Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation

‘I am the type of local boy makes good,’ Clark once wrote to his friend Lord Crawford, ‘like Cecil Beaton as opposed to the Sitwells.’4 As he came from an extremely privileged background, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford, this statement might seem puzzling, but there is a truth behind it. The Clark family were in the mezzanine floor of English society – no longer trade, landed but not gentry. They played no part in traditional county social life, and drew their friends from a raffish band of Scottish industrialists, entertainers and shooting boon companions. Clark was brought up with none of the hereditary culture of the Sitwells. His parents were without any intellectual interests, and he could justifiably see himself as self-created. In practice what his parents failed to provide he sought elsewhere, and few young men have attracted so many mentors or used them to such good effect.

‘Family history has very little charm for me,’ Clark told his biographer. ‘I find I always skip the first ten pages of a biography.’5 He dismissed his own in about five lines. But the Clark family story in Paisley was very remarkable. Paisley, today a suburb of Glasgow, was effectively a company town of the cotton industry, and was dominated by the Clark family. After Clark’s great-great-great-great-grandfather William Clark, a farmer at Dykebar, died in 1753, his widow had moved with her children to nearby Paisley, where her son James (1747–1829) started a business as a weaver’s furnisher and heddle twine manufacturer. The shortages of imports arising from the Napoleonic blockade stimulated the development of a new English cotton that was as smooth as silk, and Clark’s son, another James (1783–1865), laid the foundations of the family fortune with the invention of the cotton spool. With his brothers he built the enormous factory that established Paisley as a world leader in manufacturing cotton thread. Paisley grew into a town of consequence, with grand public buildings presented by the Clarks and their commercial rivals, the Coats family: the town hall (Clark), infirmary (Clark), and art gallery and library (Coats) as well as schools and churches. By what Kenneth described as ‘the not very exacting standards of the time’ the Clarks were conscientious employers, and their philanthropy probably conditioned his belief that humanitarianism was the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century.6

In 1896 the family sold out to J&P Coats for the enormous sum of £2,585,913 (about £2.5 billion today). This fortune was divided between four family members, including Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1868–1932), who was to become the father of Kenneth. Clark senior had been brought up in Paisley, and left school in Greenock at fourteen; according to his son he had a very good brain, although it was untrained and undisciplined. He was sent to Australia and New Zealand, and adored both, and on his return at the age of twenty-two he took up a position as a director of the family business. After two years it became evident that his love of sport and the bottle was distracting him; he was effectively sacked, and from that moment onwards devoted himself entirely to pleasure. His main occupation became building and racing yachts on the Clyde, naming three of them Katoomba, after the chief town of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (his racing yacht was named Kariad). The family, as his son later explained, ‘were big frogs in the small pool of Clyde yacht racing’. All through his life, Clark senior never cut his links with Paisley, and was always generous with charitable subscriptions: he was fondly remembered as the ‘news-boys’ friend’, providing them with an annual outing and dinner.7 He also never lost his Ayrshire accent.

Clark paints a rollicking portrait of his father as an independent-minded, self-indulgent ‘roaring boy’. Attracted to women, he drank too much and delayed marriage until the age of thirty-five, when his choice fell upon Alice McArthur, a puritanical cousin who made it her unsuccessful mission to save him from his alcoholic excesses. Before she married, Alice had been living with her Quaker mother in Godalming, ‘so different to the rowdy boozy world of Clyde yacht racing’.8 ‘Two more different people than my father and mother can hardly be imagined. He was convivial, natural, totally unself-conscious; she was shy, inhibited, and prone to self-deception. They were united by two qualities, intelligence and a total absence of snobbery.’9

Clark’s father was a big man with a drooping moustache, who was burdened by no inhibitions and knew no boundaries. Clark was fond of his father but alarmed by him, and embarrassed by his drunkenness and bad behaviour. He found his mother by contrast cold and sharp, although he was aware that he had painted a particularly unfeeling portrait of her in his autobiography: ‘I have been worried that the allusions to her in Vol 1 were incomplete. Her life was ruined by being in the wrong box. At the end of her life she reverted to being a shrewd, frugal Quakerish lady, living in a bedsitter. That suited her much better than [the family’s Suffolk home] Sudbourne, and she became quite peaceful.’10 He claimed that she never held him as a child, which several photographs show to be untrue. She remains, however, a shadowy and rather mournful figure who only came into her own as a grandmother. Unfortunately, no letters survive from her until her son was eighteen – by which time she had belatedly discovered his genius.

