The Letters of Bernard Berenson

and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959

i
ii
The Letters of Bernard Berenson
and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959

Edited and annotated by

Robert Cumming

yale university press

New Haven and London

iii
Introduction and commentary copyright © 2015 by Robert Cumming.
Letters by Bernard Berenson copyright © Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti – The Harvard University
Center for Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Unpublished letters by Kenneth Clark copyright © The Estate of Kenneth Clark.
The letters by Kenneth Clark are reproduced by permission of The Estate of Kenneth Clark
c/o the Hanbury Agency Ltd, 28 Moreton Street, London, sw1v 2pe. All rights reserved.
Plates 1–20, 38, 40, 41 copyright © Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti – The Harvard University
Center for Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Plates 21, 22, 24–37, 39 copyright © 2014/15 The Estate of Kenneth Clark.
Plate 23 copyright © Robert Cumming.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Paul Sloman

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berenson, Bernard, 1865-1959
[Correspondence. Selections]
My dear BB ... : the letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 / edited by
Robert Cumming.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-300-20737-8 (hardback)
1. Berenson, Bernard, 1865–1959–Correspondence. 2. Clark, Kenneth, 1903–1983–Correspondence.
3. Art historians–Correspondence. I. Cumming, Robert, 1945–editor. II. Clark, Kenneth, 1903–1983.
Correspondence. Selections. III. Title.
n7483.b47a4 2015
709.2’2–dc23
2014040807

A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

iv
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Umberto Morra
Much loved friend of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark
and of many others

v
Nobody really exists in himself, but exists through encounters with others;
everyone differs according to his various friendships . . .
Bernard Berenson, 16 June 1931
(as recorded by Umberto Morra, Conversations with Berenson)

If asked which has given me most pleasure in my life, art, writing, and
friendship, I think I would answer friendship.
Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood

vi
Contents

Acknowledgements viii
Preface xii
1 Hopes and Expectations, 1925–1926 1
2 Life at I Tatti, the Lists and the Florentine Drawings, Marriage and
Parenthood, 1927–1929 19
3 The Exhibition of Italian Art, Italian Politics, Windsor Drawings,
1929–1931 55
4 Oxford, the Ashmolean, 1931–1933 97
5 The National Gallery, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures,
Predicaments and Crises, 1933–1939 123
6 War and Separations, 1939–1945 221
7 Picking up the Threads, 1945–1947 239
8 Reading and Writing, Talking and Travelling, 1948–1953 277
9 Television, Journalism, Altamura, Conoscing, 1953–1958 379
10 Farewell, 1959 467
Afterword 478
Appendices 489
Dramatis Personae 507
Selected Bibliography 552
Index 556

vii
Acknowledgements

The seed from which this book grew was planted in the early 1970s. I was in my
mid-20s, and in the process of changing a career in the legal world to a hoped
for new career in the art world. As part of the transformation, I was advised that
it was necessary to spend time in Italy. The Fates benignly decreed that I should
do so in the ancient Tuscan hilltop town of Cortona. In those days it was still a
genuine market town, slightly run-down, visited by relatively few tourists and
quite different from the fashionable holiday destination that it has now become.
It was a leap in the dark but the small expatriate community of writers and artists
who were mostly Anglo-American, and some of the Italian locals, looked kindly
on me, my friends and the girl I was to marry, and they took us under their wing.
Principal among these generous souls, some of whom became lifelong friends,
was Umberto Morra, ‘Il Conte Rosso’, who lived in the imposing but unosten-
tatious villa he had inherited from his mother, at Metelliano, tucked away behind
a high wall at the foot of the hill on which Cortona was perched. He was then
in his early seventies, elderly, lame but with a twinkle in his eye and a mobile
gargoyle-like grin, and was regularly visited by many distinguished and familiar
names in the art and political worlds from all over Europe.
I gradually came to realise that Umberto Morra was one of the unsung heroes
of the Italian anti-fascist intelligentsia of the pre-war years: a man of letters who
had been Director of the Italian Institute in London after the war, of noble
lineage but of consummate modesty and impeccable integrity, and in old age
still of considerable influence. Clearly much loved, and with the gift of making
friends, his goodwill was a great blessing to a young unknown foreigner for, once
our rapport was known, it bestowed on me a certain respect by association in
the eyes of the local community. I also learned that Morra had been an intimate
member of the Berenson household, and a much valued friend of ‘K’.
Morra took an interest in my developing career and, as well as being a regular
guest at his table, I went to stay with him one summer and so sampled at first hand
the full measure of his spartan living conditions. The fare was simple, prepared
and served by his faithful manservant, Mario. Lunch and dinner were always

viii
Acknowledgements ix

preceded with a glass of Punt e Mes, which he called ‘Carpano’, a dark bitter
vermouth from his native Piedmont, an implied tribute to his military father, and
concluded with cake and vin santo, an appreciative tribute to his adopted Tuscany
and his artistic, beautiful, mother. These regular visits to Cortona came to an
end when, on leaving Cambridge at the end of my study of art history, I was
offered a job at the Tate Gallery, as a lecturer in their education department, and
became engaged to Carolyn, who worked in the Modern Picture Department
at Christie’s.
I corresponded with Umberto Morra until his death in 1981 but always har-
boured in my mind the idea that one day I should write a book about him and
try to gain for him, in the English-speaking world, the recognition that he justly
deserved but which, with his modesty and self-effacement, he always deflected.
The possibility of making this a reality occurred in 2007 when Carolyn and I
had an opportunity to visit I Tatti.We asked in advance if we could see any archi-
val material relating to Morra and the Berenson household. What we discovered
was one rather small file, containing but a few letters. It was a great disappoint-
ment. However, as we sat looking at this sparse material, a familiar voice seemed
to say: ‘Well, I don’t know what you expected! I spent a lot of my time here at I
Tatti, and of course you do not exchange letters with people that you see every
day. Also, as you know, I set no particular store by material possessions, and once
I had answered a letter I put the letter I had received in the waste paper basket. I
didn’t bother with archives. However, I don’t want you to feel that you have had
a wasted journey. May I suggest that, as you are here, you ask for the Clark files?’
We did so and were rewarded by several well filled folders which contained
not just Clark’s letters to Berenson but some of Berenson’s letters to Clark. The
seed that was planted in the early 1970s began to sprout.
Although the proposed book on Morra was thus superseded, as if with his en-
couragement, our interest in Morra was an element which stimulated the theme
of the Convegno, organised at I Tatti in 2009, to mark the fiftieth anniversary
of Berenson’s death. The Convegno was devoted to exploring the lesser-known
members of the Berenson circle, and Carolyn and I were asked to participate
with a paper on Umberto Morra. This is included in Appendix 1 of this book.
With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had asked more questions of Morra
about his life at I Tatti; but most people, as they get older, regret not having
enquired more when they were younger, and perhaps the fact that I did not
pester him with endless interrogations about Berenson was something that he
welcomed. Who knows? It was only later that I realised that the age difference
between Morra and myself was the same as that between Berenson and Clark,
and that Morra was something of a mentor and father figure for me, my own
father having died when I was a teenager.
Clark and Berenson have had a considerable influence by their writings, and
through Clark’s television series Civilisation. From the first, I could see the point
Acknowledgements x

of what they were saying, and their passionate first-hand response to works of
art has always seemed to me indispensable, to be learned from and to be worth
sharing with others. Thus, when eventually I joined Carolyn at Christie’s, with a
blank piece of paper and an idea to establish an educational enterprise to teach
future dealers, auctioneers, curators and collectors about art and the workings
of the art world, with the emphasis on the first-hand study of works of art in
museums and galleries and in the sale room, I was, albeit unconsciously, treading
in their footprints.
This book has been a genuine labour of love, a means of acknowledging the
beneficial influences of Clark and Berenson and of thanking Umberto Morra
for his friendship and his guidance. The book is therefore dedicated to him. En
route, many people have taken an interest. Prominent among these are William
Mostyn-Owen who worked with Berenson, was a member of the household
and was at Christie’s; also Ronald Vance, George Deem and Lyndall Passerini,
who were members of the Cortona community. Carolyn and I are fortunate to
enjoy the encouragement and friendship of Jane Clark, Alan Clark’s widow, and
of Clark’s daughter, Colette. Lino Pertile, Joe Connors and all the staff at I Tatti
have been unfailingly helpful, notably the present Archivist, Ilaria della Monica;
it was her predecessor, Fiorella Superbi, who first handed over the Clark files.
James Stourton, David Ekserdjian and Francis Russell read the entire manu-
script in draft, made many helpful suggestions and corrected numerous errors.
They have shared their information and experience with unstinting generosity.
David is a wizard at solving difficult clues about works of art and elucidating
obscure references. His contributions and suggestions have been too numerous
to acknowledge individually, but they have been invaluable. James’s knowledge
of Clark and his era is without equal. Numerous others have read selected
chapters in draft and been equally helpful and generous: Jon Whitely, Jonathan
Conlin, Charles Saumarez-Smith, Hugh and Janie Roberts, Catherine Porteous,
Jane Martineau, Caroline Elam. Thanks also to those who have allowed their
brains to be picked or who added to our explorations: Stuart Lyons, Martin
Mcaughlin, Benedetta Origo, Peter Rumley, Caroline Moorhead, Jane Ferguson,
Ivo Vincioni, Louis Jebb. The errors and infelicities, are, however, mine alone.
Thanks are also due to the staff of the London Library: without their ability
and willingness to find and acquire books, and without their e-library, the
research for this book would have been infinitely more laborious and difficult;
to Brian Allen for introducing me to Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press,
who was enthusiastic about the book from the start; and to Katharine Ridler, an
attentive copy-editor.
Principal and profusest thanks are due to my loving companion and collab-
orator from those very first days in Cortona, Carolyn. We have sat side by side
in the archives at I Tatti and Tate Britain transcribing the letters and puzzling
over them, always with shared enjoyment. Carolyn is far better at deciphering
Acknowledgements xi

sprawling and spidery handwriting than I am, and her attention to detail and
proof-reading skills far outclass mine. At home, and with friends, we have had
the pleasure of discussing how it all fits together, the right order for the letters,
who or what is being referred to, and how certain aspects of our own lives and
interests correspond with the lives of those who appear in the letters. It has been
like piecing together and solving an enormous jigsaw-cum-cryptic-crossword
and we hope that in the end the pieces have come together accurately, and most
of the clues have been correctly solved. It became a matter of honour to try
to unravel as many of them as possible, and establish identities for people and
works of art. Inevitably, some names and works of art resolutely refused to reveal
their identities in spite of our best efforts, and of those whose brains we picked.
They are therefore passed over without comment and not footnoted in the text.
However, if any reader is successful in identifying them, an email to mydearbb@
outlook.com would be greatly appreciated.
Not long after we were married, Umberto Morra sent a letter in which he
wrote: ‘I enjoy seeing you engaged in a work that suits you – that complies with
your intellectual aspirations and occupies the centre of your interests. I think
that is a mainspring of one’s life. Besides, Cortona made you meet the person
that is now your chosen companion. Please accept, for your wife and yourself,
all my best wishes – and do not forget me!’ We think he knew that a seed had
been planted and, forty years on, we hope that he is pleased with what has grown
from it.
Robert Cumming
7 June 2014
Preface

Who were Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark? Four decades or more ago
it was unnecessary to ask such a question. They were household names. ‘Mr
Bernard Berenson. The Sage of Art Critics’ ran the headline in the The Times for
its obituary in October 1959.
His death takes from the scene one who has achieved in his lifetime the
status of a legend. To the villa near Florence in which he spent so many
and such fruitful years came men and women from all parts of the world
to visit one whose claim to fame was not only founded on a sureness of
judgement unique in all that touched the classical schools of Italian painting,
but also enlarged by a devoted application to the art of life. For although it
may be true to say that especially in the field of artistic attributions Berenson’s
judgement was more generally respected than that of any other critic of his
time, the attraction he exercised upon others was pre-eminently that of a sage,
a humanist, and a stimulator.
‘Eloquent art historian who drew audience of millions’ proclaimed The Times in
May 1983 when Clark died.
Authority, author, television performer and lecturer, he had become in recent
years, not least as a result of the television series Civilisation, the art historian
most widely known to the general public in this country and overseas . . .The
most formative period of his education is probably his two year sojourn with
Berenson in Florence . . . He spoke of his debt to Berenson as ‘difficult to
describe and impossible to repay’.
For those who, forty years ago, were in their late teens and twenties, no
introduction is probably required. Berenson and Clark’s best-selling books were
an inescapable component of a young person’s exploration of art and history. For
subsequent generations, however, even those who have chosen to make a specialist
study of art history, Berenson and Clark are now too often unacknowledged:
their personalities and their writings, their significant and influential roles, not

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Preface xiii

just in the sphere of art but in the world at large, are, for the moment, wrongly
neglected.
This correspondence is remarkable for several reasons. It is rare that both
parties keep such meticulous archives. The exchange starts immediately after
their first meeting and continues, only interrupted by the war, until a few
months before Berenson’s death: thirty-four years, with a letter one way or
the other every few months and sometimes every few weeks. They were good
correspondents: they had worthwhile things to say and they were inquisitive and
spontaneous. It is readily evident that the letters were not written with a view
to future publication but as an exchange between two people who, in spite of
their age difference, had much in common which they were anxious to discuss;
and they enjoyed gossip.
In editing and annotating these letters the aim has been to allow the corre-
spondents to speak with their own voices, without interposing extraneous inter-
pretations and opinions. Thus, the correspondence is presented chronologically
and divided into chapters that encapsulate coherent episodes in their lives. At the
beginning of each chapter is an introduction outlining the principal happenings
in that period to provide a context for the letters which follow. The footnotes
flesh out detail and elucidate passing references, filling in background informa-
tion where such is necessary for a full and proper understanding of the letters.
The edited presentation is, therefore, biographical and factual rather than critical
or judgemental.
The writer Iris Origo, who was close to both Berenson and Clark, in her
famous essay on biography (A Need to Testify, 1984, Chapter 1), commented
that: ‘Three insidious temptations assail a biographer: to suppress, to invent,
and to sit in judgment.’ Such a complete and spontaneous correspondence has
an inescapable immediacy and evolving continuity that neither biography nor
autobiography can ever have. These letters are an authentic testimony as to who
Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were, spoken in their own words and
written without retrospection or anticipation. Any suppression, invention or
judgement is theirs, of the moment, and is part and parcel of their characters.
A biography or autobiography is inevitably a carefully worked static image,
created at a particular moment, shaped by the mood and perception at the time
of writing. A correspondence, written over decades, presents a moving picture, a
series of impressions like the brief flickering, changing images of an old family
ciné film or photograph album. If this correspondence has the ability to conjure
up an authentic impression of the writers themselves, it also has the ability, with
equal credibility, to capture a vignette of the world they inhabited; and it is a
fascinating record of a friendship, with all the ebbs and flows which are implicit
in any deep and lasting relationship.
Reading this correspondence is akin to eavesdropping on an intimate
conversation. In such circumstances it is better not to interrupt but simply to
Preface xiv

listen, to note what is being said, or not said, to ponder why and to surmise
where it will lead. Only when the conversation has concluded is it sensible to
comment – which is why there is an Afterword.
Many people populate the pages of these edited letters.The more my wife and
I explored them, the more we realised how intricately they were all connected
together, a real-life Dance to the Music of Time, fascinatingly close to that which
Anthony Powell portrayed so tellingly in fiction, and for the same epoch, in his
epic cycle of novels. Some names will be familiar to some readers, depending
on their age and interests. Rather than interrupt the flow of the letters with
too many elaborate footnotes, or reduce personalities to a meaningless single
sentence, there is a separate section, a Dramatis Personae, with biographical
entries. There the reader will find, in Part 1, information on the lives of Bernard
Berenson and Kenneth Clark, outside the chronology of these letters (1925–59),
and of the intimate members of their respective families and households. Such
individuals are footnoted thus in the main text: Umberto Morra. Those in Part
2 are footnoted thus: Iris Origo. For anyone for whom Clark and Berenson
are unknown, it might be best to read through Part 1 of the Dramatis Personae
before starting on the letters.
Something should also be said here about I Tatti, for this Tuscan villa was
the stage where many of those who feature in the Dramatis Personae made
entrances and exits and acted out their parts. I Tatti is a country house and estate,
to the north-east of Florence, near Fiesole, on the road to Settignano. To get
there today you take a bus from the centre of town, descend after half an hour’s
journey at Ponte al Mensola, cross the stream and incline towards the hills where
Berenson loved to walk and talk, to think and to look.
Bernard Berenson and his wife to be, Mary Costelloe, had determined that
they would live in Italy, and sought a suitable abode near Florence. They found
I Tatti, a run-down house and estate, but in a favoured south-facing position,
quiet and secluded, but not isolated. It was owned by an expatriate English
aristocrat, John Temple Leader, and they rented it from him. In 1907 they bought
it outright from his heir, Lord Westbury. The house was restored and extended;
Anglo-Italian Renaissance-style gardens were created; works of art were
collected; a library was assembled; the estate was rejuvenated. There they lived
and worked until the end of their days. It was a twentieth-century version of a
Renaissance humanist court, and the visitors to it were many. I Tatti continues
into the twenty-first century as a tranquil place of scholarship and learning, the
Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies.
Berenson and Clark maintained comprehensive archives of all their papers.
When Clark died, much of his archive was deposited with Tate Britain in London.
This included the correspondence from Berenson after 1945. For reasons too
complicated to record here, Berenson’s earlier letters to Clark found their way
into the I Tatti archive. All the correspondence between Clark and Berenson
Preface xv

in the archives of I Tatti and Tate Britain are included here. Very few letters are
missing. All Clark’s letters to Mary Berenson are included. Hers to him have not
been found. All Berenson’s letters to Jane that exist have been included, and hers
to him where pertinent.
Clark’s spelling could occasionally be wayward, and where it is entirely personal
it has been left unaltered with [sic]. Berenson, in his hasty scrawl, frequently used
abbreviations, and these have been left as he wrote them. Otherwise, for all of
them, clearly unintentional slips of the pen and simple errors of grammar and
spelling have been corrected during editing. Handwritten additions, alterations
or corrections to typed letters have been treated as an integral part of the
typewritten text and not differentiated.
A gender-neutral vocabulary has been used whenever possible. However,
there are occasions when the context, customary current practice or tradition
predicates otherwise. Thus, the term ‘old master’ is used when referring to
pertinent paintings and drawings.
Publications quoted in the editorial text and footnotes are cited by author and
abbreviated title, and are identified in the selected Bibliography.
xvi
One

