Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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and Renoirs, the collection is now almost as superb as Victor Rothschild’s, and these two wonderful Seurats to cap it all … The Clarks were so charming I wished they were great friends.’7

      Clark always claimed that he was not an art collector in any systematic sense. He once asked himself, why do men collect? He decided that it was like asking why we fall in love, since the reasons were as various. He reduced collectors to two essential types: those who are bewitched by bright objects, and those who want to put them in a series. He belonged in the first category, and most of his purchasing was opportunistic. No doubt having empty walls to fill was a motivation, and during the Portland Place era Clark acquired some of his most important paintings: four Cézanne landscape oils, including Château Noir from Vollard in Paris. He bought Seurat’s Le Bec du Hoc,8 which was later to influence Henry Moore’s two-piece Reclining Figure (1959) when the sculptor saw it in the Clark collection. Clark paid £3,500 for the Seurat, which so pleased the owner that she added a second painting by the artist for free, the beautiful Sous Bois.9 Clark’s favourite picture was his Renoir, La Baigneuse Blonde, which was always given pride of place in his various houses. He would refer to her as ‘my blond bombshell’, and had himself photographed standing in front of her. Clark even included this naked bather – who was in fact the artist’s wife – in his book The Nude, in which he compares her to Raphael’s Galatea and Titian’s Venus Anadyomene, adding that she ‘gives us the illusion that we are looking through some magic glass at one of the lost masterpieces extolled by Pliny’.10 One of his most charming and unexpected purchases from this period was The Saltonstall Family, an enormous early-seventeenth-century family portrait that hung on the stairs at Portland Place and is now at Tate Britain. Yet if Clark’s ambitions had moved up several notches since his collecting days at Richmond, he was only just beginning to patronise contemporary British artists in a serious way.

      Jane commanded a small army of staff to keep Portland Place running. Her chief assistant in the early days was the secretary, Elizabeth Arnold, who like all Jane’s assistants found her an exacting but generous mistress – she would give her Schiaparelli dresses. There were seven domestic staff including the chauffeur, and if the Clarks’ son Colin is to be believed, three more for the children. ‘We lived in a smaller building,’ he wrote, ‘tacked onto the back connected by a green baize door where we had a nanny, a maid and a cook.’11 When in London the children did not see very much of their parents until bedtime, when Kenneth and Jane would appear – usually dressed to go out for dinner – to say goodnight. They saw far more of them in the country, at a house in Kent provided by Philip Sassoon.

      ‘Bellers’, the house Sassoon rented to the Clark family, is a low eighteenth-century brick house which in those days had ravishing views over Romney Marsh. Sassoon had asked Philip Tilden to make some alterations to it while he was working on the big house. These resulted in the creation of one grand interior room and the placing of flanking colonnades on the garden front. The Clark children adored the house. Sassoon was a hero to the boys, and Port Lympne occupied a special place in their family mythology. Alan called it his favourite place in Kent, and later he wistfully recalled how he would ‘sit on the terrace drinking tea limone, and indescribably thin cucumber sandwiches before being sent back to Bellers. Can still look through the glass door at that marbled Moorish interior, black and white floors and arched ceilings.’13 Sassoon had a private airfield half a mile to the north of Bellevue, from which he would take Alan and Colin up in his plane to buzz ‘Bellers’. Sometimes the Clarks would be flown to his other house, Trent Park in Hertfordshire, where their father recalled ‘the children were astonished by a platoon of footmen with red cummerbunds’.14

      If Bellevue was a retreat from London cares, Portland Place was a stage on which the Clarks performed. At their grand dinners they brought together socialites, artists and writers. Clark later wrote rather condescendingly: ‘I have been told by several society people that this was the first time that they had met artists, and were surprised how “civilised” they were.’16 When he asked himself why the socialites, with whom he and Jane had so little in common, came to Portland Place, he thought it was ‘perhaps to enjoy the vivacious and intelligent company of my wife’.17 For Jane was the key to the Great Clark Boom; she was at least an equal partner, as their daughter Colette explained: ‘For the first 20 years of their marriage they were known as Jane and K … everybody was paying court to her and Papa was almost the dear old professor in the background actually.’18 Left to his own devices, Clark would not have pursued such a grand social life. Their friend Lord Drogheda underlines this in his memoirs, believing that Jane did much ‘to promote his talents and aid his self-confidence’. He describes her large blue eyes and very dark hair, and her generous and considerate nature. ‘Without her influence his career path would have been different, and less I think in the public eye. Together they were a formidable combination.’19

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