‘Like so many remarkable men he was the only son of two entirely opposite and incompatible parents,’ Clark wrote in his obituary of Cyril Connolly, and he certainly saw himself in these terms.11 Yet despite everything, his parents made a successful marriage, and remained devoted to each other. Theirs was an extraordinarily peripatetic existence. The Edwardian era is often portrayed as an earthly paradise for the rich, and no doubt it was to those who welcomed an uninterrupted social life. The Clarks, however, had no social ambitions, and were too eccentric to belong with comfort to any fixed society. They adopted the conventional habit of the rich and moved from house to house, but for them it was a stratagem to avoid rather than to meet polite society. Alice Clark found herself mistress of a house in Grosvenor Square, a large rented house in Perthshire, an even larger house and estate in Suffolk, two yachts, and soon an additional house at Cap Martin in the south of France. Their life became a progress dictated by the sporting calendar, but to the young Clark ‘my home was Sudbourne Hall, about a mile from Orford in Suffolk’.12 One remarkable aspect of Clark’s childhood is how very well documented it was by good photographs. His father employed a professional photographer to take numerous pictures of all aspects of their life – Sudbourne Hall, the yachts, the shooting parties, and young Kenneth in many poses and costumes. All these are preserved at Saltwood, and suggest that Clark’s parents were not as indifferent as he maintained.

Named after his grandfather, Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square in London on 13 July 1903. He was delivered by Caesarean section, which in those days meant that he would remain an only child. A year later his father acquired the eleven-thousand-acre Sudbourne estate for £237,500, with a mortgage of £75,000.13 From what followed we may deduce that the purchase was made with his son in mind, and the expectation that the boy would grow up to enjoy the pleasures of a rich man’s sporting estate. This was in fact as far as Clark senior’s dynastic ambitions would ever go: Kenneth once came into his father’s study at Sudbourne and found two men in black coats and striped trousers offering Clark senior the chance to buy a peerage – one of them was the notorious Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s chief agent in the sale of honours – ‘Wouldn’t you like this little chap to succeed you?’ The response was ‘Go to hell,’ and the men drove off.14 This encounter also tells us that the Clarks were in all probability supporters of the Liberal Party.

Even by expansive Edwardian standards the Sudbourne estate was large; it included a model farm and several well-ordered villages. The house was elegant but rather stark, ‘one of Wyatt’s typical East Anglian jobs, a large square brick box, with a frigid, neo-classical interior’.15 It was built in 1784 for the first Marquess of Hertford, and had devolved on his colourful descendants, the triumvirate of art collectors who created the Wallace Collection. The eponymous Richard Wallace, the illegitimate Hertford heir, mainly used Sudbourne for its shooting, and on one occasion entertained the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, there. Clark senior bought the estate in 1904 for the shooting, but found the house cold and uncomfortable, and consequently ordered a makeover. He and Alice went abroad, and returned to their newly minted ‘Jacobethan’ interior in richly carved walnut, which was probably a more suitable setting for their furnishings and paintings. Young Kenneth thought it was all in very poor taste, although he found the renovations more friendly than Wyatt’s original interiors.

Clark’s parents had few connections with the local social life of the county set. One of these was the Suffolk Show, at which his father would show his pigs and his prize collection of Suffolk Punch draught horses. These beautiful animals had their own special stables at Sudbourne, and would be brought out every Sunday morning and paraded on the lawn in front of the house before trotting home ‘as complacent as Morris dancers’.16 The main stables at the side of the house were refitted to hold the collection of motor cars: a Rolls-Royce, two Delaunay-Bellevilles and a Panhard, ‘a quiet, insinuating electric car which had been intended for use in London’.