Hopes and Expectations

1925–1926

Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925. Clark,
aged twenty-two, had just completed his third year of a history degree at Trinity
College, Oxford, and was awaiting the results of his Finals (he was awarded an
upper-second class degree). In the Long Vacation he had set out on a tour of Italy
with his friend Charles Bell, the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum
in Oxford, who was more than three decades older, ‘a tiny little man, with a
slightly humped back . . . and pale magenta face.The red rims of his eyes encircled
small and very strong lenses’, as Clark retrospectively described him (Clark APW
p. 104).They started their Italian journey in Bologna, in September, and travelled
by train to Florence where they stayed with Janet Ross, a friend of Bell, who
lived in a crumbling crenellated villa outside Florence called Poggio Gherado,
said to have once been lived in by Boccaccio. Mrs Ross, known affectionately
to friend and foe alike as ‘Aunt Janet’, was then in her eighties and a formidable
character. Poggio Gherado was within walking distance of the Villa I Tatti and a
visit had been arranged there so that her two visitors could meet ‘Mr Berenson’.
Whether or not Berenson and Bell had met previously to this occasion is
uncertain but they had certainly been in correspondence since before 1914, and
Berenson had given a painting to the Ashmolean in 1913 in honour of Bell’s
redecoration of the Rafaello Gallery. Bell had been to Poggio Gherado on many
occasions and the probability is that he had been to I Tatti several times. Be that
as it may, the immediate outcome for Clark was an impetuous invitation from
Berenson, on the spot at the end of luncheon, for him to go out to Italy to work
with Berenson on a new edition of his most important work of scholarship, The
Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in
the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné (1903).
Berenson was in need of a new assistant and his hope was that Clark would be
able to join him straight away.
The invitation, although highly tempting, was not without its complications
for Clark, and it was to be fourteen months before he was able to take up
residence at I Tatti and start work in earnest. His immediate intention had been

1
1925–1926 2

to stay on at Oxford for another year at least, carrying out research for a proposed
B.Litt. thesis on a subject which had been suggested to him by Bell and which
appealed to him greatly: the Gothic Revival. Although it was an unfashionable
topic, it had engaged his wholehearted enthusiasm and Bell, who would be
the supervisor of his studies, had generously given him a quantity of his own
notes which he, Bell, had already made. He had taken Clark under his wing and
encouraged him to spend as much time as possible in the Ashmolean Museum.
Bell treated the Ashmolean as his private collection and discouraged visitors yet
he gave Clark entry to the print room and put him to work on the Raphael
and Michelangelo drawings, to examine them and critically assess the comments
and judgements of established published scholars. Such work was congenial to
Clark, and Bell also made him tackle something less immediately captivating
– German engravings. Clark knew that to abandon his thesis would disappoint
Bell and displease his parents.
For a young man of Clark’s temperament who aspired to aesthetic experience
and to study works of art in a scholarly manner, there were, in 1925, few
opportunities for formal study of the history of the visual arts in Britain. The
Courtauld Institute, Britain’s first university department devoted exclusively to
the study of art history, did not open until 1932. The Germans had pioneered art
historical studies as an autonomous academic subject in their universities since
the late nineteenth century but few of their publications were translated into
English and study at a German university for someone of Clark’s background
and upbringing was not a practical prospect; and he did not speak German. Nor
was he tempted by the idea of study in the United States where, following the
example of the Germans, history of art as an autonomous subject was already
well established at Harvard and Princeton. Thus, in spite of the complications,
the offer to work with Berenson at I Tatti proved to be irresistible. (Although
Clark never did pursue his proposed B.Litt. thesis to completion – his acceptance
of Berenson’s offer caused him to abandon it after drafting three chapters – he
continued with his studies of the Gothic Revival and published them as a book,
to considerable acclaim, in 1928.)
The young Clark did not lack self-assurance, any more than he lacked money,
but his preferred relationship with the world at large was a benign, half-amused,
half-curious and self-deprecating aloofness. This did not always endear him to
other young people and he had not been wholly enamoured of undergraduate
life at Oxford, or of Trinity which was one of the smaller colleges: although
socially smart, it was noted for its sportiness and it was not intellectually glittering.
A notable contemporary of his at Oxford, although not a particular friend, was
Evelyn Waugh and their Oxford was that which is conjured up in Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited. Clark’s inclinations were not towards the over-exuberant
sporting ‘Hearties’ but, at the same time, he was not attracted by the flamboyantly
precious ‘Aesthetes’ such as Harold Acton. In his gossipy autobiography, Memoirs
1925–1926 3

of an Aesthete (1948), Acton makes no mention of Clark at Oxford but remembers

him as a ten- or twelve-year-old schoolboy at Wixenford (now Ludgrove School)
where they were fellow boarders from the ages of eight to thirteen, commenting
that it was obvious to his peers, even then, that Clark had a distinguished career
ahead of him, for he possessed a benign self-assurance and seemed to have all the
makings of a future archbishop or cabinet minister.
Clark’s youthful self-assurance and aloofness would not have been a discour-
agement for Berenson: aloofness was one of his own notable characteristics.
Equally, the rich, the well-bred and the good-looking held a perpetual fascina-
tion for him, as did clever, articulate, Oxford-educated Anglo-Saxons. Berenson
made rapid judgements on character and personality, and formed strong likes
and dislikes. He also had an unerring ability to spot talent and potential at-
tainment in young people. Thus, the prospect of having the unattached young
Clark at his beck and call to do the donkey work on the Florentine Drawings, at
no expense, and at the same time to have his stylish presence on hand to en-
liven formal dinners and to embellish the informal daily walks with intelligent
conversation was an opportunity not to be missed. He was willing, with Mary’s
approval and support, to wait for Clark to get his affairs organised and finally
arrive at I Tatti.
In 1925 Berenson celebrated his sixtieth birthday at a time when life expectancy
was not much more than three score years and ten. His reputation in professional
artistic circles was formidable. He was established as the expert on Italian art, and
his judgements on authentication and quality were not to be questioned lightly.
In both the commercial and scholarly art worlds his name and opinions carried
huge weight. At the same time, he was a household name and his reputation in
general cultural circles and popular imagination was widespread. His four slim
volumes on Italian painting, the first of which had been published in 1894, were
serious and pioneering publications, enshrining not just a personal view but a
methodology and a framework for explaining and justifying the importance and
the supremacy of looking at pictures and of aesthetic experience. No student
of art, and no self-respecting traveller, would set off for Italy or visit the great
galleries of Europe to look at Italian painting without having read or studied
them. Berenson explained aesthetic response through two principal concepts,
‘life enhancement’ and ‘tactile values’. His influence was even noted in the pages
of widely read fiction. When the impressionable young Miss Honeychurch
set forth from the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, in E. M. Forster’s A Room
with a View, she was determined to explore the treasures in Santa Croce in the
full knowledge that she must look at works of art according to Mr Berenson’s
method even if she did not yet fully understand what it was and where to find
it: ‘of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile
values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which
they were?’
1925–1926 4

In agreeing to live and work at I Tatti, Clark was to enter a household where
the relationships were complex. Berenson craved female company and affection,
and he also required someone to organise his life for him. In 1925 he had been
married to Mary for just on twenty-five years (they wed in 1900, although
they had met in 1890 when Mary was already married to Frank Costelloe)
but with the arrival in 1919 of Nicky Mariano, who immediately became an
indispensable member of the household, Berenson soon became the centrepiece
of a ménage à trois. When Clark first came to I Tatti, Mary, who was slightly
older than Berenson, had lost her looks, was beginning to lose her health and
was increasingly losing her influence over her husband although she held on
tenaciously. All Clark’s early correspondence, in which he discusses his plans
and arrangements prior to arriving at I Tatti, is with Mary. Other than his initial
letter, his sustained correspondence with Berenson commences only in May
1928.
Nicky Mariano was, in 1925, in her late thirties: her calm and methodical
temperament was the exact opposite of Mary’s, and she increasingly became the
staple of Berenson’s affection, as he more and more looked to her to organise his
life. In this latter task she was assisted by her sister Alda, who with her husband
Egbert (Bertie), Baron Anrep, and their son Cecil, joined the I Tatti entourage
within a year of Nicky’s arrival.They increasingly became an essential part of the
running of I Tatti, Alda taking over the Library from Nicky in 1930 and Bertie
helping to run the estate, eventually becoming the General Manager. Clark came
to establish a close relationship with Nicky Mariano but the rapport was not
instant. In her memoirs, published in 1966, she remembered him thus:
when Kenneth arrived after Christmas to stay for a fortnight, what so often
happens when somebody has been praised in superlative terms happened to
me. I found him not too easy to talk to, rather standoffish and cutting in his
remarks, also not free from conceit for one so young. But soon I realised that
much of all this was a mask for shyness and that there was much more kindness
and softness of heart in Kenneth than appeared in his outward manner . . .
(Mariano pp. 143–4).
Chronology

1925

12 September Clark and Bell are taken by Mrs Ross to dine

at I Tatti
13 September Clark and Bell lunch at I Tatti
Berensons depart for Munich, Salzburg,
Vienna and Budapest
December Berensons return to I Tatti

1926

January Clark visits I Tatti to work in the Library for

2/3 weeks
Spring Berensons visit Sicily and Naples
August/September Berensons at their summer retreat,
Poggio al Spino
October Clark spends two months in Dresden
Berenson and Nicky Mariano go to Turin and Milan
Clark joins them in Milan. Together
they tour the Trentino, Bergamo and Brescia
November The Berensons and Clark visit Trento and Padua
Clark commences work at I Tatti

5
1925–1926 6

10th Oct. 25
21 Beaumont Street
Oxford

Dear Mr Berenson,
I must apologise for the time I have taken to consider your extraordinarily
generous offer.
As I anticipated my parents were very strongly opposed to my working in
Florence & giving up all thought of a business or political career for the, to them,
narrower field of art. Above all they objected to my sacrificing my last year at
Oxford which they believe will be of great value to me. After a great deal of dis-
cussion & persuasion I have secured the following conditions, which will, I am
afraid, be totally unacceptable to you. They insist upon my completing this year
at Oxford, but would allow me to go out to you during the winter holidays.The
disadvantages of this arrangement are obvious; but I believe it is not without ad-
vantages also. If I come for a month ‘on approval’ you will be able to see whether
I am likely to be any use to you. I am afraid that you will find that you have
overrated my abilities. But if I should promise to be of use I could then spend the
rest of my time here in acquiring a better knowledge of German & Italian, & of
Renaissance history. Should you then renew your offer I could accept it without
such qualms as to my own incompetence.
Poor Charles Bell1 was ill all the time we were at Florence & only recovered
in time for me to take him home. He is still far from well & oppressed with
overwork in the museum.
I am very sorry that I have had to write such a temporising letter, & bitterly
regret that I may have had to throw away what will always seem to me a
wonderful chance. I will never be able adequately to express my gratitude to you
for your splendid offer.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Clark.

[On the back is written in Mary Berenson’s handwriting:‘I have said that tho’
B.B. wd. have liked him to come at once, he can very well put in his time with
mastering Italian & German & getting thoroughly acquainted with the Italian
drawings at Oxford. What a nice clear handwriting he has!!’]

1 Charles Bell
1925–1926 7

The Toft,2
Bournemouth
Tel: 922.
[dated at end of letter]

Dear Mrs Berenson,

I should have answered your most kind letter before, but almost as soon as it
arrived I was attacked by the fever always known as ’flu, which later turned to
jaundice. I am at present at home trying to recover from that disease. It is a slow
& depressing process, & I very much resent the waste of time involved.
Your letter was in many ways a delightful surprise, for I had no idea that Mr
Berenson would be prepared to keep his offer open for a year. It seemed very
absurd that I, who was so obviously the beneficiary of the arrangement should be
the one to make terms. However the fact that you will not be back till December,
& will be away in the spring rather lessens the disadvantages of my delay.
Unfortunately it has become necessary for me to make a further condition.
My father is very indignant that I should go out to Florence without having
spent some time at home & the earliest date at which I can leave is December
27th. It may well seem to you & Mr Berenson that such a short visit is not worth
making.To me, of course, a few days in the library or in Mr Berenson’s company
are worth a very great deal. But I am very much afraid that my continual
postponements will exhaust your patience.
I should, of course, be delighted to take out Mrs Ross’s3 Christmas present if
it was not essential that it should arrive before Christmas day. I am afraid I have
no London address except a club which will not keep things. But if it was sent
to this address I could take it. I hear from Aunt Janet that she is still very worn
out & has made one or two efforts to get up but without success. Our visit must
have been a terrible strain, & of course she would not give in & rest as long as
we were there.
Once more, thank you so very much for your letter, & please forgive the
inadequacy of this one. My disease seems to have rotted my brain as well as
sapping all my vitality.
Yours very sincerely,
Kenneth Clark
4 xi 25

2 The Toft was Clark’s father’s house in Bournemouth. His parents used to winter in the South of France,
but in the early 1920s they bought a large comfortable house overlooking the sea in Bournemouth in
order to spend the winter months there. It later became a hotel and is now part of a complex of flats.
3 Janet Ross
1925–1926 8

16 xii 25
The Toft,
Bournemouth.Tel: 922.

Dear Mrs Berenson,

It was most kind of you to write about my father’s loss;4 it was certainly a most
disagreeable business; & it was most generous of Mrs Waterfield5 to credit me
with such philosophic socialism; she has never met me or she would have been
disillusioned.
I arrive in Florence on the 28th, somewhere in the region of 5 p.m. if I catch
my connection at Viareggio. If you are still able to take me in I shall drive straight
to i Tatti;6 but if it is in any way inconvenient to you I believe Aunt Janet would
not mind putting me up for a bit.
I am looking forward to it immensely, & cannot help marvelling at my luck. I
know so many people far abler than I who would give anything for the privilege
of working with Mr Berenson.
If I don’t hear to the contrary, then, I shall appear on the evening of the 28th.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Clark

20.1.26
21 Beaumont Street,
Oxford

Dear Mrs Berenson,

It seemed to me that the unyielding surface of club note-paper & a scratchy pen
would be poor media through which to express strong feelings, so I postponed

4 A reference to the ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ (recalled inaccurately by Clark in APW p. 87). Clark’s father
had been the proprietor of an aluminium company in Wales. In 1920 an improperly built dam burst
and a nearby village was destroyed. Clark’s father undertook to compensate the workers, rebuild
the houses and salvage the company. In about 1925 he sold the company but in so doing sustained
substantial personal financial loss. John Walker, in his memoirs, says that it cost Clark’s father the
greater part of his fortune and quotes a figure of £1 million. He also says that Clark interrupted his
plans to go to Italy in order to join the board of directors to help try to re-organise the business.
He suggests that without Clark’s support his father would have been ruined, although Clark never
claimed any credit.
5 Lina Waterfield
6 Clark, uniquely, always wrote either ‘i Tatti’ or ‘the Tatti’. Everyone else, including the Berensons,
always wrote ‘I Tatti’.
1925–1926 9

writing to you till I returned here. Really my feelings of gratitude to you and Mr
Berenson are very strong; for your kindness in having me at i Tatti, for all I learnt
there, in short for the most delightful three weeks I can remember. Walking in
the hills, shuffling Bellinis in the library or simply browsing among the books
were all a great joy to me; & above all to be with people who understood &
frequently shared my enthusiasms was a new & enchanting experience. It is
very pleasant to share an enthusiasm but here they are mainly indulged in alone
& secretly, like a bath, for fear, I suppose, of a gust of ridicule. For all this, then,
please accept my thanks.As to the tragedy of the keys: I am distressed that you
should have been put to so much bother; and I am very sorry for Parry,7 for it
was quite as much my fault as his. When I think of the trouble I have given, I
hardly like to confess that I had a most comfortable journey, revelling in my
little world of light & hooks & knobs, sleeping the sound dreamless sleep of the
unjust by night; & by day living in the magic of red-gauntlet.8 The keys arrived
in Oxford as soon as I did & I was put to no inconvenience.
Nothing very important has happened in London since I left, save that they
have cleaned the Piero St Michael9 & now his armour & white wings shine in
silvery air. I always thought he was a great beauty, and yesterday he took my
breath away. I spent hours at the N. G. looking at Titians & Bellinis & feeling
some of them for the first time.
Mrs Waterfield crossed on the same boat & we had tea together yesterday. She
was full of her exiles & I was unable to rid myself of a picture of St Leonard’s
terrace looking like the frontispiece to Max’s Rossetti.10 Charley [sic] Bell is, as
usual, overworked writing an article on Cotman, with another impending – on
plumbagos,11 of all gloomy subjects.
As I have not yet seen my parents I can’t write anything further about the
chances of my returning. If Mr Berenson is convinced that I can be useful (until
I get swelled head, which may take 18 months – but perhaps less) I may be able
to persuade my parents to let me come. But I shall certainly not feel myself
justified in coming if I find that it is going to cause them real distress or serious

7 Parry was the Berensons’ loyal, long-serving Welsh chauffeur. He had gone out to Florence in
about 1900 to seek work as a mechanic and was employed by Berenson as being the only person in
Florence who knew how to fix a broken-down car. He refused ever to go into a church or museum
in spite of Mary’s urging him to do so.
8 Redgauntlet was one of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. Clark was probably reading the novel on
the train. Possibly he is obliquely referring to the magic of train travel. The Great Western Railway
(which would have taken him from London to school at Winchester and University at Oxford)
called its early express passenger trains ‘Waverley Class’ and named individual trains after particular
novels, Redgauntlet being one such.
9 Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael, National Gallery (NG 769), acquired in 1867.
10 Max Beerbohm’s Rossetti and his Circle was published in London in 1922. Logan Pearsall Smith lived
at 11 St Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, London.
11 Drawings in graphite, in this instance English portrait drawings.
1925–1926 10

disappointment. I hope I have made you understand how much I want to come
& how grateful I am for the offer. Please remember me to your brother;12 I
needn’t tell you how much I enjoyed his company & how much I learned from
him. And please give my love to Miss Mariano;13 the thought of having her as
a companion in my work is one of the most delightful parts of an enchanting
prospect. I did love it all.
Yours very sincerely,
Kenneth Clark

14 ii 26
21, Beaumont Street,
Oxford

Dear Mrs Berenson,

Thank you very much for your letter; I am most grateful for your advice & will
do my best to follow it. I saw my parents for a few hours on Wednesday & they
seemed perfectly amenable, though they will doubtless be less so when the time
for action arrives. If I can convince them that I shall not be tied in any way I am
quite sure that they will have no objections or even qualms of disappointment.
Taking it, then, as fairly certain that I shall come, I shall try to learn all I can
do which will be useful to you. This includes taking photos. With a Sanderson
half plate, a good Zeiss lens, pan chromatic plates & a little practice I should be
able to take details of any picture in almost any light. These details could be the
actual size of the original, as the Sanderson has a very long extension, & at times
this would be valuable though, of course, a half plate does not take in much. I am
afraid anything much bigger than a half plate would be rather too cumbersome
for carrying to out of the way places or up ladders. I write these details because
it is doubtful if it would not be more convenient if the camera etc belonged to
Mr Berenson & not to me. Supposing I go at the end of two years I mayn’t have
much use for a large scientific camera, whereas he will. The cost of the whole
outfit, including lens’s, stand, etc would probably be about £20. If you think it’s
better that you should buy it, would you allow me to use it during the summer
term in order to get some practice? But if you would rather it belonged to me I
am quite prepared to buy one. It may produce some amusing results, & we shall
be able to Yashiro-ise14 anything we like.

