LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

as monarch he could not sit on the board. It was suggested that he should sit as Earl of Chester, but in the event he resigned. The most useful trustee was Samuel Courtauld,22 who was not only to lend the best of his incomparable collection of modern French paintings to the gallery, but had also given £50,000 in 1924 to establish a fund to purchase such works. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this great and good man was the degree to which he was in thrall to Arthur Lee, who established the institute that bears Courtauld’s name. In 1935 Clark’s friend David Balniel also became a trustee, and was to prove a staunch ally.

      Gallery board meetings took place once a month at 2.30 p.m. The trustees would usually be invited for lunch beforehand at Philip Sassoon’s London mansion on Park Lane, where they would be served off gold plate. The meetings involved housekeeping, with much time spent on old chestnuts such as the cleaning of pictures, but the main item on the agenda was usually the scrutiny of paintings that had been, or might be, offered for sale. During the 1920s the purchase grant had reached £7,000. It was reduced to nothing after the Crash, climbed back to £3,500 in 1935, and reached £5,000 in 1936. In addition Clark had £7,000 of endowment fund income he could call upon, but even so, this was only enough to buy one good picture a year. The National Art Collections Fund was his saviour in most cases. After a period of inactivity under Daniel, a surprisingly large surplus had accumulated, and as Clark wrote to BB before taking up his appointment: ‘the trustees are all longing to spend money, and will much dislike it if I try to deprive them of their legitimate excitement. If they can be persuaded to spend it on framing and decoration all will be well, but heaven preserve me from flashy acquisitions.’23

      Clark established an excellent relationship with the board. Sassoon was delighted with his new protégé, and Lord Duveen could soon write, ‘now that such perfect harmony exists at the meetings, every minute is a joyous one. This is of course since you arrived.’24 Naturally, each trustee tended to push his own area of interest: Sassoon invariably urged the purchase of Zoffany, and Courtauld of Impressionists. Whatever criticism can be levelled at Clark’s purchases, he had no parti pris, apart from a distaste for what he called ‘the dealer’s view of British art’ – the grand full-length portraits that were still fashionable and that dominated the items on offer. He was keen to acquire more good nineteenth-century French paintings to make up a deficiency in the Impressionists collection, but was aware that these were viewed by the trustees as ‘a Dealer’s boom’. Fortunately Courtauld came to his rescue, lending Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère and Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the first work by the artist in the gallery. Clark also persuaded the Tate to return Renoir’s Les Parapluies. He felt that his first achievement at the gallery was to hang a room of French nineteenth-century art that was worthy of the place.

      ‘Buying pictures,’ as Clark often observed, ‘was the chief reward of being at the National Gallery. It was still possible to buy great works of art in the 1930s.’25 As soon as he arrived he had started to think about purchases, and he was determined that these should be important. Already under discussion were two Velázquezes from the Frere Collection, including The Immaculate Conception – but they got away. It was to take another forty years for that painting finally to reach the gallery walls. By the trustees’ meeting in March, which was his third, Clark was already recommending Constable’s full-scale oil sketch Hadleigh Castle, and seven panels of The Life of St Francis by the Sienese artist Sassetta. His appreciation of full-size Constable sketches was ahead of its time, and he needed Sassoon’s support to get it past the trustees. In the same meeting, Lord Lee was offering The Family of Sir Peter Lely from his own collection, which was turned down.26

      The seven Sassetta panels constituted a special drama of their own that demonstrated everything that was wrong with having Duveen on the board. These bewitching panels (the eighth is at Chantilly) formed the artist’s San Sepolcro altarpiece, which had been created for a convent that was suppressed during the Napoleonic era. The centrepiece depicting St Francis in Glory was already very familiar to Clark, as it was in the Berensons’ collection at I Tatti. The panels had been offered to the National Gallery by an American millionaire named Clarence Mackay, who had acquired them from Duveen. When it became clear that Mackay was unable to pay for them, Duveen set up the fiction that Mackay wished to sell them. Clark offered £35,000, half the price Mackay had been supposed to pay (and also the price at which they appeared in Duveen’s accounts). By bribing Mackay’s butler, Duveen ensured that Mackay never received Clark’s offer, a fact Duveen cheerfully admitted to the trustees. Eventually a compromise was reached at £42,000, with a press release stating that the panels had been acquired ‘through the good services of Lord Duveen’. As so often happened, it was the National Art Collections Fund that enabled the money to be raised.

      Occasionally Duveen’s interventions worked to the gallery’s advantage. Hogarth’s vivacious Graham Children, which Clark called ‘the perfect poster’, was sent to the gallery by its owner, Lord Normanton, ‘to allow the Board to consider this picture at its next meeting’. The painting was then mysteriously withdrawn, and purchased by Duveen behind the backs of the trustees. When confronted by Philip Sassoon, he relented and presented the picture as a gift to the gallery. Clark was exasperated by such behaviour, but gratified to receive ‘perhaps the most beautiful large painting by Hogarth in existence’.27

      Clark wanted to avoid making too many pretty purchases – a natural tendency of the trustees – and in July he made a courageous purchase against considerable opposition, Bosch’s Christ Mocked with the Crown of Thorns. As he wrote to Isherwood Kay, ‘The Bosch was not popular but was supported by Courtauld, Witt and Gore; Duveen keeping up a ground base of “My God! What a picture.” The result was we offered 300,000 lire, which to my great surprise has been accepted.’ He added significantly, ‘I get no support from Pouncey and Davies who detest it.’ Philip Pouncey and Martin Davies were two clever young curators whose respective interests were Italian and Netherlandish art; the first example of a disagreement with Clark from that quarter.

      Clark would normally enliven board meetings with a lantern show, a tour d’horizon of what was available on the London market. As he told Isherwood Kay, ‘England is still far and away the best place in which to form a collection of any paintings, including Italian.’28 Occasionally he and the trustees would buy a painting they did not strictly need, such as the Rubens landscape The Watering Place. The gallery was already rich in paintings by Rubens, but this work from the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection was so glorious that they found it irresistible. The country houses were still the greatest repository of paintings, and long before Clark’s time what the gallery referred to as the list of ‘paramount’ paintings – those for which every effort to acquire should be made if they became available. The owners were sometimes named after their pictures, hence ‘the Earl of Raphael’ for Lord Ellesmere and ‘the Marquess of Reynolds’ for Lord Lansdowne. This list was kept secret,29 which Clark thought was a mistake: ‘we were strictly enjoined not to tell the owners. As a result at least three of the pictures were sold secretly overseas before the present act came in.’30 The most grievous loss was Holbein’s Henry VIII, sold to the German-Hungarian collector Baron Thyssen by his friend Lord Spencer without the gallery being offered the chance to buy it.

      Clark was acutely aware of the gallery’s weakness in the German school, and this was something that could not be remedied through the art trade in London. In a particularly bold move, he travelled to St Florian’s monastery in Austria to try to secure the important Altdorfer Passion and St Sebastian series for the gallery – without success. Good German paintings were hard to find, but he did manage to acquire the Dürer variant, Virgin with Iris. In 1935 he went with Jane to Russia to see the Hermitage Museum, at a time when the Soviet Union’s desire for foreign currency was driving the authorities quietly

Скачать книгу