Clark senior was a well-intentioned if unconventional landlord, who built a cottage hospital in nearby Orford and allowed Coronation sports at the hall in 1911. His main preoccupation, however, was the pheasant shoot from October until the end of January; the Sudbourne shoot was one of very high numbers and low-flying birds. At first the young Clark enjoyed the shooting parties because they brought female visitors to the house, whom he would persuade to come to his bedroom for a beauty parade of their dresses, which he would judge with care and precision, evincing the first signs of the emerging aesthete. Then at the age of ten Clark had a gun placed into his hands, and we have the recollection of Phyllis Ellis, a young girl on the estate, that ‘Young Kenneth used to get very upset when all these birds were brought in – pheasants and ducks. They looked so beautiful in their winter plumage … He didn’t like shooting – which, of course, annoyed his father.’17 Sometimes as many as a thousand birds a day were shot, which sickened young Kenneth. He gave up shooting as early as he could – Phyllis tells us that after a time ‘he would never go out with the shooting parties’.18 Since this sport was the main point of Sudbourne, young Clark’s reaction was particularly distressing to his father, and this is the earliest external evidence that Kenneth was not going to be a conventional boy of his background. Apart from the shoot, Sudbourne boasted a private cricket pitch and a fourteen-hole golf course, complete with a professional. Clark’s father was too impatient to play a proper round of golf, but in his irresponsible way would encourage visitors to try to hit a ball over the house, causing the inevitable broken windows, which delighted him and pained his son. Phyllis Ellis reported that Alice Clark ‘when alone would play golf on the private 14-hole course with the gamekeeper’s wife’. She cuts a rather lonely figure.

One day when Clark was six his mother came to the nursery and caught his German governess scolding him. The governess was sent away the next morning and replaced by a Highland Scots woman, Miss Lamont, thereafter always known as ‘Lam’. Lam was the daughter of a minister from Skye, but was not at all dour; she was a great giggler, with a naughty sense of humour, and above all she was affectionate and full of unsentimental goodness. Clark adored her, and for the first time he encountered uncritical love. ‘The arrival of Lam,’ he wrote, ‘was the first of several pieces of human good fortune which have befallen me in my life.’19 He always claimed that Lam saved him: ‘At last I had someone whom I could love and depend on, and who even seemed to share my interests.’20 Lam became his protector and companion. This remarkable woman spoke four languages, never married, and ended up, thanks to Clark’s recommendation, as the housekeeper at Chequers, where she once remarked on the similarity between Clark senior and Mr Churchill.

At the end of January, when the shooting season was over, the Clark household would move by wagon-lit to the south of France, where one of the pleasure yachts would have sailed from the Clyde to await them in the harbour at Monte Carlo. His father loved the casino, but his mother found Monaco too socially demanding, and preferred the quieter pleasures of nearby Menton. One day a French woman who had joined them for lunch on the Katoomba expressed the wish to own a yacht of such beauty. Clark senior saw his chance, and named an enormous price, which to everyone’s surprise she accepted. The Clarks left their yacht the following day, and with the money Clark senior acquired a parcel of land near Menton on Cap Martin, where he employed the Danish architect Hans-Georg Tersling to build – using Scottish labour – a sturdy wedding cake of a villa in which the family would stay for three months of every year. Clark senior would gamble all day at the tables, where according to his son he had extraordinary luck that would fund extravagant purchases.* The Menton casino also put on early-evening shows for children, with conjurors, jugglers, acrobats, comedians and stuntmen, and through these entertainers the young Clark developed a desire to become an actor; he loved showing off his newly learned skills to his rather bored mother and her friends. In France, his mother’s only occupation seems to have been directing the head gardener, who returned during the summer months to his native Pitlochry.

Clark claimed to have had no childhood friends on the Riviera, but Isobel Somerville, the daughter of the English vicar at Menton, remembers playing rounders with him; she also recalls his passion for parsley sandwiches. She was captivated by Lam, with her compassion, her sense of the ridiculous and her exhortations to her charge – ‘Kenneth, don’t be silly.’ She remembers Lam bringing ‘her fabulously rich employers to Menton, each in turn. When she went to the Churchills, because we got no gossip whatever out of her, we changed her name into “Damn-clam-Lam”.’21

Perhaps the first indication of Clark’s remarkable gift for engaging the affection of distinguished friends and mentors is his improbable attachment to the Empress Eugénie, the elderly widow of Napoleon III, a neighbour who would allow him to accompany her as she took her morning walks. Otherwise the rather sedate life of the Riviera was punctuated for the small boy with carnivals and flower festivals which brought colour and a welcome vulgarity.