12 Logan Pearsall Smith

13 Nicky Mariano
14 Yukio Yashiro (1890–1975) had preceded Clark as Berenson’s assistant for the Florentine Drawings. In 1925
1925–1926 11

Oxford is plunged in gloom. There has been one fine day this term, and I
have become so depressed that at one time I seriously meditated running away.
I should have done so long ago were it possible to work on my Gothic Revival
anywhere else. It goes on quite well, & I have already accumulated more material
than I can use. Last week I spent in writing an essay on Ruskin for a society here
which helped to clear up my ideas, for Ruskin is in a most curious relationship
to the Gothic revivalists. The result has been to leave me very exhausted & quite
unable to express myself. That is why this letter is incoherent. Much of the time
I look out at the rain & fog & groan at the thought of i Tatti.
I was not surprised to hear that they had resolved to operate on Nicky. I hope
it was quite easy & that she is getting better. I have been meaning to write to
her – not that I have anything of interest to tell her, but invalids welcome any
letter – but I have been either so busy that it was impossible, or so depressed that
it would have been worse than useless.
Please excuse this letter,
Yours always
Kenneth Clark

31. iii. 26
Golf-Hotel
Sospel15
Alpes Maritimes

Dear Mrs Berenson,

Now that my parents seem not merely willing but anxious for me to go to i Tatti,
I must write and bother you with definitive arrangements.
Oxford goes down before the end of June, & if you do not object I feel I
ought to spend a few weeks at home before abandoning my family. I think you
suggested that I might stay with you till we all returned from England at the
end of October; of course that would be delightful for me if you still think it
best. The question arises: would it be better for me to bring out my car in July

he had published a scholarly monograph on Botticelli with copious black and white illustrations,
including many details. According to Clark (APW p. 259), he was the first scholar to publish photo-
raphic details to increase an understanding of pictures.
15 Clark’s father enjoyed gambling and frequented the Casino at Monte Carlo where he met with
regular and extraordinary luck. According to Clark, after one such successful evening of roulette, he
bought a small, recently created golf course at Sospel, behind Mentone, and then built a hotel there.
In the early 1920s he gave the hotel to Clark: ‘I was fond of golf and I much enjoyed the drama and
complications of hotel management’ (APW p. 188).
1925–1926 12

or in October. I do not want to encumber your garage with an extra car; still
less with a chauffeur. If you think my car would be useful to me during August
& September – as well it may be, if I am visiting out of the way towns – then
perhaps it may be possible to find some lodgings for my chauffeur. It sounds
preposterous that anyone of my age should have a chauffeur at all, but he will
be able to be valet to me when I am on my own; & I am afraid I cannot drive
far without one, as I am a fool with the inwards of cars & when they break I
am lost. I shall be grateful if you will write & tell me what arrangements will be
most convenient to you.
Nothing has happened to me which could be of any interest to you in a letter.
I wish I could say that I was learning something which might make me rather
more useful to Mr Berenson; but I am doing a little – filling in any few bad gaps
which I have often bridged with rather flimsy bluff, including Santayana16 &
Dante.
I have had a most gloomy letter from Aunt Janet; I hope she was not quite as
ill as she thinks she was. Of your brother’s letters on English prose I have only
received one, though he tells me he has written many more. I read it swollen
with conceit & dithering with delight. And the hope of others gives me that
violent interest in the post which I haven’t had since I first went to school.
This letter ought to reach you before you leave for Constantinople. I hope the
trip is a success. Love to Nicky & Aunt Janet.
Yours ever,
Kenneth Clark

7 iv 26
Golf-Hotel
Sospel
Alpes Maritimes

Dear Mrs Berenson,

As usual your letter solves all my difficulties; every suggestion it contains suits me
perfectly & is exactly what I should have suggested had I been free to do so. I had
always felt that I could be of no use to you without a good working knowledge

16 George Santayana (1863–1952), although Spanish-born, was raised in the usa and was a contemporary
of Berenson’s at Harvard and a close friend in their early years. A prolific writer, he published books
on philosophy and aesthetics and a best-selling novel. Initially he taught at Harvard but after 1912 he
lived entirely in Europe.
1925–1926 13

of German; & I was so worried by this difficulty that I have been trying to
summon up courage to ask if I might have a couple of months off to live in a
good family in Dresden, which has been recommended to me by some friends.
Dresden is a good central ‘headquarters’ & I might stay with the family & make
expeditions from there. Of course it would be delightful to take a journey with
your young German – Neumayer – but I should need to have definite lessons
in the language. Personally I cannot just ‘pick up’ a language but need to work
hard at it. Perhaps Neumayer might be able to take a trip towards the middle
of September when I have learned the rudiments of grammar, & conversation
would be more valuable to me. I shall begin taking lessons next term in Oxford
& presently am wrestling with a grammar. Lord! what a tongue. I have attempted
to learn it many times & always broken down when I came to the irregular verbs.
However that was in cold blood & very different to being in the country. I am
really delighted that you are prepared to let me go to Germany. And the rest of
your plans seem to me ideal. I only met Pinsent17 once or twice liked him very
much & would like to share his extra floor extremely. But that is a matter for him
to decide. If he seems prepared to risk having me for a month or two I shall be
delighted. If not I shall have to wait until rooms appear, which, I am afraid will
put you to some inconvenience but will be very agreeable for me.
As to London: my parents are taking a flat18 there, for which they pay the rent
& I buy the furniture – a very good arrangement as far as I am concerned as they
are very seldom in London.
As to German galleries: I should, of course be very grateful to Mr Berenson
if he would tell me which of the smaller ones to visit & give me introductions.
I could take my (or rather, his) camera & take photos of anything he wished,
though I should imagine that this is not allowed in most German galleries.
If all these plans work out I shall have the time of my life & it won’t be wasted
neither.
Yours always,
Kenneth Clark

17 Cecil Ross Pinsent

18 It was a service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster. Still in existence, it is a large, middle-ranking,
red-brick establishment with more than 300 rooms and suites, known affectionately to London
residents as ‘St Vermin’s’. Arranged round three sides of a tree-lined courtyard, it is built on the site
of a 15th-century chapel dedicated to St Ermin. The hotel building was erected in 1889 as a block
of mansion flats. By 1900 these had been converted into the hotel with redesigned interiors and
extensive reception rooms with rich plasterwork.
1925–1926 14

10 vii 26
Shielbridge
Acharacle, S.O.
Argyllshire
Station.
Glenfinnan, N.E.R.
Telegrams,
Salen, Argyllshire19

Dear Mrs Berenson,

You very kindly said that you would give me some instructions & introductions
for Germany. I leave for Dresden at the end of the month. The family I am going
to stay with seem promising & speak very little English; & there is a teacher
of German next door to them. I hope I learn a little, though I am very silly at
languages, through never having been taught to use my mind when I was at school.
I am not taking my car, because it is needed at home. The family car is broken &
they can’t get on without one. However I am sure I will have my time full visiting
those towns & galleries which are easily got at by train. Please tell me if you want
me to take my big camera. I should doubt if I shall go to obscure enough places,
& I suppose one is not allowed to photograph in any German galleries.
I have heard vague reports of your movements from Aunt Janet, & one
blood-curdling story about a scene in the streets of Naples, which, I hope, she
exaggerated. I am afraid she must be disappointed that neither Bell nor I can
come out to see her this summer. Poor Bell has been very ill all summer; for a
month he was really bad, with a sort of asthma which would have killed anyone
else. But, as he says, he is indestructible & he is now recuperating at Weymouth.
It is not very easy to work during one’s last summer term at Oxford. I am
afraid I did very little; but the Gothic revival essay has gone a good way & I am
working at it here. I am still interested in the subject & really believe it is ‘fool
proof ’ – as indeed it needs to be.
I look forward to my two months in Germany; but much more to seeing
things with you in London, in October. I do hope you are all well; Aunt Janet
wrote that you were ill in Naples. I am extremely well & very different from the
poor thing you saw in January.
Yours always,
Kenneth Clark

19 Clark’s father was keen on shooting, stalking and fishing. In the early 1920s he bought a 75,000-acre
estate with two lodges on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula on the far west coast of Scotland,
west of Fort William. Ardnamurchan Point is the most westerly place on the British mainland.
1925–1926 15

[Attached to the letter is a note in Mary Berenson’s hand with a list of some
eight German names and addresses, and some twenty German towns such as
Nuremberg, Weimar and Stuttgart.]

Raditsky Strasse 8
Dresden A
14-ix-26

Dear Mrs Berenson,

Of course I should have written before & reported progress. I have written
so many letters describing Dresden (including one to your brother) that I had
better not do so again. I think my time here has been a great success; certainly
I have enjoyed it very much, though there have been moments when I would
have given a good deal to speak to someone who understood me. I believe
I have learned as much German as could be expected in so short a stay – of
course I speak very slowly & inaccurately, but can convey most ideas & almost
any information. I understand an educated person speaking not too fast, & I can
follow a play if I know it before hand. As to reading. Learned works are certainly
difficult & I couldn’t read one without a dictionary. Even less could I read a
newspaper. But an ordinary book e.g. Gregorovius ‘Vanderjahre’20 is quite easy. I
have read Wölfflin’s21 Grundbegriffe which is tough, & Brinckmann’s book on
Michelangelo’s drawings which is a very nasty book.22 So I think I can say that
I can read German art-books, though still rather slowly. Unfortunately I have
spent a lot of time reading the plots of Wagner operas. The opera is so good here
that I thought it would be a pity not to see it, & it was a good opportunity to
study the Ring – in London one is always too busy or too tired, & of course the
production is not in the same class.
I worked in the [Kupferstich-Kabinett] gallery every day for three weeks so
got to know it quite well. Now I have worked for a fortnight in the print room
which is very agreeable & full of interesting things. The people there have been
very kind & helpful. Lehrs23 is a charming little man & very learned, I should

20 Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–1891) was a German historian who specialised in the medieval history
of Rome. His best-known work is Wanderjahre in Italien, an account of the walks he took through
Italy in the 1850s (he took up residence in Italy in 1852). A devout Lutheran, Gregorovius was born
in East Prussia and studied theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. He was a friend
of Nicky Mariano’s father.
21 Heinrich Wölfflin
22 Albert Erich Brinckmann
23 Max Lehrs (1855–1938) was the long-serving director of the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett (1896–
1904 and 1908–24; in 1904–8 he worked in Berlin). His principal work of scholarship was on 15th-
1925–1926 16

say, though immersed in the monographist24 E. S. & other rather unimportant

people. Singer25 is kind but not a very impressive scholar – of course I have no
means of judging his ability, but he writes rather many introductions to auction
catalogues. I found the Italian attributions were influenced by recent scholarship.
Naturally it was not for anyone of my years to make suggestions; but I made
one Rembrandt discovery which I had not the good sense & modesty to keep
to myself. All directors hate anyone making discoveries, most of all a young &
ignorant student. However they have been very polite about it. The Rembrandt
drawings here are a magnificent lot & it would be well worth weeding out the
obvious duds. There remain the German drawings which are very numerous, of
course, but contain splendid Durers Cranachs Grunewalds, Hubers etc. I have
five days left for them. What a delightful occupation it is! I should really rather
hunt through collections of drawings than anything else I can imagine.
I went to Berlin for a few days with a friend & saw the chief things of all
kinds. I am afraid the new Greek statue26 seemed to me very ugly – but of
course that tells you more about me than about the statue. How wonderful the
Tel-el-armena27 things are; & the German pictures are also a revelation. But I
was slightly disappointed by the Italians, especially by the later Venetians. After
Dresden with its splendid Veroneses & Titians – the late portrait of a man is
surely the most sacred of all Titian portraits28 – Berlin Venetians seemed very
dull; & what a lot of gloomy north Italians. However this is ungrateful; obviously
a collection which contains the School of Pan29 and the Bellini ascension [sic],30
to say nothing of the Mantegnas & Botticellis, was an experience which left me
breathless.

century German and Dutch engravers. He went blind and his writings, which were then dependent
on memory, were completed with the help of his daughter.
24 Clark means ‘monogrammist’.
25 Hans Wolfgang Singer (1867–1957) wrote Die Meisterwerke der Königel: Gemälde-Galerie zu Dresden
(Munich and New York, 1913).
26 Probably the so-called ‘Greek Goddess’, a freestanding female statue 2 m high, dating from the 6th
century bc in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. It was acquired in 1924.
27 Amarna (commonly known as el-Amarna or incorrectly as Tel el-Amarna) is an extensive Egyptian
archaeological site that represents the remains of the new capital city built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten
of the late Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1353 bc) and abandoned shortly afterwards. On the east bank of
the Nile, it was excavated by the Germans in the early 20th century. In the Berlin Museum, the
greatest treasure to come from there is the head of Queen Nefertiti.
28 The only portrait in Dresden that fits Clark’s description is a portrait of an unknown man carrying
a palm branch of 1561, in the Gemäldegalerie.
29 Painted by Luca Signorelli (c. 1450–1523). It was destroyed during the Second World War.
30 Giovanni Bellini’s (c. 1430–1516) Resurrection, which shows Christ rising from the Tomb and
ascending into Heaven, is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.
1925–1926 17

As I hadn’t time to look at the drawings when I was there I am going back
to do so on Thursday. I met a man I know in the print room here. He is named
K. Parker31 & though not brilliant is very keen indeed. He has seen a great many
drawings & knows a lot about German & Dutch, I should say. He edits a paper
called Old Master Drawings which I am afraid has rather a lot of sharks among
its contributors. But Parker is certainly not a shark. I have managed to get a good
deal of information out of him & am going to Berlin with him. He knows the
people in the print room & at Munich which is very useful for me. Next week I
go to Munich. It would be absurd to stay there less than a week, so shall certainly
have time to see Herr Wolf & the other people you gave me introductions to.
Also to work through all the Italian drawings.
I shall return to England about Oct. 5 & spend five days packing & settling
accounts. Then motor to Plymouth & take my car by sea from thence to
Bordeaux. This saves time & a long, dull drive, leaving me only a short pleasant
drive through Provence. I don’t know how long it will take to drive from
Bordeaux to Milan – surely not a week, so I shall be in Milan before the 20th.
I am sorry to think I shall not hear Toscanini conduct all the Symphonies32 – it
would be a great experience. But I don’t see how I can get there in time.
As I have never been to Venice I am moved by the prospect of visiting it. I
hope Mr Berenson will be up to it – I am very sorry to hear he has not been
well.
On reading this letter through it seems very ill expressed & in places
ungrammatical. Please don’t tell your brother or he may feel it is not worth
wasting time on such a pupil. My only excuse is that it is late at night after a stiff
day’s work.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Clark.

31 Karl Parker
32 Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) was especially celebrated for his interpretations of Beethoven and
Wagner. He was the artistic director of La Scala, Milan, from 1921 to 1929 and conducted all
Beethoven’s symphonies at La Scala in October 1926.
18
Two

Life at I Tatti, the Lists and the Florentine Drawings,

Marriage and Parenthood
1927–1929

Living and working at I Tatti required as much in the way of diplomatic skills as
scholarly expertise. Berenson presided over what was, in essence, a modern-day
version of a Renaissance court with all the rituals, jealousies, frustrations and
temptations that court life inevitably entails. By temperament and upbringing
Clark was well suited not only to survive court life but actually to thrive on it.
The hub of daily activity at I Tatti was the Library. There was a constant
succession of assistants, mostly young, at work on one or another of Berenson’s
projects, or dealing with the routine and voluminous correspondence. The
task which principally preoccupied Berenson in the 1920s, and had done so
increasingly since the turn of the century, was the additions to, and revisions of
the ‘Lists’. They were just that: lists of the names of Italian artists, from the best-
known to the minor, together with the paintings that could be attributed to
them and their location. In the early years they were something that he and Mary
had worked on together, and initially they were addenda to his four essays on
Italian art: the Venetian Painters, the Florentine Painters, the Central Italian Painters
the North Italian Painters. By 1925 the Lists had become an enterprise in their
own right; Mary was no longer involved and assistants were employed to do the
donkey work. Their publication gave him enormous authority and power in the
scholarly and commercial art worlds. The Lists required extensive research – not
so much in archives in pursuit of documents but through journeys to places to
examine and re-examine works of art at first hand, to search out hitherto lost or
undiscovered works; and also through the acquisition of photographs in order to
establish an archive which could then be used for making visual comparisons. It
was by means of visual examination and comparison that Berenson believed that
decisions about attribution were best made.The scale and complexity of the task
should not be underestimated, nor its originality and pioneering nature. Every
year, inevitably, the Lists grew longer as new information and new evidence
came in; revisions were constant and attributions had to be changed from time
to time.

