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      When Clark came to make the last episode of Civilisation, he told his audience, ‘One mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called the “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were ignorant as swans.’39 This prompted a protest from one American listener, whom Clark answered as follows: ‘My remark about society people being as ignorant as swans was based on fairly extensive experience in the 1930s. If I may give one example: I went to Glyndebourne to see The Magic Flute and found myself sitting next to Lady Diana Cooper, who was the queen of society for 50 years. Half way through she said to me in a loud voice, “What is this incredible nonsense?” I replied, “I will tell you in the interval.” She said she had remembered hearing about it from Tommy Beecham. I said to her, “What on earth made you come?” She replied “To see darling Oliver’s (Messel) sets, of course.” Does this convince you?’40 This uncharacteristically ungallant letter reflects, as much as anything else, Clark’s ambivalence about Diana Cooper.41 If one part of Clark was in society, the other half of him despised it, an example of Graham Sutherland’s characterisation of him as the divided man. As he later wrote, ‘I had a front row seat at Vanity Fair, but a back row seat in Bartholomew Fair might have done me more good.’42 His increasing sense of mission, and the coming of war, were to be his escape route.

Towards the end of the 1930s Clark embarked on a new course that would characterise the rest of his life: he started being unfaithful to his wife. Jane noted in her diary ‘a sudden change in K’s attitude’ – evidence, she believed, that her husband was having an affair. She took to her bed and confided to her diary, ‘decide no use floundering in a sea of surprise, must try and forget and then see what happens, but this is difficult’.43 Often Clark would merely have lunch with beautiful, unobtainable women such as Vivien Leigh,* and have passing dalliances with those around him. One such affair was with his and Jane’s elegant secretary Elizabeth Arnold, who after a brief sojourn working for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was to follow Clark to the Ministry of Information. On one occasion Jane came home and found her husband in an embrace with ‘Stempy’ – Elizabeth Stemp, the very pretty maid at Portland Place.

      But at the end of the 1930s the story changes. Clark fell in love with Edith Russell-Roberts, the sister of the choreographer Frederick Ashton. Many years later he was to write to his then amour, Janet Stone: ‘I have been IN love only twice – once with Jane, and once with Freddie’s sister, little Edith who was so gentle with me in 1939, when Jane was being bloody.’44 Edith was small, neat and fair, with a warm and sentimental character, but according to Colette Clark not as clever as her brother – ‘an adorable sweet hopeless little goose’.45 She was married to a choleric naval officer, Douglas Russell-Roberts, who was frequently away, during which times Clark and Edith would meet at her house in Lennox Garden Mews. There are two undated letters from her at I Tatti: ‘My darling heart, I feel a lovelorn lass this evening …’ and ‘Last night at long last a divine sunset, awakening all my longings for you, and all the happiness that I feel in your presence …’ Clark evidently told Jane about his feelings for Edith; she was baffled, and hoped he would get over it. He even gave Edith a Henry Moore drawing. Edith was later to claim that Clark was ‘the love of my life who taught me everything I know’.46 Contrary to what Clark later wrote, he was certainly to fall in love on many more than two occasions.

      Jane idolised her husband; she had oriented her life in every way to serve his needs, so the revelation that he was less than perfect was a hard shock. In those days it was far from unusual for couples of their class to take lovers after ten years or so of marriage – the Berenson household was not untypical – but Jane bitterly resented the change. She was already prone to tantrums when she and Clark were alone, and took refuge in alcohol and prescription drugs in an attempt to control her temper. How much these tantrums were aggravated by Clark’s behaviour is not clear: Colette believes that they were a part of her mother’s character, with or without the provocation of his affairs. Jane discovered a fashionable Harley Street doctor, Bedford Russell, who gave her a nasal spray containing morphine and cocaine, and from then on she would reappear after a puff, puff, puff ‘in a beautiful haze’.47 Her husband meekly accepted her outbursts as the price for his misdemeanours, but the more she tormented him, the more he sought solace elsewhere. But on only one occasion was the marriage actually in crisis. Neither of them ever seriously contemplated divorce – they believed in marriage, and had established mutual bonds that went too deep to separate.

* One personality Clark met at Lympne was T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who he described as ‘scrubby, donnish, or rather school master-ish’. Diary, 20 March 1934 (I Tatti).

* The two women were both remarkable. Sybil Cholmondeley became a brilliant châtelaine of Houghton Hall, Norfolk, and a musical patroness. Hannah Gubbay was a collector of porcelain; her collection is housed at Clandon Park in Surrey (National Trust).

* Ben Nicolson, diary, 29 December 1936 (private collection, copy at Burlington Magazine). Clark later explained to Nicolson his fondness for using surnames: ‘No: Lady C is impossible. So is Sir K. Try Jane & K, or if the latter sticks in your throat the Doric surname unadorned, a form I like to use.’ Letter to Ben Nicolson, 3 February 1938 (private collection, copy at Burlington Magazine).

* Leigh was acting in George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Haymarket, and on matinee days she would drop in between performances. Clark’s friendship with her began in 1939.

      13

       Running the Gallery

       Stand close around ye artist set

       Old masters sometimes will forget

       With dear K to your shores conveyed

       The pictures that they never made.

      CYRIL CONNOLLY1

      Kenneth Clark was the first director of the National Gallery to become a household name. Although his tenure there was marked by controversy, it nonetheless constituted eleven years of steady achievement in which the gallery moved from being a very inward-looking organisation towards a far greater engagement with the needs of the visiting public. Many of the previous directors had been artists who sought to improve the appreciation of painting in Britain, but Clark was an unlikely populist with a Ruskinian desire to open the nation’s eyes to works of art. Indeed, the predecessor with whom he most identified was Charles Holmes (director 1916–28), who like Clark was interested in contemporary art, held fund-raising concerts at the gallery, and wrote an accessible book on Rembrandt. Holmes brought the gallery into the twentieth century by acquiring modern French pictures (for the Tate with the Courtauld Fund), including three works by Van Gogh (Sunflowers among them). Clark once refused to alter an erroneous attribution, explaining: ‘My motive for not changing the label is simply that my predecessor, Sir Charles Holmes, has always behaved most generously towards me and would no doubt regard it as a personal insult if I were to do so.’2

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