When his parents left Menton in April for a cure at Carlsbad or Vichy, young Clark would be sent back to Sudbourne – which was a mixed pleasure. With his parents away he found himself looked after by resentful servants, whom he accused in his memoirs of taking out their malice on him by serving him rotten food.*

But there were also enormous compensations to life at Sudbourne. His favourite room was the library, the heart of the house, still filled with books left by the previous owner. Clark learned to read late, from an illustrated manual called Reading Without Tears in which each letter was represented by a pictogram. He read all the standard Edwardian children’s classics, but claimed that one series of books ‘influenced my character more than anything I have read since’. This was the illustrated adventures of ‘Golliwogg’ by Florence and Bertha Upton.22 Golliwogg, as Clark explained, lives on terms of perfect happiness with five girls. He always treats them with the greatest courtesy, and they share his adventures. Their role is to admire him, and when things go wrong they rescue and console him. ‘He was for me an example of chivalry far more persuasive than the unconvincing Knights of the Arthurian legend,’ wrote Clark, who added the frank admission, ‘I identify myself with him completely and have never quite ceased to do so.’23 Indeed, he was to spend the second half of his life enjoying carefully managed relationships with a number of women at the same time, and their role would be to appreciate and console him in a not dissimilar fashion.

Meanwhile in his nursery the solitary Clark enjoyed constructing elaborate Classical buildings with his bricks, and putting on performances with his circus figures à la Menton. ‘When my parents departed for Cap Martin and Vichy, I was left to my own devices,’ he wrote. ‘I was an only child and should have felt lonely, but in fact I do not remember suffering any inconvenience from solitude. On the contrary, I remember with fear and loathing the rare occasions when some well-wishing grown-up arranged for me to meet companions of my own age.’24 When other children did appear he found that he had little in common with them. Nor did he expect them to share his interests, thus nurturing a personal exceptionalism from an early age. He rejoiced when they left, and ‘returned with relief to my bears, my bricks, or at a later date, my billiard table’.25 All his life he would be pleased when guests had departed, and he believed that his early solitude ‘made me absolutely incapable of any collective activity. I cannot belong to a group.’26 He tended to exaggerate this point: in fact he was to demonstrate an unending capacity for collegiate activity by serving on numerous committees throughout his career, from the war onwards. His solitary childhood did make him shy – except with grown-ups – but it also helped to develop his sensitive perception of works of art.

Perhaps a greater enemy than loneliness to a solitary child might have been boredom. But Clark was at pains to dispel any such notion: ‘my days were all pleasure. Most children suffer from boredom, but I do not remember a dull moment at Sudbourne. I loved the Suffolk country, the heaths and sandpits, the great oaks in Sudbourne wood, the wide river at Iken.’27 Equally, he could write: ‘in family life the enemy of happiness is not oppression, but boredom, and against this the unfortunate parents are almost powerless’.28 All his life Clark was frightened of boredom – an important consideration in his attitude to other people. To most observers he displayed a very low boredom threshold; he was always allergic to bores, and was terrified of becoming one himself in his lectures or television programmes.

The large eighteenth-century Sudbourne Hall was opulent, and its estate well-tended, but down the road was romantic Iken on the Alde estuary, with its isolated thatched Saxon church of St Botolph. Clark would be taken there by horse and cart to go shrimping, and it was to remain a magical spot for him: ‘I found that the delicate music of the Suffolk coast, with its woods straggling into sandy commons, its lonely marshes and estuaries full of small boats, still had more charm for me than the great brass bands of natural scenery, the Alps or the Dolomites.’29 It was here, in a cove on the edge of the River Alde, that Clark was painted by Charles Sims, the first artist he befriended. He had already had his portrait painted by Sir John Lavery in the manner of Velázquez (which he described, using Maurice Bowra’s favourite term of praise, as ‘by no means bad’). Clark thought the Sims portrait lacked freshness, but the choice of setting on the Alde estuary is important. He would return there all his life, and at nearby Aldeburgh on the coast he would write his best books. When in later years he formed a close friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, he became an early champion of the Aldeburgh Festival and helped establish its reputation.