19
1927–1929 20

The Lists were not catalogues. Berenson offered no discourse or commentary

either about the artists or individual works – these were to be found in his
four essays on Italian art and in other books and articles. Notable among these
was the publication in 1927 in book form of Three Essays in Method (originally
published in Italian in the magazine Dedalo), in which he explained in detail,
by means of three case studies, his way of examining and assessing pictures as
to both style and content in order to arrive at an attribution of authorship. For
any young student of art interested in Berenson’s methods (as was Clark), the
publication was something of a handbook and, as Clark grew more confident
in his own observations and opinions, he liked to feed Berenson morsels of
information and photographs of the type that would please him and fit in with
his methodology and its needs. In the Lists, however, Berenson simply made
a pronouncement without any justification: this artist painted this; that artist
painted that. Nonetheless, the constant demands that the Lists imposed on him
were burdensome. They were an obsession. He drove his assistants hard and if
they made a mistake or failed to answer his requests with speed and accuracy
they would suffer the whiplash of his tongue and his temper.
Berenson’s Lists were exclusively devoted to paintings. The Florentine Drawings
was a related but different undertaking. First published in 1903 in two large
volumes, it bore the lengthy but self-explanatory title: The Drawings of the
Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and
Appreciation of Tuscan Art:With a Copious Catalogue Raisonné. If the attribution of
‘old master’ paintings is hazardous and difficult, the attribution of such drawings
– many of which are mere sketches or experiments or even sleights of hand
by assistants in a busy and competitive studio – is truly a minefield. Berenson
was well aware of this but also conscious that the publication was his scholarly
masterwork. During 1925–6, Berenson was in the middle of a major revision of
this magisterial work and it was on this that he most wished Clark to work, not
purely as an assistant but as a collaborator. It was a monumental task and the
minutiae it contained in its 500,000 words almost overwhelming. In the original
edition of 1903 he had analysed nearly 3000 drawings. There were now another
1000 to add; and all the 4000 had to be studied or restudied, photographed,
annotated, catalogued, and all the recent scholarly literature, most of it in
German, needed to be digested. Michelangelo gave the most difficulty, partly
because of the quantity of recent German scholarship about the artist. Asking
an untested young man to work with him in this capacity was a commitment
of considerable faith and trust. In the end the project took far longer than
ever anticipated and the revised edition was finally published in three volumes
in 1938.
Clark’s announcement of his wish to get married soon after he started work
in earnest at I Tatti was sudden and unexpected. Jane Martin, who was a doctor’s
daughter from Tunbridge Wells, had been at Oxford at the same time as Clark.
1927–1929 21

At Oxford she had become engaged to Janet Ross’s great-nephew, Gordon

Waterfield, a friend of Clark. When Waterfield went off to Egypt to work as
a journalist, he asked Clark to look after Jane. Jane and Clark grew close and
agreed that they wished at some point to be married, so her engagement to
Gordon was broken off. Clark claimed that he and Jane were never formally
betrothed and that in late 1926 he sent a telegram to her, from Italy, ‘asking her
to marry me on January 10th 1927, to which she agreed’ (Clark APW p. 165).
Whatever the ins and outs of this unusual manner of proposing, the undeniable
fact is that they were married on the due day and remained married until Jane
died in 1976.
The Berensons, who had been told by Clark at Christmas 1926 that he and
Jane were engaged, were not pleased by the news. There were several strands
to the Berensons’ annoyance. Berenson himself had been counting on having
Clark’s time and attention exclusively for his own use. Mary saw Clark as ‘I will
not say another Nicky, but another very congenial and reliable and satisfactory
prop for our declining years’. It also seems that they considered Clark had
stolen another man’s fiancée (whom they knew and liked) and this incurred
their severe disapproval. Mary was especially indignant and although she did not
overtly reveal her antagonism to the young couple, she took against them. She
later described Clark as a ‘queer mixture of arrogance and sensitive humility’ and
regarded Jane as a ‘complication’, ‘neither dressy nor smart’ and with ‘nothing to
say’ (Strachey p. 258, letter of 12 January 1926; p. 263, letter of 27 January; p. 275,
letter of 8 February 1929). Janet Ross, however, showed her disapproval openly,
until told to behave decently by Berenson (Clark APW p. 168.) Nonetheless, the
Berensons allowed the newly wedded Clarks back into the fold and for Jane to
join in the life and work at I Tatti.
Indeed, apparently oblivious of the Berensons’ covert disapproval, the Clarks
were, within a month of their marriage, installed at the Chiostro di San Martino,
a rented apartment within the precincts of the fifteenth-century Church of
San Martino, about a ten-minute walk from I Tatti. In April 1927 they travelled
together in northern Italy on their way back to England, where they spent the
summer in Oxford. In the autumn they returned to the Chiostro for a prolonged
stay until the following spring.
When they returned to Italy for this second stay their circumstances had
changed. Jane was pregnant. A boy, Alan, was born on 13 April 1928, in London,
after a long and difficult labour owing to the large size of the baby’s head. Clark
later claimed that it was on the same day that he delivered the manuscript of his
first book, The Gothic Revival, to his publisher. A few months after the birth they
moved from their unprepossessing tiny service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel, which
did not have a proper kitchen, into an equally unprepossessing but larger rented
house with space for a baby and servants, and a kitchen for a cook, in Tufton
Street, Westminster.
1927–1929 22

Clark continued with his commitment to the Florentine Drawings but often
he was left to work on his own. The Berensons were enjoying a golden period
financially. Early in 1928 a new five-year contract with the art dealer Duveen,
to whom he had been committed since 1907, came into force under which
Berenson would receive an annual retainer of £10,000 and ten per cent of
the cost of all purchases made on his recommendation. This arrangement
replaced the old labyrinthinely complex contract of 1912 under which some
payments were linked to profits, and whose terms had given rise to endless
misunderstandings and disputes. It was also, internationally, an era of expansion
and commercial confidence and this ambience encouraged the Berensons to
embark on an extensive programme of travel entailing long journeys: by car at
a leisurely pace in their comfortable Lancia, with their chauffeur Parry, across
Northern Europe via Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm,
Oslo ‘to do nothing but look at works of art and listen to music’ (Samuel ML p.
355); by train on the Orient Express for a two-month archaeological expedition
to Turkey, returning via Athens and Salonica; and by boat to Beirut for a two-
month expedition in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. There was the annual summer
retreat to ‘Poggio al Spino’, a small and simple house near the Consuma Pass, in
the hills about an hour south-east of Florence, amid dense cool woods of birch and
conifer, where the principal members of I Tatti retreated nearly every summer to
escape the heat of the Val d’Arno and the throng of visitors; and the ritual Christmas
visit by Berenson, without Mary, to Edith Wharton in the South of France.
The lengthy visit to England by way of Holland in the summer of 1927 was an
opportunity for Berenson and Clark to work together in the British Museum
Print Room, at the Ashmolean and at Windsor Castle.
The researches which Berenson required meant that Clark had to spend time
in libraries but it also necessitated travel to inspect drawings at first hand in
collections inside and outside Italy. The minutiae of library work with books
was never really to Clark’s taste, but the chance to gain through Berenson’s
influence an entrée to those collections difficult to see, to examine works of
art at first hand and to extend his knowledge and range of contacts, appealed
greatly to him. He managed to juggle his researches, the demands and joys of
early married life, parenthood, establishing a family home, travel and the self-
centred demands of his patron, with considerable dexterity, but in May 1929
Berenson wrote unexpectedly, and somewhat peremptorily, to tell Clark that
he no longer wished him to be his collaborator on the Florentine Drawings.
The decision, which evidently caused much heart-searching on both sides, was
made more protracted because Berenson’s letter, it seems, got lost in the post.
However, two important invitations were already in the pipeline for Clark: to
join the executive committee of the forthcoming Italian exhibition at the Royal
Academy in London and to undertake a catalogue of the Leonardo da Vinci
drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor.
Chronology

1927

January Mary Berenson goes to Berne, Switzerland, for a cure

Berenson’s Three Essays in Method published by the
Clarendon Press, Oxford
10 January Clark and Jane Martin are married in London
February Clarks arrive at I Tatti and stay at Chiostro di San
Martino
Mary Berenson in Berne, Switzerland
April Clark and Jane visit Venice, Turin, Parma, Bologna,
Modena and the Clark-owned hotel at Sospel in the
South of France
May Clarks return to Chiostro di San Martino
Summer Clark rents house in Oxford to work on The Gothic
Revival
Berensons visit Venice,Vienna, Prague, Dresden,
Hamburg and Berlin; Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden
in Stockholm; Oslo
Mary Berenson goes to England
Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit north-west Germany
and Holland
Berenson, Mary and Nicky visit Paris and then spend a
month in London, renting a house in Lower Berkeley
Street. Berenson studies prints and drawings with Clark
at the British Museum, the Royal Library at Windsor,
and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
August Clarks visit the family estate at Ardnamurchan
Autumn Clarks return to I Tatti (Chiostro di San Martino)
November Berensons go to Paris where Berenson works with Clark
and Nicky Mariano on drawings in the Louvre

23
Christmas Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit Edith Wharton at
Hyères in the South of France. Mary Berenson returns
to I Tatti
1928

Spring Clarks return to London from Italy

13 April Alan Clark born
The Gothic Revival delivered to publisher (Constable).
June/July Berenson’s father dies aged 83
Mary visits London
Berensons at Consuma
Clarks move to 65 Tufton Street, Westminster
August/September Clarks visit Scotland
Berensons visited at Consuma by Duveen with a visit
to San Sepolcro
Berenson and Nicky Mariano undertake a two-month
archaeological trip in Turkey, based at Constantinople
November Berensons return to I Tatti by way of Athens, Salonica
and Emilia Romagna

1929

January Clarks in Rome where Clark attends a lecture by Aby

Warburg at the Hertziana
Spring Clark starts to catalogue Windsor drawings
Berensons and Nicky Mariano visit Syria and
Palestine
May Berenson writes to Clark to terminate their
collaboration on The Florentine Drawings
June Berensons return to I Tatti
Berenson works on the Lists; Mary works on her
‘Book of Travels’ (published in 1938 as A Vicarious Trip
to the Barbary Coast)

24
1927–1929 25

[Undated but they were married on 10 January 1927]

St. Ermins1
Westminster s.w.1.
Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson,

Although we were married yesterday this is the first free minute there’s been
to write in, and & we want the first letter to be to you because it is due to you
more than anyone that we are as we are – that is to say a good deal happier than
I’ve ever thought possible on this widdershins2 planet. We shall never be able to
thank you properly for sympathy, insight & generosity. I hope you won’t regret
it; at present it seems to me impossible that you should. Jane says you will think
her a deaf mute; but I tell her you don’t have that effect on people.
We were married in a hideous church3 – not even Gothic Revival. But it only
took fourteen minutes, so I can’t grumble. Everyone seemed satisfied except
the pew opener who refused to believe that two such drab & youthful people
could be bride & bridegroom. No organ, no champagne & only half-a-dozen
handshakes: I call that a success.
Unfortunately Jane is still very run down, and is suffering from a terrible
tooth. I think she needs a rest & a change & we will probably go to Sospel4
together & have Lothian5 meet us there. There is a great deal to see here with
the Flemish6 exhibition on. But what with clothes & callers Jane will get no rest.
You see, I adopt a husband like tone at once.
Please thank Nicky for her postcard. We will write to her as soon as our feet
are clear of duty letters of thanks.
Love to you all,
Yrs ever,
K.

1 Clark’s mother gave the service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel to Clark on his marriage to Jane. See Ch. 1
n. 18.
2 A Lowland Scottish term meaning to go against sense; contrary.
3 St Peter’s, Eaton Square, built in the early19th century and an austere example of the Greek Revival
style.
4 See Ch. 1 n. 15.
5 Possibly a chauffeur called Lothian.
6 The large and ambitious Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art 1300–1900 was the major event at the
Royal Academy in 1927.
1927–1929 26

Chiostro di San Martino7

Settignano.
8-ii-27

Dear Mrs Berenson,

I should have written before to tell you about our arrival here. It has all been
surprisingly successful – perhaps ‘surprise’ is the wrong word, because we didn’t
expect anything but great kindness from everyone at i Tatti, and so far the whole
thing – the house, the servants, even the bells – has far passed our expectations.
We have been up to i Tatti to lunch & dinner, & though Jane was naturally shy
at first, it would have been impossible to be embarrassed in such an atmosphere.
Nicky alone would have prevented that, & Trevy8 could hardly exist in an
atmosphere of formality. Most charming of all was BB. Jane finds, as I do, that
he is not in the least awe inspiring, & that however much one may admire his
wonderful intellectual qualities, he is essentially friendly and lovable. This is a
great thing, because one either sees that side of him or one doesn’t, & too many
people don’t – why I can’t imagine. It was also very pleasant to find dear Morra9
there. He & Trevy have dined here twice & are coming again; they make a
perfect combination & no one could feel shy with them. As for Mrs Hyde:10 we
are both won round to her; of course she was alarmingly unlike the rest of us, &
as you know the word ‘smart’ is a red rag to me. But she is really such a good sort,
so nice to Jane & such fun with BB that we like her. I hope she’ll come down
here for a meal some day.
Aunt Janet behaved as we expected. She could hardly have been ruder, but
as she neither looked at, nor spoke one single word to, Jane during the whole
interview, Jane was saved the responsibility of replying, & so could hardly
incriminate herself. After all that she must have heard about Jane it is something
that she allows her into the house.
The Chiostro is just as I had anticipated. Enchanting but chilly. Still the
weather can’t continue and we don’t really suffer. Our servants, on the other
hand, surpass anticipations. The old french maid is of a sort one imagined only

7 The Chiostro was rented by Mary for guests. Clark said there was a plaque in the bedroom saying
that St Andrew the Scot had died there in 682 (Clark APW p. 167).
8 Robert Trevelyan
9 Umberto Morra
10 Charlotte Pruyn Hyde (1867–1963) was born in Glen Falls, Upper New York State, into a successful
paper-making family. In Boston she met a Harvard law student, Louis Hyde (1866–1934). They
married in 1901 and in 1906 he joined the paper-making business. They built a new house in the
Renaissance style and in the 1920s and 30s formed a collection of furniture and works of art. They
travelled regularly to Europe where they became friends of the Berensons, who advised them on
their purchases. They gave their house and collection to the City of Glen Falls as an art museum.
1927–1929 27

existed in old plays – charming & extraordinarily willing. She has taken a great
fancy to Jane, & this is reinforced by the fact that Mrs Price11 lunched here
today & was obviously quite satisfied with her tenants. And the cook! My pen
pauses in reverence as I write his name – really the best cooking I have ever
encountered, & I come straight from some of the most pretentious tables in
London. I dreaded his first bills – but they were very reasonable – Marie says far
less than Mrs Price’s.
Jane was touched and delighted by your letter which must have crossed one
from her in which she tried to say how kind everyone had been. I needn’t tell
you how much pleasure it gave her. She isn’t answering it herself as all she could
say has been said already in her first letter.
As I write a letter is come from Aunt Janet asking us both to lunch. It adds a
note of triumph to our chorus of praise & thanksgiving, though I don’t doubt
that the letter was wrung from her by Nicky.
We both look forward to seeing you very much indeed.You are, of course, the
chief author of all our happiness.
Yours affty.
Kenneth

3 May 1927
Chiostro Di San Martino
Settignano
Firenze

Dear Mrs Berenson,

We were sad to find you had all gone, but I am sure you deserved a holiday. We
are both very brown & well & pleased with ourselves; our stay at Sospel was
delightful & our drive back most instructive. We saw the Turin Gallery quite
thoroughly & the Gualino Collection (thank you so much for the introduction).
The Pollaiuolo & Filippino are both pictures which no photo can convey; &
of course many of Gualino’s things are enchanting, especially some of the small
things – the Veronese, the Foppa & the Rubens landscape. What of his Piero
della Francesca?12 We were not prepared for it & found it beautiful, though not

11 Mrs Price was the owner of the Chiostro. Clark said that the apartment came fully equipped and
with Mrs Price’s maid (presumably Marie), plus a cook and a housemaid.
12 Riccardo Gualino (1879–1964) was a successful industrialist who became Chairman of Fiat and
founder of Snia Viscosa which manufactured artificial silk. Immensely rich and a prodigious and
voracious collector, he built a princely residence in Cereseto near Turin in a Lombard Gothic style.
Gualino was an anti-fascist. Mussolini confiscated his castle and his assets but after his fall Gualino
1927–1929 28

quite his silveriest or solidest. Most of the pictures improved on acquaintance,

especially the wonderful Byzantine madonna. But the meeting of Joachim and
Anna, which I was disposed to take seriously in reproduction, looks, in the
original, like a fake – and is now kept in a box-room.
By wonderful good luck they were doing Cosi fan Tutte the second night we
were in Turin, & E-leo took us in his box; we’d neither of us been in a box at an
opera before & were as proud as peacocks; & the performance was perfect. E-leo
said the best thing the Theatre has yet done, & I certainly can’t imagine Mozart
better played or sung, though the scenery by Komisayevsky13 was a little too
Moscow-Arty-ish. When one considers what Courtauld14 is doing in London
& Gualino in Turin it becomes a moral duty to buy artificial silk. E-leo was
charming to us & I really like him though his theories on art are daft.
Unfortunately we could not help with the lists as the Accademia is entirely
dismantled & shut up. Pictures are being restored & reframed & consequently
are without numbers.
From Turin we went to Parma, stopping at Piacenza – which contains
fascinating churches, doesn’t it. We had out the Byzantine M.S. at Parma15 &
went through it all carefully; & also the Baptistery roof by a good light.16 Poor
Moschini’s successor is going to re-hang the Parma Gallery completely, so any
search for numbers was fruitless. We then motored to Bologna – stopped & saw
the gallery & cathedral at Modena, & this morning saw the Bologna gallery &
a few churches. I loved it; I have to see things twice before I feel I’ve seen them
& it was fun showing Jane things. I prophesied in front of the pictures in feeble
imitation of BB; but she was not impressed & discovered a lot for herself.
We are delighted to be back. The garden is lovely & I am sure the drains are
cured; I was sorry to trouble you with them at such a busy time. Mrs Stoop17 is

re-established himself and his fortune. Today there is a room in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin which
is dedicated to the Gualino Collection and includes Veronese’s Venus and Mars with Cupid and a
Horse, and Rubens’s Landscape with a Pushcart. The Pollaiuolo referred to is Tobias and the Angel, and
the Filippino Lippo is The Three Archangels and Tobias; the Piero della Francesca, which Clark queries,
may be a reference to a work by Nicola di Maestro Antonio d’Ancona, San Gerolamo nel deserto.The
first volume of a catalogue of the Gualino Collection by Lionello Venturi was published in 1927.
13 Fyodor Fyodorovich (‘Theodore’) Komissarzhevsky (1882–1954) was a Venetian-born Russian
theatrical director and designer, particularly notable for his ground-breaking productions of plays
by Chekhov and Shakespeare. A colourful figure of European theatre, he placed great emphasis on
costume and stage sets.
14 Samuel Courtauld
15 The Parma Gospel Book in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma is a Tetraevangelion (the Four Gospels)
believed to have been compiled in the latter half of the 11th century.
16 The Baptistery of Parma dates from 1196. The outside of pink Verona marble is octagonal. The most
striking interior feature is the painted domed ceiling. Sixteen rays come out of the centre of the
ceiling, each corresponding to sixteen arches which form alcoves each containing a painted scene.
17 Mrs Frank Stoop was a colourful London hostess who was married to a Dutch-born stockbroker.
Patrons of musicians and modern art, the Stoops lived in a small house in Hans Place, Chelsea, and
1927–1929 29

in Florence – perhaps she was the last straw – if she can be compared to a straw
– which decided you to go away.
We both send love to Nicky & BB.
Yours ever,
K.

8 iii 28
St Ermins
Westminster

Dear Mrs Berenson,

We are never very good correspondents and since we returned we have been
busy comforting our parents. They have now gone & left us free to write letters.
We had a very peaceful journey back; I did not really anticipate anything else,
but the thought that it might be rough or that the baby might be born in the
Wagon lit had oppressed me for so long that when we arrived at Victoria with
Jane safe & sound I felt I was in a dream. Jane enjoyed the journey, & was not
even very tired. The worst part was leaving San Martino. We had been so happy
there & had come to look on it as a home. I have certainly never been so sorry to
leave any place. It was with difficulty that we prevented ourselves from weeping
as we drove away.
Here I work till lunch & from tea to dinner at my book; that only leaves about
two free hours a day in which to see things & people, & those are chiefly taken
up with looking for a house. We have not yet found anything.
I found my mother very frail after her operation, but I suppose she will be
the better for it ultimately. At present she is nervous & seems ready to pour cold
water on anything.
We have not yet seen Logan18 owing to the parental incubus; and hope to ring
him up tomorrow. The only Londoner that we have seen is Ashton19 whom we
met by chance. He looks much the better for his rebuff; it has cleared his skin. It
is perhaps as well that the lady refused him, though she is very beautiful, & very
pleasant (not at all common) for I do not see how she would have stayed with
him for long; & he wants domestic serenity. [Here added in another hand: (She

collected works by artists such as Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. In
1933 the Stoop Collection was given to the Tate and forms the core of their holdings of international
modern art. The Stoop and the Clark families had intermarried, although distantly from Kenneth
Clark.
18 Logan Pearsall Smith
19 Leigh Ashton
1927–1929 30

is the actress Hope Johnstone20 married, who was engaged to Leigh Ashton)].
I hope your cure has really done you good. I am sure you will have enjoyed
the rest & change.
Jane is very well & sends her love.
Yours affectionately,
Kenneth Clark.

