Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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for the Museum that the new Keeper happens to be an old Friend and Pupil of my own, so that the transfer of the duties will be as smooth and the interruption of business as slight as we can possibly make them by mutual give and take. Certainly the Visitors [i.e. the museum’s trustees] have no reason to congratulate themselves for having brought about this happy coincidence.’7

      Clark gave his reasons for accepting the post as ‘vanity and filial piety’. As he later told an interviewer: ‘I thought it would be nice for my parents to be able to say that their boy was doing something. Actually, they were faintly distressed, because it meant that I had less time to play bridge with them.’8 With his usual sense of loss and regret, in his memoirs he described the appointment as ‘the turning point of my life, and I am certain that I took the wrong turning’.9 He believed that by accepting the museum post, ‘administration would prevent me from writing the great books that I already had in mind’.10 The divided man is a recurring theme of Clark’s life; the constant dance between seeking the contemplative life when in the throes of action, and gladly accepting the return to action when he achieved it. It is doubtful if he would ever have been contented with one or other life – he needed the stimulus of both.

      Clark’s immediate concern was to be allowed to finish work on the Windsor drawings, and to find a new assistant keeper who would make this possible. The trustees of the Ashmolean indulged him on both points. Bell, who left Clark twenty-one pages of closely written advice on all aspects of the collection, ended his notes by encouraging him to appoint his own assistant. Sir Charles Holroyd put forward Teddy Croft-Murray and Ellis Waterhouse, two exceptionally clever young art historians, but as E.T. Leeds wrote to Clark, ‘As you say, brilliancy is not wanted. A capacity for steady work, which doesn’t shirk drudgery at times, is much more essential.’13 The candidate he chose, I.G. Robertson, was later upset by Clark’s description of him as one who, ‘whatever his shortcomings as a scholar, was a wizard with old ladies’.14

      The next priority was to find a new home. Clark wrote to Berenson, ‘We are determined not to live in or too near Oxford & become involved in University Society – which means that grave of so many valuable abilities, University politics.’15 They rented what he described as a featureless modern house with twenty acres and a good view over the Thames valley at Shotover Cleve for £15 a year.16 Rather surprisingly, Clark wrote, ‘on the whole we prefer it to Richmond, where we had bored ourselves with our own boasting. This house is nothing to boast about.’17 Jane was by all accounts upset to be leaving Old Palace Place, which was rented out. Alys Russell was more enthusiastic, and called the new house ‘a delightful white Italian villa with a lovely tame and wild garden’.18

      One of the chief glories of the fine arts department at the Ashmolean is generally hidden – its drawings. These cannot be permanently displayed, but Clark was determined to show more of the rest of the collection. He started by rehanging the paintings, and was revelling in his new life, as he told BB: ‘We have had a busy but an agreeable Autumn. I have enjoyed playing about in my toy shop, which really looks very pretty now. And I am delighted to find how little there is to do. Even though I have rehung the whole gallery I have had plenty of spare time. Most of this has been spent on my Leonardo Catalogue which is now almost finished … Charlie Bell is not returned to Oxford. I don’t believe he ever will, as he couldn’t bear to see the mess I was making.’19

      The main problem Clark faced was a lack of gallery space. Soon after his arrival he wrote, ‘unless some extension of the galleries is achieved, it will be absolutely impossible for the University to accept any gifts, bequests, or loans for oil paintings’.20 A second problem was to find funding – during his tenure the keeper’s office was run on a shoestring: in 1931 his entire department budget, including purchases, was £1,400. In order to pay for a new gallery to be built, Clark offered to advance the amount required to the university anonymously, which it was glad to accept. His plans for the partial rebuilding of the museum caused the destruction of Bell’s life work, the Fortnum Gallery; this was another black mark as far as Bell was concerned, and the final breach was near at hand. He vented his frustration with Clark to Berenson: ‘I am afraid I shall never really like him or his wife … not because I am jealous or covetous, if I know myself in the least, but I have an instinctive turning away from the facile.’21 To John Pope-Hennessy, an undergraduate at Oxford, Bell went even further: ‘I stood behind Kenneth Clark on the platform of a bus this morning and could have pushed him off.’22

      Clark made some very fine purchases for the museum, starting with two important works by Samuel Palmer, Self Portrait and the artist’s first major oil, Repose of the Holy Family. But his boldest acquisition came in his second year. Piero di Cosimo’s Forest Fire had been in the Italian exhibition, loaned from the collection of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Having no purchase grant, Clark paid for the picture with £3,000 of his own money, and then appealed to the National Art Collections Fund, which reimbursed the entire price.23 He was later to describe it in his book Landscape Into Art as ‘the first landscape in Italian painting in which man is of no importance’.24 As Pope-Hennessy said at Clark’s memorial service, ‘How many undergraduates’ imaginations must have been kindled by that painting since it was acquired?’ It remains, with Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest, the museum’s most popular painting.

      In addition, Clark acquired a Virgin and Child from the workshop of Botticelli that once belonged to Ruskin, and a purchase well ahead of its time – an elaborate Burges cupboard of which he wrote, ‘though not acceptable to present-day taste it will always remain an important document’.25 However, his favourite acquisition was not a painting but a ‘ravishing’ ivory of Venus and Cupid by Georg Petel, which may have been owned by Rubens. He also persuaded Lord Duveen to lend a Resurrection then attributed to Andrea del Castagno.26

      Clark’s tenure at the Ashmolean is still regarded as important. It could not be claimed that he was in any way populist, which might not have been particularly appropriate to a scholarly university collection, but ‘he will be remembered for the brief period between August 1931 and December 1933 when, with his characteristic mixture of arrogance and energy, he transformed both the collections and their display’.27

      One of the obligations of the keepership, which Bell had ignored, was the giving of lectures. Clark enjoyed this task. He also invited Roger Fry to talk on Cézanne, although

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