Although Clark took ‘a steady second’ in the Schools, his ability was quickly recognised. C.F. Bell, Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean – ‘the old spider’, as Roger Fry called him – took him up, accompanied him to Florence for a fateful meeting with Bernard Berenson and, generously, handed over his research materials on the Gothic Revival. Clark turned them into a lively book published in 1928, when he was twenty-five. A year later he succeeded Bell at the Ashmolean. His flair as a museum man quickly shone. He acquired Piero di Cosimo’s A Forest Fire for £3,000. Stourton briskly notes ‘... having no purchase money, Clark paid for the picture out of his own money and then appealed to the National Art Collection Fund which reimbursed the entire price’. The Ashmolean was desperately short of space. Clark lent the funds required for the extension and was again reimbursed.

The Great Clark Boom began in 1934 when he and Jane returned to London on his appointment as director of the National Gallery. That year the Gallery became electrified and made possible the extension of its hours. K. was a thoroughly modern director. He established the conservation and the photography departments. More than that: he saw the general public as his audience rather than the hitherto narrow band of scholars, connoisseurs, and collectors. On the day of the FA Cup final at Wembley in 1938, he opened the Gallery at eight am so that ‘the provincial supporters of the finalists ... up early for the day in London might have an opportunity of seeing some famous exhibitions instead of wandering the streets’. Neil MacGregor, the other great twentieth-century director of the Gallery, called this ‘a dazzling populist touch ... that did a great deal to put the gallery right at the heart of the nation’s affections’.

Early on, Clark made some brilliant acquisitions, such as the seven panels by Sassetta of the Life of St Francis, Bosch’s Christ Mocked, Rubens’s Watering Place, and Constable’s Hadleigh Castle. The Trustees loved him. Sir Philip Sassoon, his wealthy chairman, confessed to being ‘crackers about Clark’. The staff was less happy: he rarely consulted them and they disliked the popularising of the Gallery. Philip Pouncey, the ablest of them, Neil MacLaren, and Martin Davies, later director himself, should have known better. Their antagonism came to a head over Clark’s impetuous purchase of four pastorals believed to be by Giorgione, the Holy Grail of all European museums. They cost twice the annual purchase fund. The National Art Collection Fund promised to underwrite them, provided the Gallery stood behind the attribution to Giorgione.

This acquisition, with its dubious attribution, mushroomed into a colossal public row. Clark’s enemies and would-be friends came out of the woodwork to attack him including the old spider, C.F. Bell. At the Trustees inquiry as to the origins of the acquisition, the Keeper, a nonentity called Harold Isherwood Kay, complained to the chairman: ‘They [the Curators] did not know what was happening and, instead of being treated as junior partners in a firm, were looked down upon as porters and servants.’ Moreover, the director’s policy ‘seemed to be to popularize the Gallery, whereas the prestige of the Gallery could only be enhanced by its becoming an institute of scholarship’. The four panels, rarely shown, are now ascribed to Andrea Previtali – Pouncey’s attribution at the time – pleasant enough, but in the B team of northern Italian painting.

World War II, ironically, gave Clark his finest hour at the National Gallery. The collection was dispatched from Trafalgar Square to the salt mines of Wales for safekeeping. The empty rooms of the Gallery would become the venue for the famous lunchtime concerts and recitals instigated by Dame Myra Hess and enthusiastically carried out by Clark. Hess suggested a concert every three weeks. Clark, according to Stourton, retorted: ‘No, every day!’  They were a spectacular success. More than 1,200 people turned up regularly and queued patiently for admission. Queen Elizabeth brought the young princesses and once King George VI, no culture vulture he. With these recitals, Clark created an island of peace, hope, and civilisation in war-shattered London. Hess played Jesu, joy of man’s desiring as her encore, like a benediction.

‘Towards the end of the 1930s Clark embarked on a new course that would characterize the rest of his life: he started being unfaithful to his wife’, so Stourton bluntly states. He deals with Clark’s many misalliances, amitiés amoreuses and outright mistresses without salaciousness. Unlike the baneful Meryle Secreste, he never sensationalises K.’s infidelities. He makes good use of K.’s correspondence with Janet Stone, his longstanding extracurricular lover, wife of the typographer and graphic artist Reynolds Stone. Cumulatively, it fuelled Jane’s alcoholism and her explosive rages.

Kenneth Clark (Flickr)

The years 1939–56, from the monograph on Leonardo – E.H. Gombrich claimed it as the best single book on the artist in any language – to The Nude, his A.W. Mellon Lectures in Washington, DC, were his best, most productive period as an art historian. The Nude, for all its mannered style, is still remarkable: the art of classical antiquity is discussed in the same critical voice as the art of later periods.

Stourton gives extended coverage to K.’s celebrated television series, Civilization (1969). Much of the background is fascinating. Clark was shabbily treated by the BBC, despite winning it a worldwide audience. When they sold the television rights to an American broadcaster for £250,000, Clark’s share totalled two hundred and fifty-seven pounds, ten shillings and tenpece. He never worked for the BBC again. It used to be standard among the chattering classes to mock Civilization. The mandarin tone, the Burberry look, the upper-crust irony, the National Health Service teeth, and the inevitable omissions and simplifications. Looking at the series again, two elements struck me with renewed force: Clark’s empathy with artists across all periods; and his steadfast belief that art is the agent of the deepest beliefs and feelings of men and women, and that every man can enter the house of art. We cannot talk about art, Clark claims, without talking about ‘inspiration’. Shamefully, such views could not be more at loggerheads with contemporary art history with its unbreakable belief in art as social construction. Any other way of talking is romantic fantasy.

Clark’s last years were sad. He married Nolwen Rice the year after Jane died in 1976. She owned a handsome seventeenth-century chateau in Normandy and proved to be occasionally charming, even dazzling. She cut K. off from his children and his closest friends. The girlfriends were sent packing and were devastated. She was avaricious, wheedling some of Clark’s finest possessions from him, such as the Seurat landscape, Sous-Bois (now in the Metropolitan) and Samuel Palmer’s masterpiece, Cornfield by Moonlight with Evening Star (now in the British Museum). Both had been promised to Clark’s daughter, Colette. At the end, Clark took Communion from an Irish Catholic priest to the surprise of his friends. Henry Moore rose swaying from his wheelchair to throw the first handful of soil on Clark’s grave.