14 April. 28.
St Ermins
Westminster s.w.1
Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson

Thank you all very much for the telegram. Here are full particulars of the event.
The baby arrived at 11.15 yesterday morning; I had taken Jane to the nursing
home at dinner time the night before, very cheerful & in no pain. I believe the
thing went off as well as is possible considering the infants size, for it is said to
be a large baby. Jane is always much upset by anaesthetics, so did not recover
very quickly yesterday; but I believe she is much better today, though still stiff &
weak. As for the baby, no one seems to bother about it, so I presume it is perfectly
normal. It seemed to me abnormally ugly, but people with more experience
assure me that it’s beautiful. School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very close to
the one in the André picture.21 I am thankful that it is all over, though I had the
minimum of worry, Jane was so cheerful & well to the last minute; & of course
my ignorance helped to keep me from pessimism. I shall be seeing Jane this
evening & will write again to tell you how she gets on. Poor dear, it must be a
ghastly business.
Quarter of an hour after Jane’s baby was born I took my book22 to the
publishers, & they were very polite about it.
Please forgive a short letter. I have written ten, & five or six remain to be
written. My love to everybody.
Ever yours affectionately,
K. C.

20 Charles Hope-Johnstone
21 Baldovinetti (1425–1499), Madonna and Child, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.
22 The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste was published by Constable in September/October
1928.
1927–1929 31

5. May ’28
St. Ermins
Westminster s.w.1.
Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson,

Thank you very much for all your letters. I have written to Mrs Carmichael but
I am afraid she will get things very muddled. I wish I was there to stand over her.
For about three days after the baby arrived Jane was wretchedly ill; then she
suddenly recovered & has been very well & happy ever since. She returns to the
flat on Monday. We shall stay in London till after the Holford Sale,23 & then go
to Tunbridge Wells for ten days. The baby is very well. Authorities, such as Jane’s
doctor, say he is a prize baby, & he certainly seems much heartier looking than
the ordinary babe of three weeks old. But his parents are quite as infatuated as
parents are supposed be, & he may be quite a commonplace child, after all. Jane
feeds him, not without sorrow as he is strong & greedy.
Constables, after expressing enthusiasm for my work, have sent it off to an
architect to see if there are any architectural blunders in it. There probably are.
In any case he has had it a fortnight, & has shown no signs of having read it.
Meanwhile my morale is failing & I find it impossible to write the last ten
pages of the last two chapters – which I didn’t give Constable, not from lack
of material, but from lack of will. In fact I begin to know how Cyril24 feels,
presumably, all the time.

23 The Holford Sales of 1927/8 were arguably the high points of the London market in the inter-war
years. The collections, accumulated by Robert Staynor Holford (1808–1892), comprised the finest
pictures, manuscripts, books, silver and furniture. For several generations the Holfords had been
Lords of the Manor of Westonbirt in Gloucestershire where they lived quietly but Robert, in 1838,
became unexpectedly very rich through the rise in value of shares in the New River Company,
and the recovery of gold bullion buried by an uncle in the Isle of Wight during the threat of the
Napoleonic invasion. With this fortune he started to collect on a vast scale . His grandfather had
also made an immense fortune by supplying London with fresh water through a canal. The original
Elizabethan manor house was demolished by his father, who built a lavish new house in 1823, and
a few years later he started the celebrated Arboretum which became one of Robert’s principal
passions. To accommodate his growing collection Robert built Dorchester House in Park Lane,
London, in 1851–3. His only son George (1860–1926) shared his father’s passion for gardening but
not for art and literature. A military man and a close friend of and Equerry to the future Edward vii,
he married late in life and had no children. When he died in 1926 the principal part of the estate
passed to his nephew, the Earl of Morley, who sold Westonbirt House, Dorchester House and the
collections in 1927/8.The family gave the Arboretum to the nation in 1956. Christie’s sold the Italian
pictures from the Holford Collection in July 1927 and the Dutch and Flemish pictures on 17 and
18 May 1928. The 1928 sale created a sensation. It was viewed by some 10,000 people and raised
£364,094, then a world record for an auction-room two-day sale.
24 Cyril Connolly
1927–1929 32

Your news of Cyril will distress his supporters but cannot surprise those who
know him. He has always been liable to bursts of worldliness – we used to call
these phases ‘Champagne paganism’ – & they are usually followed by periods of
some intellectualism – called his ‘Sebastian van Storck’25 phase. Both phases are
equally unproductive of written work, but ‘champagne paganism’ has the added
disadvantage that it makes Cyril contemptuous of intelligent conversation. His
friends usually find it best to withdraw till this disturbing period is passed: there
is no way of helping him through it. What a wonderful assortment of people
have stayed at i Tatti – I would like to see them all in a row. (ro not rau).
I have found a picture in a dealer’s here which, I think, will amuse you. It is a
head of a girl which belonged to Charles i (his seal on back), fully described in
his Catalogue as by Giorgione. It also belonged to George iv who gave it to a
Lord in Ireland, where it has been ever since. I have wheedled a photo out of the
dealer, (not for BB., but for myself) & will send it to you as soon as I get it. It is a
lovely brilliant thing, & I have no idea who painted it.26
What do you think of Desmond’s27 new paper? The prospectus is like that of
a school magazine. I hope it survives for a year, as I have sent him some articles
– but he’s probably lost them, anyway.
I went down to Oxford to see Charly [sic] Bell28 a week ago. He had just had
another relapse & was in bed, so terribly thin & white that it was impossible
to believe that he could go on living. But his eyes darted about indomitably,
& I don’t despair of his being cured. He is as full of passion as ever & sent the
warmest message to all of you.
Please thank Logan for his telegram. I shall write to him when I hear from
Constable. And please give our love to Nicky & BB.
Ever yours affectionately,
K.

25 Sebastian van Storck was the subject of a short story (1886) by Walter Pater, the Oxford philosopher
and aesthetician (Berenson was an admirer of Pater so he would have understood the reference),
about a rich and distinguished youth in 17th-century Holland, much driven by intellectual curiosity
who comes to the conclusion that all material existence and human emotion are mere illusion, and
that reality lies only in detached and absolute thought because nothing exists except in the mind.
This conclusion, and the desire for peace, led him into melancholy and to death – a death caused,
however, not by suicide but by the saving of the life of a young child.
26 Unidentified
27 Desmond MacCarthy
28 Charles Bell
1927–1929 33

11 Church Road
Tunbridge Wells29
20. May 28.

Dear Mr Berenson,
The last five weeks have been rather a nightmare with little leisure for anything
agreeable; but the worst of it seems to be over now. Jane is really better, the baby
is very robust, the house in London is almost painted, & Constable’s have finally
made arrangements about my book. We have come down here for a few days
rest, & I feel like a slum child at the sight of the hills & hedges.
When we get back to London I shall be free to go about the business of
the Florentine Drawings, & I shall be glad to get back to them. Chatsworth &
Windsor will be a great delight, & so will the Edinburgh Gallery which I have
quite forgotten. Please thank Mrs Berenson for her letter & the Edinburgh notes.
I will write to her soon.
One of these pictures I believe you know, but I thought you might not have
a photo of it. Incidentally the dealer to whom it belongs – Max Rothschild30 –
says that you once called it a Bartolommeo della Gata.This surprises me very
much, as, in the original it looks exactly like an Alunno – if an old picture, or
rather as much of it as is old. However my idea of B. della G. is pretty sketchy &
founded only on the three pictures. The other head is a very interesting thing.
It is painted in tempera & of astonishing brilliance, with an atmosphere like a
Vermeer. It is part of a larger picture which was in Charles i’s collection, escaped
his sale & was given by Queen Victoria to an Irish Lord, who cut it up. The two
other parts were in a house which was burnt down. The original picture was
described as Georgioni [sic], his mistress & another lady.The remaining fragment
has Charles i’s seal on the back. This pedigree is certainly genuine, but that does
not, of course effect [sic] the authorship of the painting.Various shots have been
made at it – Dosso, Cariani, Palma & so forth, none quite convincing.The dealer
to whom it belongs deals chiefly in dutch things & is quite ignorant of Italian.
He may send you the picture, but in case not I thought you would like the photo
– which of course he does not know is for you. I never mention your name in
dealers’ shops.

29 Jane Clark’s parents’ house.

30 Max Rothschild ran the Sackville Gallery specialising in old master pictures at 28 Sackville Street,
London.
1927–1929 34

Russell31 is selling some of his drawings – all the late ones except the Venetians
– & I am going up tomorrow in case one comes within my reach. I doubt it, as
his collection has been well boomed. I also fought my way into the Holford32
sale which was quite interesting sociologically. The price of second rate Dutch
pictures makes the Italians look cheap.
We hear from Mrs Russell33 uncertain reports about your plans. It seems that
you really may get to Constantinople. Whatever you do we are quite free to fall
in with your plans, & even if we arrived in Italy before you were back there is
plenty to see there. I am afraid Cyril Connolly was a disappointment at i Tatti: of
course he is that everywhere, but he really justifies his existence of providing an
unending topic of conversation.
I forgot to ask if you have a photo of the Holford Leonardo drawing sold at
Sotheby’s last week.34 If not I can let you have one. It is a great beauty. There is a
wonderful exhibition of Tiepolo drawings in London35 – A sketch book which
Tiepolo presented to a convent & which subsequently belonged to Canova.The
man who owns them (a share) has done a catalogue of them with real photos,
which you might like to have, if he has not sent it to you.
I hope you will forgive my squalid notepaper, bad writing & bad spelling, but
I am writing with difficulties.
Jane joins me in Love to you all,
Yours affectionately,
K.C.
P.S. I am sending the photos separately.

31 Archibald George Bloomfield Russell (1879–1955), an art critic and art historian specialising in
William Blake, was a collector and connoisseur of old master drawings. Drawings from his collection
were sold by Sotheby’s in London in 1928. He later turned to collecting butterflies and moths. A
long-serving officer of arms at the College of Arms in London, he was Lancaster Herald from 1922
to 1954.
32 See n. 23.
33 Alys Russell
34 Included in Sotheby’s Old Master Sale of 17 May 1928 was a small silverpoint study of a horse and
rider by Leonardo da Vinci which had belonged to the Holford family. It was purchased by John
Nicholas Brown of Newport, Rhode Island, for £2500. In due course it was inherited by J. Carter
Brown, and was sold by Christie’s, London, in July 2001, for £8,143,750.
35 There was an exhibition of Tiepolo drawings at the Savile Gallery in May 1928. The gallery was
started by Richard Edward Arnesby Wilson with Mark Oliver in 1927. It closed in the 1930s, a victim
of the Depression.
1927–1929 35

65 Tufton Street36
s.w.1.
15th June ’28

Dear Mrs Berenson,

After a great deal of labour we are now settled here. We have practically no
servants, & I still do most of the housework. But carrying and carpentering
which has occupied my time for the last fortnight is almost over.
When I got your kind letter suggesting that Mr Berenson might not be ready
for the Drawings till next spring, I should like to have replied at once. But a letter
to Mr Berenson was long over due, so I said in that what I should also have said
to you – that I shall be out in Florence this winter ready to help him if I can. I
owe him a great deal, & I should like to try & be of use to him. But if you do
not think I can be of any use to him please tell me so. I shall not be surprised,
but rather sorry.
This house is very much to my taste. The decorations are quite unadventur-
ous, & of a kind most unpopular just now – mahogany furniture & large gold
picture frames of the kind called Edwardian. But I grew up among such sur-
roundings & would not be comfortable in the shiny rooms now fashionable. I
always used to think it odd that Ruskin could have lived surrounded by hideous
Victorian furniture, but I sympathise with him now.
Jane is very well, despite a great deal of work & worry. Our first experiment
in servants was a failure, the cook refusing to attempt an omelette, owing to the
complicated nature of the dish. She maintains that she is always considered a
first-class cook, & such is the standard of cooking here that she probably is. All
the english seem to expect is something out of a tin with hot water poured over
it. Both she & the housemaid are under notice & so far we have discovered no
reputable substitutes.
We envy our son. He is fed regularly & abundantly, & sleeps in the intervals.
He is extremely well & warms our hearts by flourishing his arms & gurgling.We
cannot allow that any other baby has done these things. He was christened on
friday, Barbara37 being one of the six people present. He hicoughed gently while
we gave solemn promises that he would shun the flesh.
Next week I really hope I shall be able to take up my work, so called. I much
look forward to looking at drawings again – other than my own, which hang

36 Tufton Street is a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and within walking distance of the National
Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the Tate Gallery at Millbank.
37 Barbara Halpern
1927–1929 36

in my study. They include an enchanting Correggio38 & a ravishing Beccafumi

which I managed to snatch out of the teeth of the dealers here. Soon I shall
believe I own Leonardo’s & Michelangelos.39
Jane joins me in love to you all.
Yrs.
K.

15th July 1928.

As from
Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear Mr Berenson,
I am sending you a photograph of a picture which I have bought. I am afraid
the photograph is not very good & of course gives no idea of the colour, which
is good. I hope you like the look of the picture. It hangs on our living room
mantelpiece & gives us great pleasure.
Jane has had a bad cold, & London has been very hot, so we have taken refuge
in the country for a week. We have arranged to stay in Windsor from August
13th to 20th, & afterwards we go to Chatsworth. Edinburgh & Glasgow we shall
visit on the way to my home in Scotland in September. I should like to manage
a week in Oxford, but not in this weather. In the meanwhile I shall have plenty
to do correcting proofs of my essay, which is now in the press. It is very bad, very
disappointing, & I wish I had locked it up for twenty years. However having it
published will be a chastening experience, & I suppose, good for a dilettante like
myself.
Macbeth has found all the photographs ordered from the B.M. but three.
I am afraid we took our references on the wrong option for the purposes of
photography. We should have taken the numbers of the cases as well as the

38 Correggio, Mother and Child, drawing related to Allegory of Virtue, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Berenson
considered it to be a work after Correggio.
39 Clark did buy a drawing which was later attributed to Michelangelo. Lot 124 in the Oppenheimer
Sale of Old Master Drawings, 10 July 1936, at Christie’s, was catalogued as ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’.
The drawing was of The Virgin and Child, and the lot includes two other drawings. The reserve was
£80, and Clark bought it for 100 guineas (£105). In a letter to Frederick Hartt in June 1972, Clark
explained that he had bought it at a moment when many so-called Michelangelo drawings were
attributed to various actual or invented pupils or followers (see Ch. 5 n. 119) and that the drawing
had been attributed to one such. Later Johannes Wilde, A. E. Popham and Philip Pouncey accepted
it as authentic. Berenson thought it was School of Michelangelo. Clark also says that it suffered
damage during the war (see Ch. 5 n. 84).
1927–1929 37

press-marks. Fortunately the three which Macbeth can’t find do not seem very
important. Perhaps I shall be able to find them.
Most of our time in London has been spent on household work. Servants are
unbelievably silly in England. In the intervals I have tried to write an epilogue
to my essay, & failed hopelessly. I have also read a little – the first time for some
years – & enjoyed very much the sensation of some wretched person trying to
make facts clear & entertaining to me, instead of my trying to do so for someone
else. (For whom, I wonder.)
We look forward to seeing Mrs Berenson in August, & showing her our son,
who really does seem to be a success.
Jane joins me in love to you all,
Yours.
K.C.

[Undated letter]
Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB,
Your letter made me blush40 – most letters do, but I was more than usually
careless about those photographs. I had them packed & addressed when we
moved house.41 They got lost in the move & have only recently reappeared –
when I was too ashamed to send them. However here they are + a drawing of
Russell’s42 that will interest you, I think.
Shame apart, I was delighted to get your letter & hear that the end of those
cursed lists was in sight. As a bourgeois myself I am very complacent about
bourgeois instincts, and am glad that yours have survived. The lists will be an
everlasting blessing, especially for people like myself who, though fond of the
attribution game, would like to try another approach to the study of art.
The Gothic Revival is finished, proofs & all; & it makes a pretty book.
Logan enjoyed finding misprints in it all last weekend, & Jane is making it an
encyclopedic index. It is too late now for apotropaios43 (if that is the word); I can
only hope people will realise the size & difficulty of the subject.

40 Letter missing.
41 See letter of 20 May 1928.
42 See n. 31.
43 Greek for ‘warding off evil’.
1927–1929 38

We go to Windsor on Monday for a week, & I hope to spend one day of it

at Lockinge.44 I once glanced at the drawings there & found nothing except the
Raphael.45 But the Holford Leonardo46 was discovered in a most disreputable
scrapbook so I have hopes. I had a piece of luck the other day. You know the
pitifully repainted Correggios in the Louvre – allegories of Virtue & Vice. I’ve
found the drawing for the woman & child to the right of Virtue – perhaps the
most repainted part of all. Unfortunately my drawing is rather damaged, but
quite unbedeviled & the exquisite loveliness of the figure shines quite clearly
through the blotches of damp. It shows, too, some very interesting variants from
the painted figure.47 I got it for £7.
What fine things Russell (AGB)48 has got. I dined with him a week or two
ago, & was glad to see a large heap of photos ready to be sent to you.
Either way do you know a drawing of a horse reduced to measured proportions
in the Metropolitan which is ascribed in an old hand to Verrochio?49 I think it is
right – at least the handwriting agrees perfectly with all the other specimens of
V’s hand known to me. I have not seen a photo of it at i Tatti.
My family are extremely well, & the infant, very fortunately, seems to enjoy
travelling. I have heard from Charley Bell who sounds rather more vigorous than
he did; but, poor man, his rather silly assistant is leaving him & he himself is
thinking seriously of retiring. So his great life’s work of preventing people seeing
the drawings in the Ashmolean may be ruined. Much as I love him, it will be a
good thing for Oxford & students generally when a more liberal spirit rules the
Ashmolean.
I shall do my best for you at Edinburgh & Glasgow; & the week after next I
hope to go to Chatsworth. Then I shall write again & report anything I found.
Did that poor lady in Florence ever finish typing the list of Drawings?
Jane sends her love to you both,
Ever yours affectionately,
K.