In London the family had given up the house in Grosvenor Square where young Clark had been born, and rented a flat in Berkeley Square. ‘We never stayed in London for long,’ wrote Clark, ‘because my mother thought, and rightly, that my father would get into trouble; but I enjoyed these visits because it meant going to the theatre.’30 He was taken to see all the famous Edwardian actors: Squire Bancroft, Gerald du Maurier, and his favourite, Charles Hawtrey. His mother may have watched her husband like a hawk in London, but he was allowed to take young Kenneth to the music hall; Clark senior kept boxes at the Empire and the Alhambra theatres. As a result the young Clark stored a repertoire of music-hall songs in his head, which would emerge in later life to the surprise of his friends.*

In 1910 Lam took Clark to see the great exhibition of Japanese art at White City. It was one of the most formative moments of his childhood. There he saw life-sized dioramas representing various scenes and settings of Japan, but it was the screens that made the greatest impression, ‘with paintings of flowers of such ravishing beauty that I was not only struck dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world’.31 He realised that something had happened to him. This aesthetic awakening marked the birth of his ‘freak aptitude’. The following Christmas his grandmother gave him a picture book of the Louvre, which was his first introduction to the Old Masters. The images fascinated him, and he found himself similarly enchanted. However, when he showed her his favourite plate, Titian’s Concert Champêtre (then attributed to Giorgione), her only comment was, ‘Oh dear, it’s very nude’ – which was probably the first time he encountered the word.

In fact, paintings surrounded the young Clark at Sudbourne. His father was a voracious buyer of pictures of the Highland cattle variety, although occasionally he bought something more interesting, such as Millais’ Murthley Moss, a Corot or a Barbizon School landscape. In general, however, he enjoyed the high polish and sentimentality of Jozef Israëls’ Pancake Day, Rosa Bonheur’s Highland Cattle and William Orchardson’s Story of a Life. This was what his son called ‘a coarse diet for a growing aesthete’, but he came to believe that those who had grown up with too much good taste were less capable in later life of a catholic response to works of art. ‘It is no accident,’ he wrote about Ruskin, ‘that the three or four Englishmen whose appreciation of art has been strong enough and perceptive enough to penetrate the normal callosity of their countrymen – Hazlitt, Ruskin, Roger Fry – have all come from philistine, puritanical homes. To be brought up in an atmosphere of good taste is to have the hunger for art satisfied at too early an age, and to think of it as a pleasant amenity rather than an urgent need.’32

Clark senior enjoyed the company of artists. No doubt they appealed to him as living outside the conventions of the day, and he befriended several, including Sims and Orchardson. He encouraged his son’s interest in them, and the boy’s ambitions did indeed change from acting to painting. His father even allowed him to rehang the smaller pictures at Sudbourne on a regular basis, developing a skill that would one day help to make the National Gallery in London one of the most carefully hung picture galleries in the world. And on young Clark’s twelfth birthday his father, presumably remembering his son’s rapturous tales of his visit with Lam to White City, gave Kenneth a scrapbook, put together around 1830 by a Japanese collector, containing drawings and prints from the circle of Hokusai; a wonderful treasure which he still owned at the end of his life, and one that fed young Clark’s growing passion.

Each summer the family would make the long train journey to Ross-shire for the fishing. They would spend a night at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh, where his father would invariably get very drunk and have to be fetched by his son from a sofa in the main lounge and helped upstairs muttering, ‘It’s a hard road for an old dog.’ Young Clark hated the holidays in the Scottish Highlands, and his heart sank at the thought of the threadbare comforts the house there offered. He described the country around Loch Ewe as ‘endless bogs, not an acre of cultivated land, persistent rain, followed by swarms of midges’.33