoying his work, and a routine soon established itself. Each day he would catch a train from Richmond station to Windsor, where he worked in the library till lunchtime. He would have a snack in a teashop and then take the train home, ‘my pockets stuffed with notes’.39 He expected this peaceful and happy existence to last for many years, until one day ‘I received a telephone call from a character named Brigadier Sir Harold Hartley asking if he could call on me. It boded no good, and sure enough he came to invite me to become Keeper of the department of Fine Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.’40

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       The Ashmolean

       You certainly would be in clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown-ups.

      BERNARD BERENSON to Kenneth Clark, 10 June 19311

      The Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in Britain. It was given to the university by Elias Ashmole in 1683 as a collection of curiosities, and has grown far beyond the founder’s imagining. In 1908 the museum was amalgamated with the University Gallery and went from strength to strength, augmented by gifts and bequests, many of them princely. The Ashmolean is a scholar’s museum, ‘a collection of collections’ with a complex history of amalgamations and transformations. In Clark’s time it was divided into two: an archaeological department with its own keeper, and a fine art department with outstanding Western and Oriental art, and – as we have seen – a particular strength in drawings. It was this keepership that Clark was offered. His department also housed the glorious Fox-Strangways collection of early Italian pictures, including Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.

      BB answered shrewdly: ‘It is a most flattering offer. You certainly would be in clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown-ups … You would at the same time take a high rank among the dignitaries of a great university where so recently you were a mere boy … The advantages are so real, so splendid, & so alluring that you would – perhaps – do well to seize them. On the other hand the post will fix you down in the world of collectors, curators, dons … My dear Kenneth you still are so young that I venture yet once again – but positively for the last time – to ask you to reconsider what you are doing.’4 Despite BB’s plea, Clark accepted the position, explaining to him that it was ‘partly that I should have, as you say, so many lovely toys to play with, and partly that it really gets me out of the Burlington world’5 – by which he meant the London art world exemplified by the Burlington Magazine, Burlington House and the Burlington Fine Arts Club. He had seen this world at ugly close quarters during the Italian exhibition.

      Clark’s appointment to the Keepership of Fine Art at the Ashmolean was in some ways more astonishing than his National Gallery directorship, which was to come three years later. Oxford was a conservative place, where age and rank took precedence, and he was still only twenty-seven. Nothing is known about the reason for his appointment. It was welcomed by Bell – with whom Clark had not yet had his final break: ‘I don’t think I ever could have felt so happy and contented. It is far better than being followed by a son … for even in moments of the most soaring fantasy I never could imagine myself producing a son with your intellect and sympathetic temperament.’6 At this stage Bell preferred to see

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