44 Lockinge House in Berkshire was owned by Arthur Thomas Loyd who had inherited the house
and estate on the death of a second cousin, Lady Wantage (born Harriet Loyd), in 1920. The house,
a brick-built Georgian mansion built in the 1750s, was demolished in 1947. It had a distinguished
library, whose librarian had been Arthur Strong (see n. 76 below).
45 Raphael, Group of Four Figures, now owned by the Getty Museum, California. It is a study for
Raphael’s Disputa. The drawing was published by A. G. B. Russell in The Vasari Society, 2nd ser., pt v,
Oxford, 1924, p. 9, no. 6, and by Oskar Fischel in the Burlington Magazine (October 1925), pp. 174–9.
46 See n. 34 above.
47 See n. 38 above.
48 See n. 31 above.
49 Andrea del Verrocchio, Measured Drawing of a Horse, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
acquired in 1917.
1927–1929 39

Nov 1, 1928
Pera Palace Hotel
Constantinople

Dear Kenneth
Your letter wh. we received a day or two ago delighted us, it reminded me that
again I must approach you with a confession that I shall not be ready to go to
work on the drawings before next June.
We are planning to spend Apr. & May in Palestine & Syria. Fr. Dec. to Apr. I
shall have my time taken by the last revisions of the list. When we return fr. the
near East I shall begin to turn my attention to the drawings but even then I shall
be giving half my time to proof-reading and tinkering & re-writing. Then next
autumn we mean to go to Spain.
The upshot is that for a whole year I shall not be able to do much on our
joint task.
I do not need tell you how glad we should be to have you living at the
Villino50 and how delighted to see you & to enjoy yr. society. Only you must
consult your own convenience & not come out expecting to work with me on
the drawings. I am sure you know how much I regret having engaged you in a
partnership wh. I was so far fr. ready to enter upon. I had no idea the lists would
take me so long for I calculated on the work I used to be able to do & had no
idea of how little I can now do each day. I am most grateful for all you have
done hitherto & I hope you will go on and see the French collections. Lille &
Bayonne are the great depositories but at Rennes there is a good lot & almost
certainly there are others at Nantes and Dijon and Orleans and Grenoble etc. etc.
Indeed there is no telling what one may find in the French provincial museum
or library. I expect more from libraries than museums.
I look forward to see photos of drawings you write you have procured & I
hope you will have one of the medal you have found.51
I am writing by open windows with the thermometer at 68 in the shade.
Constantinople is a fascinating place wh. it will be hard to leave. I have learnt
more here than I expected to – if only I don’t forget it.

50 When the Berensons purchased I Tatti they acquired, along with 57 acres, several rustic houses,
including the Villino at Corbignano, just across the road from I Tatti, and well placed on an elevated
west-facing hillside. Over time it was modernised and became the principal guest house for visitors
to I Tatti.
51 See n. 68 below.
1927–1929 40

Our next address will be Hotel Petit Palais Athens. We may stay there till the
end of the month.
With much affection to you both
Ever yrs.
B.B.

Nov. 7th ’28

Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.,
Your letter reached me in Edinburgh, whither I had gone to visit a newly found
collection of drawings.52 I was very glad to get it & to hear definitely what your
plans are to be. Of course it is disappointing that you will not be able to work on
the Florentine Drawings for almost a year, but I can hunt other drawings in out
of the way places & look through collections of reproductions & do other things
which require more time & less intelligence than you need to give. Also I hope
that every year makes me better able to work with you.
We are most grateful to you for renewing your kind offer of the Villino.
Certainly we cannot let the whole winter pass without seeing Italy; but we are
most unwilling to cart our infant about unless it is absolutely necessary to do
so. At present our plan is this: to go out to Rome for a month or so, without
the baby; &, if it is convenient, to see you on the way home. We could visit the
French collections in the spring, &, if you go to Spain in the autumn, we should
much like to join you there.
Of course work for the Florentine Drawings cannot consume all my time,
& I should very much like your advice on how the rest of it may be profitably
employed. I learn what I can by reading & looking but such purely assimilative
work can never be as valuable as a systematic work towards a definite aim. Many
plans have occurred to me, the most ambitious & the one which seems to me
most worth doing is some study of the conflict between classicism & baroque
which seems to have absorbed the Italian spirit during the late 16th & early 17th
century. I should like to put Raphael & Michelangelo into two slots at the top

52 Perhaps a reference to the 2000 drawings which the Royal Scottish Academy had gifted to the
National Gallery in Edinburgh in 1910.
1927–1929 41

& see them come out Poussin and Rubens at the bottom. Baroque perhaps has
been overwritten, but Classicism has never been touched. Do you think it is
worth attempting? It contains, as you will see, the possibility of working at many
ideas which you yourself suggested to me.
I have managed to collect a good deal of new material for the Drawings.
Some was at Windsor, some at Oxford, some at Edinburgh; the best of all a
lovely Verrochio design for a marble monument which I found under the
rubric ‘metal work’ in the Victoria & Albert.53 Parker54 & I have also made a
most interesting discovery – the attribution (or signature?) Agnolo di Donnino
in a contemporary hand, on the base of a ‘David Ghirlandaio’ in the B.M.55 I
did not know the name, but Thieme Becker56 & Vasari57 tell me that he was
a friend of Cosimo Rosselli’s who spent all his time making drawings. There
was absolutely nothing at Glasgow, only a couple of Soglianis in the newly
discovered Edinburgh drawings. Jane & I took a special journey to look through
them, felt rather aggrieved, though outside the Florentines there was a very
fine Giorgionesque drawing. Good stuff. Perhaps the most interesting thing I
have found is the fact that the little Castagnesque Last Supper at Edinburgh
measures precisely the same as the Castagno Crucifixion in the N.G.58 I was led
to compare the measurements by the extraordinary resemblance between them
in colour & technique. Both have the same rather unusual harmony of grey &
claret. Unfortunately the Edinburgh panel is rather common place in conception
& the types are what Crowe & Cock59 called ‘vulgar’. They are also extremely

53 Verrocchio, Design for a Monument , 1470s , V&A acquisition number 2314. See Ch. 5, letter 7
February 1934, n. 44.
54 Karl Parker
55 Possibly London, British Museum, drawing no. 1860,0616.46. The BM catalogue entry states: ‘A
nude man, standing almost to front, his right arm raised, looking down. Metalpoint, heightened with
white (partly oxidised), on orange-brown prepared paper. . . . inscribed in ink on the verso in the
lower right corner: “Agno di DĿnin.” . . . This was catalogued as Raffaellino del Garbo in the 1860
Woodburn sale. Karl Parker suggested, on the basis of the inscription, that this and other drawings
attributed by Berenson should be given to Agnolo di Donnino. . . . Agnolo’s name is inscribed on
several other drawings in the group’.
56 A German Lexicon of painters in more than 30 vols, published 1907–62. It contains more than
250,000 biographies written by several hundred worldwide specialists.
57 Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, considered to be the
first work of art history, and a narrative compilation of artists’ biographies, was first published in 1550.
58 The Edinburgh Last Supper is now attributed to Botticini, as is the National Gallery’s Crucifixion
(NG 1138). Both were formerly considered to be by Andrea del Castagno.
59 Sir Joseph Archer Crowe (a former consular official) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (a
connoisseur forced to flee Italy after the 1848 Revolutions) collaborated together in a remarkably
seamless partnership to write the first modern history of Italian art to be published in English, A
New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London, 1864–71, 5 vols).
It was a pioneering work of scholarship, founded on documentary evidence and acute first-hand
observation.
1927–1929 42

like a Resurrection60 which belonged – may still belong – to Duveen,61 & which
I, of course, have never seen. If the Duveen panel was exactly the same size as
the other two (it has the same proportions) there would be some excuse for
following the matter up. I wonder if you know the Edinburgh picture. In any
case I’ll include a photo of it in the large bundle I send (with my book) to i Tatti.
Mention of my book reminds me of Mrs Berenson’s very kind & sympathetic
letter, for which please thank her. I have had some very encouraging reviews.
Unfortunately the Times Lit. Sup. reviewer was an ardent high church man &
half his review is given up to a very unhistorical defence of his principles.62
The book could hardly have gone to a more unsuitable person. Some friends &
people whose judgement I respect have been so kind that I feel well rewarded
for writing it.
Jane & Alan are well. The latter is cutting teeth, but preserving through it all
health & great jolliness.
Jane joins me in love to all,
Ever yours affectionately,
K.

Nov. 28. 1928

Hotel Grande Bretagne-Lampsa
Athènes

Dear Kenneth
We shall be delighted to have a visit fr. you both. We can talk over yr. scheme of
work, wh. as vaguely indicated in yr. letter sounds most alluring. Of course you
would have to take a great deal of time to carry it thro. The result could scarcely
fail to be fruitful as well as fascinating.
To return to our drawings please put Besançon on yr. List.
And in Rome have a good look at the Corsini drawings. There are some in
the Vatican Library & there may be more in still other libraries.

60 Francesco Botticini (c. 1446–98), The Resurrection, c. 1465–70, formerly attributed to Andrea del
Castagno, tempera on poplar panel, purchased by the Frick Collection, New York, 1939. The
measurements are virtually identical to those of the National Gallery and Edinburgh pictures; see
n. 58.
61 Joseph Duveen
62 Clark’s book was treated to a long review in the Times Literary Supplement (tls) on 8 November 1928
by David Leslie Murray who was the Editor of the tls.
1927–1929 43

While on Rome I want you to see Toesca.63 He can be helpful. Steinmann64

you know already I believe.
Agnolo di Donnino has already attracted my attention* [In margin: *At least
I hope that I am not imagining it. Notes at home should be consulted] & I
remember the inscription on the verso of a Dom. Ghirl. in the B.M. I wonder
whether we have an exact reproduction of his inscriptions. We must at all events
find out.
It is hard to tear oneself away from Athens. The Acropolis is a perpetual
surprise. But we sail day after tomorrow from Brindisi and go straight to I Tatti.
With affection to you both
Yours
B.B.

Hotel Hassler, Roma [in another hand ‘1928?’]

Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.,
I have yet to thank you for your letter, with its extremely kind comments on
the Gothic Revival.65 At least it will be the only book I shall ever write which
contains something unknown to you. I have been amused at the reviews, half
rebuking me for admiring the Gothic Revival too much, half for admiring it
too little.Your complaint, that it was too ‘behaviouristic’, alarmed me, especially
as I am not very sure what ‘behaviourism’ is. I am afraid all it means is that my
eyes are focused by our old enemy, the time-spirit. However it is a great thing to
know more-or-less how the t-s is affecting our vision, & the next book I write
I shall do my best to exalt free will.
You may have heard that our time here has ended sadly with Jane getting
a bad attack of influenza. Fortunately we had worked quite hard before she
caught it, & though an infinity of things remain unseen, I have nothing actually
on my conscience. I have found no new drawings. The Corsini gallery remains

63 Pietro Toesca
64 Ernst Steinmann (1866–1934) was the Director of the German Institute, the Bibliotheca Hertziana
(see n. 66), in Rome and was an authority on Michelangelo.
65 Letter missing.
1927–1929 44

unchanged from your catalogue; & there appeared to be absolutely no 15th c.

drawings anywhere else. Toesca has been most helpful with introductions &
advice.
Even more valuable was the introduction to Steinman[n] & the Hertziana.66
That is as I contemplated the rows of pale & serious German youths bowed with
research, I was overcome with my own idleness & ignorance, & determined on a
more laborious life. Incidentally practically every one of those youths was writing
on Baroque; so that finally extinguishes any idea I can have of approaching that
field. Besides the Baroque is made to stink in the nostrils here. Constables seem
keen that I should write a short ‘vue generale’ of paintings to synchronise with
the Italian exhibition67 next year. It certainly would be good fun to do; I should
enjoy trying to fix my present ideas & sensations, & I should enjoy the literary
stunt of compression. Besides it’s the sort of thing which can only be done by
the very ignorant or the very learned and I am never likely to be the latter. And
it will in no way interfere with the pursuit of more serious work.
We hope to arrive on Sunday, but will send you a telegram. We look forward
to it very much.
Yours ever,
Kenneth.

March 15th ’29

Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.,
Much to my surprise I have been asked to help with the Italian exhibition.
Your objections were, I think, [to] the transporting [of] delicate pictures & to

66 The Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome was founded with a
gift from Henriette Hertz in 1913 and originally called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. It is one of
the 3 of the 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft) not in Germany. Its
focus is the study of Italian art and architectural history. On 19 January 1929 Aby Warburg gave a
lecture on his Mnemosyne which Clark attended. The Mnemosyne Atlas was Warburg’s last project. It
took the form of 40 wooden panels covered with black cloth, on which he had pinned nearly 1000
images of objects and works of art of all eras, which he had accumulated from books, magazines and
newspapers. He then arranged them into 14 different themes.
67 The Exhibition of Italian Art; see Ch. 3.
1927–1929 45

the political colour of the exhibition. I think it is unlikely that the exhibition
will come off but if it does it will not attempt to be representative, but will
consist entirely of pictures in England with a few travellers from America. It is
improbable that the committee will try to get anything from Italy. Of course it
will be a bad exhibition, but I can see no harm in it. Personally I find the amount
of slush poured on these exhibitions degrading rather than helpful to the study
of art, but if the thing is going to run in a reasonable way, I should like to do
anything I can to help it. However I have neither accepted or rejected an offer to
be on the committee because no committee has yet been formed.
I have written an article on my small medallion, because whether the Portrait
of Valerio Belli is by Raphael or not, it & the documents connected with it are
undoubtedly of interest to students.68 I have not yet received a good photo of it,
but will send you one as soon as I do so.
Your advice has been continually in my mind, & has led me to reject all offers
to write articles of any kind, & to concentrate on collecting material for a study
of Classicism; it has also led me to avoid Bond Street. I find the classical revival
so absorbing that I have laid aside my Reynolds & Ruskin, which contained too
large a proportion of theory to fact.
I am enclosing a prospectus of our History of Art Society. I do not ask you
to approve of anything with which Read69 is connected, but if there is anything
foolish in the prospectus, I should be most grateful if you would point it out to
me.
I send out a catalogue of the Savile Gallery.70 It may amuse you, though
despite the names of Ghirlandayo and Verrochio there is nothing in it for us.
The attributions are not by Borenius.71 I saw several mentions in reviews of a
Rafaellino del Garbo at the Leicester Galleries72 & hurried round to see it. But
it was a Pieter Coecke.
I am sorry to say that Jane has not been well ever since her influenza (or Genii
or whatever it was) in Rome. She is up for a few days feeling wretched & then

68 The attribution to Raphael is disputed. See Christa Gardner von Teuffel, ‘Raphael’s Portrait of
Valerio Belli: Some New Evidence’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 129, no. 1015 (October 1987), pp.
663–6.
69 Herbert Read
70 See n. 35 above.
71 Tancred Borenius
72 The Leicester Galleries (Ernest Brown & Phillips) started in 1902 in premises near Leicester Square,
London. The driving force was Oliver Brown (1885–1966), who became a partner in 1914 and
dedicated his life to the gallery. In the first half of the century it was one of the country’s leading
venues for promoting modern French art and young British artists. By and large they did not deal in
old masters. Clark was a keen follower of the gallery, often buying things for less than £5 (roughly
equivalent to £1000 today, according to www.measuringworth.com).
1927–1929 46

goes to bed again. It is very sad for her. I hope our visit to Sospel73 next month
will cure her.
I hope you are all well & have braced yourselves for your travels; & I hope
you will find a lot of Strygowskian74 churches with inscriptions saying they were
built in the 12th century.
Jane sends her love,
ever yours affectionately,
K.

[This letter contains a carbon copy of the proposed History of Art Society. Clark
was to be the Secretary, the Committee to be composed of W. G. Constable
(National Gallery), E. M. O’R. Dickey (Professor of Fine Art, University of
Durham), R. Gleadowe (Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford),
Roger Hinks (British Museum), Herbert Read (Victoria and Albert Museum).
The immediate aim of the society was to publish original books in English on
the history and science of art, especially works which embodied original research
or ideas, publication of which through ordinary channels would be difficult or
impossible; and to provide for the translation into English of important works on
the history of the science of art which had already appeared in foreign countries.
Five hundred subscribers were envisaged at one guinea a year, who would receive
without further cost the publications of the Society.]

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Baalbek
May, 1929

Dear Kenneth,
I think I must let you know that after having thought it over as well as I know
how, I have decided that we had better give up our plan of collaborating on

73 See Ch. 1 n. 15.

74 Josef Stryzgowski (1862–1941), a German art historian who had a theory about the influence of early
Christian Armenian architecture on the medieval architecture of Europe. Berenson did not agree
with the theory. See also Ch. 8 n. 69.
1927–1929 47

the new edition of the Florentine drawings.75 In the first place I feel I have no
right to keep you hanging on for the ever retreating day when I shall be ready
to devote my whole energies to preparing this new edition. At the present rate,
it may be years.
Then when the day does come, I shall need not a collaborator but an assistant
who will be at my beck and call to fetch and carry, to look up texts etc etc. It
would be absurd to expect you to leave house and wife and child and friends to
devil for a cantankerous old man.
I have no clear idea of what you have done already. I understand that you have
gone over the Uffizi drawings. For this and any other work of the same nature
that you have done already, including corrections and amplifications at Windsor,
if you choose to let me have them, I shall give you full credit.You told me that
you had made efforts to get to Chatsworth and you will get there no doubt.
When you do, I would ask you to let me have any corrections you can make.
If on the other hand you see Florentine drawings I missed – I saw only what
Arthur Strong76 was pleased to show me – or have other attributions to suggest,
I would advise you to publish them on your own account. That would leave me
free to accept any of your discoveries that seem right to me. And you could do
the same with Lille.
I want you to believe, dear Kenneth, that it is to save our friendship that I am
giving up our working together. And I am eager that our friendship should in no
way suffer. I hope to see you not less, but more and I shall be very keen to know
what progress you are making in preparing the history of Classicism in England.
I hope you will not let any other interests lure you away from that fascinating
undertaking. Let others decide which tenth late drawing is by Pulcio di Ceaccio
and which other is by Ciaccio di Pulcio, let others waste their worthless time
increasing their pannaches [sic] sitting on committees. Let still others feed the
maw of the monster called the reading public.You, you should devote your gifts

75 On 9 February 1929 Mary had written to Alys Russell: ‘Nicky is very troubled about the business of
Kenneth’s collaboration with B.B. over the [revision] of the Florentine Drawings. Houghton says that
K would like to get out of it and B.B. would like him to, but none of us . . . dare to put in our oars.
B.B. feels sure that K cannot help him, as he needs careful scholarship and not the pretty writing à la
Leonardo in Life and Letters. K has said to me that he loathed the pettifogging business of correcting
notes and numbers and there will be a lot of that to do if he means to help B.B. But all he wants out
of it is, I fear, whatever kudos he will get from the association. He has an ungenerous self-centred
nature, and B. B . needs devotion . . .Will he ever get it from a man? . . . I do not interfere . . . I expect
it to end in a deplorable quarrel’. Edmund Houghton was a neighbour of the Berensons’, of the same
generation. He went on motoring trips with them and encouraged Cecil Pinsent’s architectural
talents (Pinsent was briefly engaged to Houghton’s daughter).
76 Arthur Strong (1863–1904) was a distinguished librarian and Arabic scholar who had been the
librarian at Chatsworth in the 1890s where he made notable discoveries among the paintings and
drawings. He was not of a friendly disposition towards Berenson because he thought his wife had
once been over-cordial with him.
1927–1929 48

for scholarship and your gift for words to a task which will prove one of those
contributions to the history of ideas and taste which by their mere existence
advance culture.
[This is an unsigned carbon copy of a type-written letter on I Tatti writing paper.
It is headed ‘Copy’.]

Sixty Five Tufton Street,

s.w.1
Tuesday 11. [June] 1929

Dear Mary
Your very charming letter has just arrived and I feel I must write at once to
thank you for it.
Please wear the slippers – I promise you a pair every Christmas!
I will answer Nicky’s letter when we get to the peace of the country on
Saturday. She can have the house any time that suits her this summer for as long
as she likes – I only hope we shan’t miss her by being in Scotland.
K has not yet had BB’s letter from Baalbec. He is only waiting till it arrives to
write to thank him for all he has done. He feels he owes everything to him and
to you all at I Tatti and to the real home spiritual and in every way that you gave
him after Oxford for the first time in his life. If BB will accept it he is hoping
to dedicate to him his next book which is to be on the Classical Revival as you
know – even the title B.B. suggested. K has long felt that B.B. would naturally
rather be entirely free from any ties in his work, but he knew B.B. would tell him
so when it suited him and he respects and is too fond of him to have thought of
suggesting this himself. Collaboration was always too grand a word anyway for
so young a disciple!
However he will say all this himself and to B.B. but we have talked about
you all so often and so gratefully that I couldn’t help trying to express to you
something of what we feel, myself.
How lovely that you are writing a book about your travels – that is splendid
news. Please hurry up!
We go to the seaside on Saturday, then Chilling77 which will be great fun,
then Scotland 21st July then Nicky I hope, then Vienna – and if possible look

77 Big Chilling was Logan Pearsall Smith’s house on the Solent.

1927–1929 49

in on you going or coming. Alan is very well indeed. Gordon’s young woman
is very nice.
In haste much love to you all
Jane

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
June 15, 1929

Dear Jane
Returning I found your teddy bear rug & despite the heat I have been caressing
& hugging it ever since. I keep it on the arm of the chair whilst I sit & work betw.
tea & dinner. And many a blessing fr. it shall be wafted to you as I experience its
comforting cockling.
I do not understand what could have become of my letter to Kenneth? Nicky,
she assures me she posted it along with one that has already reached you. If K.
does not get it soon please let us know & Nicky will send the copy she made.
Meanwhile I must tell you how touched I am by the way you speak of the letter
for it seems that Nicky must have given you the substance of it. Of course I shall
be proud of K’s dedication of his Classical Revival.
Affectionately
B.B.

Pope’s Hotel,
Littlestone,
Kent
20th June ’29

Dear BB,
There is still no sign of your letter, but Nicky has told us more or less what it
contains, & I feel I can’t put off writing until a copy has arrived. The only thing
I don’t know is whether you have given up the idea of revising the drawing
book altogether, or whether you only feel you would rather do it at your leisure
1927–1929 50

& don’t want to keep me waiting too long. If the former, I should naturally be
sorry, for the new edition would have benefited scholars & delighted aesthetes
till our threatened relapse into barbarism is complete. But if the latter, then I
do wholly sympathise with your feelings. I found the Florentine Drawings a
wonderful training & a happy excuse for working with you, but you, I am afraid,
must have found it rather an irritation, keeping you from original work in more
attractive fields. If the book had dragged on for a few more years it would have
become a sort of skeleton for us both. As things are the time I spent at work on
it was one for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I think Jane, in a letter to
Mrs Berenson, told her how much we both feel this debt of gratitude. We learnt
much besides the history of Florentine art – especially I learnt how little I know,
which I could not have learnt so easily in London.
I hope that even in this lax atmosphere I shan’t forget the high standards of
the Tatti. All the work I do in the history of art will have foundations in what I
learned with you: but you actually suggested my writing about Classicism, so of
course the book must be dedicated to you, if you approve of it when written. I
hope that although I am not working for you, you will not mind if I occasionally
ask your advice about my work. Unfortunately all I can offer in return is to send
you photographs of anything I think would interest you!
As it happens I should like your advice at once. A man named A. H. Pollen78
(you – certainly Mrs Berenson– have met him) has a drawing presumably
by Leonardo for the Madonna del Gatto.79 He wants to publish a book on
Leonardo’s early & Madonna drawings to include – he says not to ‘star’, but I
gather that is what he means – his own. He has asked me to write the book. I
have refused saying that any material I had collected on Leonardo was collected
for the Florentine Drawings, but that argument doesn’t apply now. Obviously
there are other arguments against doing it, chief of them that he will try to get me
to boom his drawing & not write an impartial book on the whole subject. The

78 Arthur Hungerford Pollen (1866–1937), from a wealthy and eccentric aristocratic English family,
trained as a barrister but became a successful businessman. In 1900 he became interested in the problem
of aiming naval artillery after witnessing a practice firing at sea, and persuaded the Admiralty to co-
operate in the development of his proposals. Eventually, a different system was adopted. Pollen bought
at auction a tiny drawing by Leonardo of The Virgin and Child with a Cat and offered Clark a fee to
write a book about Leonardo’s drawings of Virgins and cats. Clark declined the offer. Pollen’s father,
John Hungerford Pollen (1820–1902), was a High Anglican parish priest who converted to Roman
Catholicism. Skilled as a painter and decorator, he became, through Cardinal Newman’s influence,
Professor of Fine Art in Dublin and executed elaborate decorative schemes, much influenced by the
Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement, for churches and houses connected with the
Catholic aristocracy, including ceilings for Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) at Blickling Hall, Norfolk.
79 The drawing is now in a private collection in New York. It was sold by Pollen’s widow at auction
when it was bought by the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer.The Bodmer Foundation sold it in 1999.
It was included in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman at the Metropolitan Museum,
New York, in 2003.
1927–1929 51

chief argument in favour is that he is going to have the book printed by Bruce
Rogers80 which would certainly be beautiful, & if I don’t do it Chesterton81 will.
Chesterton on Leonardo is a terrible thought & would be the waste of a well
printed book. I have brought this question into this letter, as I must give Pollen
an answer as soon as possible. But everything else I’ve got to tell you I shall write
when I have received a copy of your last letter.
Ever yours affectionately,
Kenneth.

June ’29
Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.,
A copy of your letter has arrived, & I must thank you for it as well as I know
how. I am really touched by all that it contains, & chiefly by your saying that it is
to save our friendship that you are giving up our working together. I have tried
to say something of what knowing you has meant to me in my other letter, & I
shall not repeat it here. I hope that in my future work I shall be able to fill in the
grandiose outlines you have sketched for me.
I am only sorry that I should have been responsible for this wretched muddle
with Constable.82 He must have completely misunderstood what I said to him,
though I must take part of the blame, for it was indiscreet of me to say anything
at all. He was asking me about my future plans, & how the Florentine Drawings
was getting on, & I said that, though I hadn’t heard definitely, I believed that the
plan of our collaboration was at an end. I know Constable well & I have written
to tell him that he misunderstood me. In any case nothing in Mrs Berenson’s
or Nicky’s letters led me to believe that you have given up the idea of work on
the drawing book. I only mentioned this possibility in my first letter as it was I
thought you might feel yourself better employed in original work than in the
comparative drudgery of revision.
As to the material I collected: I certainly saw most of the Florentine drawings
in the Uffizi – of course there is no means of telling if I saw them all. My notes

80 Bruce Rogers (1870–1957) was an American book and type designer, considered by many to be the
greatest book designer of the 20th century. His style was traditional and classical.
81 Possibly G. K. Chesterton, who was interested in Leonardo da Vinci as a personality, and had written
a poem, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in 1893.
82 William George (‘W. G.’) Constable
1927–1929 52

on them, for what they are worth are at i Tatti. The most important notes I
have here are those on the Leonardo’s at Windsor which included a good few
drawings not in your catalogue, & some unimportant connections. When I
am next at i Tatti I can go through all my notes there & get in order any that
would seem to be of value to you. As for the Windsor notes, I had better try
to get photos of all the drawings not in your catalogue & send them with the
notes. I shall certainly try to go to Chatsworth & Lille, & of any important
Florentine drawing not in your catalogue I shall get a photograph & send it to
you. You will be able to see from the photo if it is worth your while making
a special expedition to see the original. And of course I shall do the same in
any out-of-the-way collection I visit. Despite your generous suggestion that I
should publish such drawings, I am not likely to do so. I seldom feel confident
of an attribution & in any case I hate writing short articles. But if I am ever so
interested in a drawing that I feel I must publish it, I’ll send you a photo of it
plus my attribution before I do so. I am afraid my contribution to the revised
F.D.s is quite insignificant. A few measurements put right by a centimetre, a few
numbers & once or twice the sex of the subject correctly established. When
I think of the hopes with which I began I cannot but be disappointed, but
of course the truth is that such work demanded a longer training & greater
aptitude than I could give to it. Which brings me back to your letter with its
generous peroration. Indeed I hope I may eschew the other interests which
you mention. For petty fogying attributions I have always been too ignorant,
& heaven knows I shall never be lured on to another committee. The reading
public is more of a temptation, but I have great examples – Gray, Gibbon,
Flaubert – to keep me clear of it.
Ever yours affectionately,
K.C.
1927–1929 53

Addendum

[Extract from an undated letter from Clark to Umberto Morra in Rome, written
when staying with Logan Pearsall Smith at Big Chilling in Hampshire for a
month and ‘dreading our departure’.]
As you may have heard I was inveigled onto the Italian Exhibition committee
and I bitterly regret it. Besides annoying BB and causing some resentment among
those of my elders and betters who are not on, it has meant a lot of co-operative
work. It has however had an excellent result. It has pleased my parents who find
it a recognizable form of success, and will acquiesce more quietly in my future
inactivity. For as soon as this business is over we intend to leave London and
settle in the country, there to practice those virtues of absorption, contemplation
and non-production which BB has so much at heart for me. At present we are in
great hopes of getting a beautiful trecento house in Hampshire which is just our
size and if we buy it I think it will be worth a visit to England.
You will have heard about my correspondence with BB on the Florentine
drawings: indeed you will have heard of far more than I can tell you. BB’s letter
was a model of tact and grace, and I don’t wonder he was annoyed at such a
masterpiece being lost, and its whole effect ruined by Mary’s and Nicky’s letters.
I look forward to my next visit to I Tatti, as I feel I shall be able to meet BB on
much easier terms.
I had got this far when we left Chilling and went to Scotland. This is never
a period of the year we enjoy partly because of the climate which makes even
reading difficult. I am preparing an article on BB for your new encyclopaedia,
and have just reread the whole of his work. Like many great writers who have
created new influential ideas, Nietzsche or Rousseau for example, he is very easy
to attack and on many counts quite indefensible. But if one confines oneself to
his positive contributions, they also are numerous, and I suppose could not have
existed without a certain amount of perversity.
54
Three

The Exhibition of Italian Art, Italian Politics, Windsor

Drawings
1929–1931

Clark knew that any involvement in the Exhibition of Italian Art (or the Italian
Exhibition) would dismay Berenson. Nevertheless, the invitation to join the
Selection Committee was irresistible. The exhibition was the brainchild of
Ivy, Lady Chamberlain, who was the wife of the Foreign Secretary, Joseph
Chamberlain. She and her husband were widely travelled and were passionate
about the art of Italy and, like many people of that period, she had a great
admiration for Mussolini. She first mooted the idea in the summer of 1927
and by Christmas she was chairing a small committee which included Sibyl
Colefax and Sir Robert Witt. Mussolini responded to the idea with enthusiasm,
appointing a capable and experienced Italian Commissioner, Ettore Modigliani,
and, putting his personal authority behind the proposal, ordered museums and
private collectors and inheritors in Italy to lend treasured masterpieces. Two
years in the planning, the exhibition opened to the public at the Royal Academy,
Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, on 1 January 1930 and ran until 8 March.
Designed to be a sensational success, it fulfilled every ambition and attracted
more than 500,000 visitors (attendance averaged well over eight thousand per
day). The numerous honorary presidents and committee members boasted the
names of all the great and the good of both nations, including Mussolini and
Ramsay MacDonald and the premier princes, dukes, counts and earls and so on.
The Executive Committee, which Clark was invited to join, comprised twenty-
eight of the most influential movers and shakers of the British art world. More
than six hundred works were displayed with over 50 per cent coming from Italy,
25 per cent from British collections and 25 per cent from the usa and the rest
of Europe. Although covering more than four centuries of art, the exhibition
is most remembered for its display of Renaissance paintings, drawings and
sculptures, among which were the rarest of the rare, such as Giorgione’s Tempest
from the Accademia in Venice, and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus from the Uffizi in
Florence.

55
1929–1931 56

The Selection Committee (a sub-committee of the Executive Committee)

included twelve distinguished and experienced names, so that Clark’s inclusion,
aged twenty-seven, with little track record in any professional or formal artistic
activity other than his work with Berenson and his book The Gothic Revival, was,
arguably, a surprising choice and made him both the new boy and the baby of
the group.
Many, both in the uk and in Italy, opposed the Exhibition. King Victor
Emmanuel was contrarissimo. There were those, like Berenson, who feared for the
safety of the works of art and rightly so, for these precious and fragile treasures
were put on a single ship, the liner Leonardo da Vinci, and transported from Genoa
to Tilbury in boxes in the hold – they arrived on 20 December 1929 and the
exhibition opened ten days later – and similarly shipped back again when the
exhibition was over. Standards of conservation were different in those days but it
did not require great imagination to contemplate the possibility of what might
happen to these precious works of art if the ship was beset by storms in the
Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay or the English Channel (it was)
and that there was a real danger that all of them might end up at the bottom
of the sea. Another objection, which Berenson shared and with justification,
was that the proposed exhibition had little to do with making art available to
the public and was a blatant nationalistic propaganda exercise by Mussolini to
promote italianità and the power and supposed virtues of Italian Fascism.
Although the collaboration between Clark and Berenson on The Florentine
Drawings was terminated shortly after Clark joined the Selection Committee
of the Italian Exhibition, there was awareness in the London art world that he
had Berenson’s blessing and trust. Berenson had visited London in the summer
of 1927 and he and Clark would have been seen together socially and working
together.This observable friendship and collaboration must have been a factor in
his appointment to the Selection Committee for the Italian Exhibition.
The abrupt termination of the partnership on The Florentine Drawings could,
with good reason, have ended their friendship and their correspondence. Yet
the outcome was the opposite. Freed from the constraints that any working
partnership can bring – such as obligations, demands, disagreements, resentments
– it seems that each chose to move immediately and willingly to a more personal
and more intimate level of friendship. Even at this early stage of their relationship
there were too many interwoven threads of mutual friends and acquaintances,
interests and enthusiasms, experiences and aspirations, for the tapestry to be
unravelled or pulled apart. An especially strong thread was Edith Wharton, the
celebrated American writer who had settled in France. She was the same age as
Berenson and they had first met in 1903 when he had been given the ‘frozen
mitt for which she was famous’ (Clark’s words, APW p. 203) but a carefully
1929–1931 57

orchestrated second meeting in Paris in 1909 bore fruit: their friendship

blossomed, was treasured by both, and the Christmases they spent together with
other guests in the South of France brought much shared happiness. Clark was
also ignored by her on their first meeting but he and Jane were soon welcomed
into the fold and became intimates.
Clark’s commission to catalogue the drawings by Leonardo daVinci at Windsor
Castle was fortunate and timely, and came about through the good offices of the
Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, who initiated a series of catalogues of the
drawings at Windsor (by 1958 a total of fourteen volumes had been published). He
asked Clark to work on the first volume, which was to be devoted to the Leonardo
drawings. The corpus of six hundred and more drawings – the largest single
holding anywhere in the world – had never been fully researched or catalogued.
Once contained in a single leather-bound portfolio which had belonged to the
sixteenth-century sculptor Pompeo Leoni, they had, in the seventeenth century,
been acquired by the passionate connoisseur and collector Thomas Howard, Earl
of Arundel. The exact circumstances of their royal acquisition are unknown but
they are recorded in the Royal Collection at the end of the seventeenth century.
Their subjects include portraits, figures, caricatures, horses and horsemanship,
hydraulics, mechanics, anatomy and geometry. Not much scholarly work was
carried out until the end of the nineteenth century and the researches carried
out then were never brought to any final conclusion or published. Thus Clark
was presented with the opportunity to benefit from, and to summarise, in a
single publication such work as had already been done, to make his own original
contribution and to establish himself as an independent scholar.
With a son then aged two and more children contemplated, the Clarks, like
many metropolitan young couples, faced the question of where to live. They
concluded, as many do, that a house without a garden in central London was
not suitable for a growing family and considered a life in the country. This
proposition had its drawbacks, not least opposition from Clark’s parents, who
refused to fund it. The compromise was a house in Richmond, conveniently
situated near London, within easy reach of Windsor Castle. Whereas their first
flat had, as Clark later recalled in his autobiography, ‘nothing to recommend
it, not even a kitchenette’, and the house in Westminster was ‘a nasty . . . little
house . . . bought as a stop gap’ (Clark APW pp. 167 and 186), this Richmond
house, Old Palace Place, was a fine, substantial, four-storey eighteenth-century
red-brick house with ten bedrooms, overlooking the Green and built round the
remains of the old Tudor Palace of Sheen. It was their first dream house: a place
to be proud of, in which to work comfortably, entertain elegantly and display a
growing collection of treasures and works of art. Nonetheless, their time there
turned out to be unexpectedly short. Although happily settled, and immersed
1929–1931 58

in his work on the Windsor drawings, out of the blue came the offer of a job in
Oxford that Clark found too tempting to refuse.
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the subsequent economic
consequences appear to have had no immediate impact on either Clark’s or
Berenson’s income or their way of life. The Clark family business had factories
all over the world supplying a basic commodity, cotton thread, and the firm
continued to pay dividends from which Clark benefited directly and he had
support from his parents. Berenson’s investments in the stock market were
affected but his 1928 renegotiated contract with Duveen provided him with
a substantial fixed retainer, so that he was less reliant on a commission from
Duveen’s purchases or sales, and he was also due substantial monies still owing
under the old contract. His major problem was getting Duveen to pay him
what he was owed in a timely manner: the art market was severely affected by
the Crash and Duveen had more stock than cash and ready buyers. A further
worry was whether or not Harvard would be willing to accept his proposed
gift of I Tatti and its contents in the new economic climate. Inevitably, there
had to be some drawing in of horns but, whereas Mary was willing to dip into
capital to fund current expenditure, Berenson wished to preserve it for the future
endowment. Berenson’s allowance to Mary’s daughters was cut, the butler and a
gardener at I Tatti were let go, the library purchase budget was reduced to almost
nil and there was less entertaining and travel, although in March 1931 Berenson
undertook a major expedition to North Africa with Mary and Nicky, taking his
own car and chauffeur, to explore the history and archaeology of Algeria and
Tunisia, with a leisurely return journey via Cumae and Paestum in Campania.
Italian politics also caused Berenson increasing concern. From the very outset,
even at a time when many Italians welcomed Mussolini’s rise to power as a
means of revitalising a country which was broken economically and socially,
Berenson was unwaveringly – and in private outspokenly – anti-fascist, and he
foresaw eventual disaster. Early in 1929 Mussolini made a pact with the Papacy,
bringing the Vatican State into existence and in March he claimed 99 per cent of
the vote in the general election.
Berenson was fascinated by politics. He liked to put the daily unfolding of
events into the broadest possible historical and cultural contexts.The conversation
at mealtimes at I Tatti was often more about contemporary politics than about
art, and Berenson was famous for his vituperative attacks on those he regarded as
his enemies. Berenson liked to be more than a mere observer, however. In 1919
he had been a participant on the edges of the Paris Peace Conference, as a sort of
unofficial American representative, during the negotiations when the leaders of
the victorious powers got together to redraw the map of Europe after the defeat
of Germany. Berenson thought at the time that they had got it wrong, especially
Woodrow Wilson, and being himself a Jewish refugee from Lithuania to the
1929–1931 59

United States, and a resident in Italy from the 1890s onwards, he was perhaps
more acutely aware than most of the consequences.
Although never publicly or actively anti-fascist, his quiet but earnest support
for a small group of mostly young intellectuals who were opposed to the
regime was important, which is one reason why his friendship with Umberto
Morra was significant (see Appendix 1). Morra was a frequent visitor to I Tatti,
becoming as one of the family, one of Berenson’s intimate confidants, and he
was included in Berenson’s three-month trip to Spain, with Nicky and Mary,
in September to December 1929. Completely trustworthy and discreet, with
a noble lineage and connections to the Italian royal family, he divided his time
between I Tatti and his family villa hidden away behind high walls in a hamlet
just below Cortona in Tuscany.There he offered a safe haven to a group of young
writers and intellectuals such as Alberto Moravia, who were determined ‘to keep
the flame of liberty alight’ (see Appendix 1), providing them with a refuge where
they could think and write and speak with freedom and security. Morra was of
the same generation as Clark and they first met during Clark’s brief visit in early
1926, forming a deep and close friendship which lasted the whole of their lives,
and introducing each other to their own closest friends.
In the autumn of 1930 another young man who was destined to become a
lifelong friend of both Berenson and Clark arrived at I Tatti for the first time: John
Walker.Three years younger than Clark, he came with a strong recommendation
from Paul Sachs as to his brilliant student achievements in the fine arts department
at Harvard. With his charm, quick sense of humour and willingness to argue his
corner, ‘Johnnie’ Walker was immediately welcomed into the I Tatti circle and
put to work, as Clark had been initially, on Berenson’s current projects and
the Lists. Walker came from a wealthy Pittsburgh iron and steel family. He had
contracted polio at the age of thirteen which confined him to a wheelchair for
many years, leaving him with a disability and pointing him towards a scholarly
lifestyle. Berenson came to have a deep influence on Walker’s career, and the
admiration that grew between them was mutual. Walker was instrumental in the
negotiations which finally resulted in Berenson bequeathing I Tatti to Harvard,
and Berenson hoped that he might be the first director. However,Walker applied
and was appointed to supervise construction of the new National Gallery of
Art in Washington, dc, where, in 1939, he became the Chief Curator and, in
1956, the Director (until 1969). Berenson called Walker ‘Cherubino’ because of
his propensity to fall in love with a succession of young women: in 1935, while
Professor of Fine Arts at the American Academy in Rome, he met his future wife
who was the eldest daughter of the then British ambassador, the Earl of Perth.
Clark and Walker, although from different continents and societies, were very
much of the same temperament, with kindred backgrounds and interests, and the
mutual esteem that developed between them was both personal and professional.
Chronology

1929

January Clarks in Rome where Clark attends a lecture by Aby

Warburg at the Hertziana
Spring Clark starts to catalogue Windsor drawings
Berensons and Nicky Mariano visit Syria and Palestine
June Berensons return to I Tatti
Berenson works on the Lists; Mary works on her ‘Book
of Travels’ (published in 1938 as A Vicarious Trip to the
Barbary Coast)
Summer Berensons at Consuma
Nicky Mariano holidays in England with her nephew
Cecil Anrep
Mary visits England
Berenson revises text of the four essays, Italian Painters of
the Renaissance, for a single-volume publication
September Berenson stays with Edith Wharton at Hyères
Berensons, Nicky Mariano and Umberto Morra make
a three-month visit to Spain
Clarks visit Vienna and Berlin
Christmas Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères; Mary
Berenson at I Tatti

1930

January The Exhibition of Italian Art opens at Burlington House,

London
Summer Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen
Edith Wharton at I Tatti

60
 Berenson, Nicky Mariano and Edith Wharton tour
Tuscany, meeting up with the Clarks and Alberto
Moravia at the Villa Morra, near Cortona
Clarks move to Old Palace Place, Richmond
Autumn John Walker visits I Tatti for the first time
Winter Berenson’s The Italian Painters of the Renaissance and
Studies in Medieval Painting published
Christmas Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères; Mary
Berenson and Nicky Mariano at I Tatti

1931

March Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Tunisia and Algeria.

They return by way of Cumae, and stop in Rome with
Walter Lippmann and John Walker
Spring Clarks in South of France, including a stay with Edith
Wharton at Hyères and a visit to Sospel
May Clarks visit Paris and Edith Wharton
Summer Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen

61
1929–1931 62

10th July ’29

Sixty Five Tufton Street
s.w.1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.,
Toesca1 has asked me to write a short article on your work for his Encyclopedia.2 I
am reluctant to take on articles of this kind, but I thought I probably came nearer
to understanding you more than most people in England; & if I refused heaven
knows who might have taken it on. I hope to think I did right in accepting.
The article is to be short – ⅔ of a column – but it will have to contain
some facts I don’t know. And at the risk of annoying you with an impudent
questionnaire, I had rather get them correctly from you, than incorrectly from
someone else. So will you be so kind as to let Nicky or Mrs Berenson tell me:
when & where you were born, when you came to England, if (& when) you
met Morelli,3 & when you bought i Tatti.Would you rather I didn’t mention the
library? It is obviously the most important part of your work, but perhaps you
would rather it was not insisted on in an Italian article.
In any case I shall send you the article to criticise.
Yours ever,
K.
P. S. Hadn’t you once a semi-official connection with the
Gazette des Beaux Arts?4 So much of your work came
out there that I feel I ought to mention it.

1 Pietro Toesca
2 Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti (‘Enciclopedia Treccani’), 35 vols, 1925–36. Considered
to be the most authoritative Italian encyclopaedia ever published, it ranks with the celebrated
Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition of 1910–11. Toesca was the editor of the section on medieval
and modern art.
3 Giovanni Morelli
4 The Gazette des beaux-arts was a French journal which established itself as an authoritative source
of reference on art history. In 1928 it was bought by the Wildenstein family who owned it until its
closure in 2002, after the death of Daniel Wildenstein.
1929–1931 63

Poggio al Spino5
Consuma
(Prov di Firenze)
July 22, 1929

Dear Kenneth
Since the arrival of your letters I have been far fr. well & very busy. There was
the preparation for moving up here. It meant selecting material for two months
work. At the same time we tried to get round more voluminous painters e.g.
Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, & Veronese on the spot, and we did. Finally Nicky left
us – me bereft – two days ago.
At last I can take up correspondence & finish all of your letters. I thank you
scinisceramente for the answers to the contents of mine fr. Baalbec – Toesca wrote
some time ago that he had secured you for his Enyclopedia. I hope it won’t
distract & take too much time. How is the article about me? I am of course
delighted that you & no other should do it. I confess I did not expect to be
included.
You ask for facts. Those not in the English Who’s Who you could find in the
American one.
I was born in Lithuania. I first came to England in January 1888. I first met
Morelli in 1889, but never saw him more than three or four times. It was his
books rather than his society that had much influence on me. We began to live
at I Tatti in 1900 & bought it in 1906.
I have had no kind of connection with any mag. except that I was one of the
founders & guarantors of the Burling. Mag.6 If possible give or mention what my
publications mean. The rest is of small interest – unless indeed it were treated at
great length as a study in culture.
Better not insist on my collections, not even my books.
I have a nephew7 here just fresh fr. Harvard, and as green as grass. Mary is
taking him to England. I wish you could see him.
Affectionate greetings to you both
Ever yours
B.B.

5 Poggio al Spino (in English, ‘Thornhill’), the relatively small and simple house close to Vallombrosa,
was a rented property which the Berensons leased from 1914 to 1938. Only selected close friends
were invited there.
6 A serious, long-surviving art history magazine in London, founded in 1903 by among others
Berenson and Roger Fry, which has never compromised its strict scholarly principles.
7 Probably Richard Arthur Berenson
1929–1931 64

16th Aug ’29

Sixty Five Tufton Street
sw1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.
I put off answering your most kind letter till I could send you the Encyclopedia
article. I can’t say it is good or bad because it had to be so short that there
was only room for bare facts, & only an arbitrary selection of those. A certain
amount of compression is good & bracing for style, but the compression of an
encyclopedia is cramping, & I shall not try it again. Another bloody lesson! My
life is made up of them. However this one wasn’t so bad, for it gave me an excuse
to reread all your work, & I must say I got more out of it than I ever got before.
It seems to me that despite the great success of your little books they are not
really at all easy to understand, & anyone who reads them without considerable
esthetic experience must be constantly bewildered. However I suppose they
skip the difficult parts & go on to the descriptions of pictures etc. Will you look
through the article & tell me if you would like anything altered? I am afraid I
cannot add much, as I have already overstepped my limit by about 150 words;
except that you might add one or two things to the bibliography.
We are just off to Austria for a few weeks, I very excited at the prospect of
seeing Vienna for the first time. We hope to stop at Munich on the way back, &
if possible make an expedition up to Frankfort which I had never visited.
Has it ever been observed that Bellini’s Prudence,8 whose gothic figure people
always have referred back to Riccio’s Eve, must have been inspired by van Eyck’s
lost Lady at her toilet,9 which went to Italy as soon as it was painted & later
belonged to Federigo Montefeltro. He even borrowed the celebrated convex
mirror. The whole subject of the influences of northern art on Italian painting
would make a good subject, despite the work that has already been done on it.
Maclagan10 tells me that Planiscig11 has done some more on Classicism, & both
he & Nicky have given me introductions to him. I hope also to have time for
the drawings & I wish I knew how far you had got them in order. I seem to
remember that you hadn’t got the numbers of many.

8 One of four allegories by Giovanni Bellini, painted c. 1490, now in the Accademia,Venice.
9 The ‘lost van Eyck’ is known only as a detail, appearing as a picture in a gallery display in Willem
van Haecht’s Archduke Albert visits the Kunstkammer of Cornelius van der Geest (1628). A copy of the
supposed van Eyck is in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.
10 Eric Maclagan
11 Leo Planiscig
1929–1931 65

We have so much enjoyed our glimpse of Nicky, & only wish there had been
time to make some expeditions with her.We managed to get to Hampton Court
where the pictures had been rehung. Incidentally the recumbent Venus12 (like
the Allori in the Uffizi) has been put in a good light, & it’s not, as we vaguely
thought, a Lotto, a poor thing. Nicky’s stories of your Syrian expedition made
us very envious, & very keen to see Mary’s book.13 I do hope she makes it very
personal, as much like her letters as possible & as little like a guide book.
We hope to go to Rome again next spring to get on with the Classical
revival. The Hertziana14 is the perfect library for the purpose. We should love
to come to i Tatti then, if you are there. I shall have said goodbye to the market
place, but only by the drastic means of selling 65 Tufton Street & going to live
in the country. Of course all this business of committees & so forth is ephemeral
& corrupting; but if one has never done it, one always feels it might be worth
doing, or at least one has a secret bitterness against those who do do it. However
we have found a small house with a 14th century hall15 – all the corbel heads of
which are intact, original windows etc. – & in this conventual atmosphere I hope
to strain my muddy wits.
What a pity we are just missing Mary.
Jane sends her love,
Ever yours affectionately,
Kenneth.

[From Consuma but on I Tatti headed paper]

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Consuma

Sept. 13.1929

My dear Kenneth
I suppose you are getting home now. I hope you found Friedlander16 in Berlin.
He wrote to tell me he’d be delighted to make your acquaintance.

12 Giovanni Cariani (c. 1485–after 1547), Venus in a Landscape, c. 1530–35 (RCIN 402912).
13 Mary Berenson’s A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast was published in 1938.
14 See Ch. 2 n. 66.
15 See Ch. 2 Addendum, letter to Umberto Morra.
16 Max Friedländer
1929–1931 66

What good news that you are leaving London & the temptation to snuffle
about the gutters of Bond Street, the Burlington Club,17 Burlington House and
all their coasts. Some day – I trust not too late – you will understand my horror
of the spirit that controls those haunts, & how destructive it is to any intellectual
work, as distinct from petty antiquarianism.
So retire to the country by all means, gather companion-minds at your retreat
& prepare a book de longue haleine.18 There is no harm in publishing discreet [sic]
bits of it as they get done, & still less harm in publishing essays about points for
wh. there is no room in the magnum opus. All provided you are not carried away
from the main current.
I have just had for the third time your notice about me from the Italian
Encyclopaedia. I really cannot see what more you could do in the space allotted,
& as for myself I can’t imagine anything more elogieux. It is a ticklish business
writing about a living person whose life has been so strictly private & about
whom there can be outside a tiny circle very small interest.
We are packing & it is a day after tomorrow we start for Spain going by slow
stages & stopping for ten or twelve days at several places in the south of France.
We shall probably reach Madrid Oct. 10 or a few days later & remain there a
fortnight. Should you find it possible to join us there we should all of us be
delighted.
I wonder have you seen Charles du Bos’s ‘Byron’? It is rather elaborate &
scholastic but fascinatingly penetrating & at the same time constructive. The
fragments of his (Du Bos’s) ‘Journal’ are even better.19
Post as for abroad & address Baring Bros. 8 Bishopsgate Within, London E.C.2.
Affectionate greetings to you both
Yours
B.B.

17 The Burlington Fine Arts Club was a London club founded in 1866 for artists, collectors and
connoisseurs, whose heyday was 1898–1912, although it continued to flourish between the wars
(there were 424 members in 1924). Many of the notable figures in the art world from home and
overseas were members (although Berenson was blackballed by Robert Benson because of some
temporary falling out – they made it up later). It was the chief meeting place in London for like-
minded individuals to get together to discuss works of art, and the Club organised good exhibitions
of historical art which were open to the public. In Clark’s day it was housed in Savile Row, not far
from the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly. The Club went into liquidation in 1952.
18 A work which requires time and effort.
19 Charles du Bos. Extracts from his voluminous ‘Journal’ were published in France by Pléiade in
1928. His Byron ou le besoin de la fatalité (1929) was a psychological study of, among other things,
Byron’s marriage and incest with his half-sister.
1929–1931 67

[‘Nov. 25. 1929’ in another hand, possibly Mary’s]

Sixty Five Tufton Street
sw1
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.
As usual I have to begin a letter by asking for forgiveness – which will have soon
reached the biblical limit of seventy times seven. As you will have guessed, the
truth is that I am completely taken up with the Italian exhibition, & as I know
you disapprove of it, there is very little I can write to you about without shame.20
The exhibition has certainly not been a waste of time for me as I am doing
a great part of the catalogue, & that is giving me just the training & general
information that I missed by never taking a course in art at a university. When
it’s all over I shall have a bibliography of useful references in my head, & I don’t
see how else I should ever have become familiar with back numbers of l’Arte,
the Jahrbuchs etc.
The only other job I have in sight, & it is not at all certain, is to publish the
early Italian drawings at Chatsworth. After refusing to let me see them at all, the
librarian21 has gone to the other extreme & has invited me to stay there & make a
final publication. I don’t think there is much scope for my making a fool of myself
in this, as there is very little early stuff there which you haven’t seen.

20 The Exhibition of Italian Paintings opened at the Royal Academy in Burlington House on 1 January
1930 (detailed account in Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, ch. 7). The exhibition was alluded
to, for the first time in public, by Sir Robert Witt in a letter to The Times on 13 February 1929
(not 14 February 1928, as stated by Haskell), although it had been under discussion in the art
world for some time. The following day a long article appeared in The Times in which their art
critic gave greater detail, while emphasising that the form, character and scope of the exhibition
were as yet unformulated. The article mentioned the names of most of those who composed the
organising committee: Clark’s was not included. The Berensons must have been aware that Clark
was deeply involved with the exhibition. Charles Bell had written to Mary on 27 May 1929
telling her that Clark had been to see him to discuss the exhibition, expressing a wish that the
Ashmolean might agree to lend: to which Bell had replied ‘Not if I can help it’, adding that he
thought Clark’s ‘pimping for the exhibition’ was contemptible (thanks to Jon Whiteley, Honorary
Curator, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for this reference). See also Clark’s letter to Berenson of 15
March 1929 in Ch. 2.
21 F.W.Thompson. In 1928–9 he compiled the first typescript catalogue of the drawings in the Duke of
Devonshire’s collection, using the copious notes of Arthur Strong and his wife, Eugenie, with further
advice he had sought from Campbell Dodgson, Archibald Russell and A. E. Popham.
1929–1931 68

I don’t think I have seen any Florentine drawings not in the book. Did
you see Koenig’s so-called Benozzo sketch book22 when you were there? You
probably know he has bought the Bohler (Lucerne) collection,23 – which is a
great economy of time for students.We also went to see Stoclet24 & were amazed
at the things he has bought in the last few years.
As far as my work on the Classical tradition goes, all I have done is to find a
collection of very valuable material belonging to Kristeller,25 which he is willing
to sell me. It includes a good many nozze, essays, & otherwise unfindable books.
He is selling all his material & has a very good collection of photos of early
engravings which might be of use to you. Also such books as Lauro’s Antiquae
Urbis Splendor Romae 161226 which I imagine is rare.
I am sending you a couple of photos and drawings at the Staedel.27 You
probably know the designs for a cross – for nielli – I suppose – but I was told it
had never been photographed. It seems well worth a photo – indeed I should
have thought it might well be Mantegna himself.28 The other was bought as
Ghirlandajo. I suppose it is N. Italian, but have had no time to look into it.
You must have had a wonderful time in Spain. We hope to go to Italy in the
spring, but not till April – never again will I visit the sculpture galleries of Rome
in January.
I should like to stay in Rome for some months, but it is hard to leave our
son for so long, now he has begun to talk. Our future plans are still vague. My
parents are very much against our living in the country, & indeed will not give
us the money for a house there.The lack of books would undoubtedly be a great
difficulty, especially in works which require continual reference to back numbers

22 Clark published an article in the Burlington Magazine in April 1930 on the drawings in the Italian
Exhibition. In it he refers to the so-called Benozzo Sketchbook from the Koenigs Collection which
was shown at the Exhibition but comments that the sketches in it are copies and not by the hand of
Benozzo Gozzoli. In 1940, Koenigs gave it to the van Beuningen family, whose collection forms a
major part of the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
23 Julius Böhler (1860–1934) established a family art dealing business in Munich in 1880. His eldest son,
Julius Wilhelm (d. 1961), went into partnership with Fritz Steinmeyer, founding a gallery in Lucerne
in 1920. They survived the turmoils and pogroms of the 1920s and 30s and the family business
continues today with a gallery on the shores of Lake Starnberg near Munich.
24 Adolphe Stoclet
25 Paul Kristeller (1863–1931) was born in Berlin. He studied art history there and at Munich and
Leipzig. His expertise was in Italian Renaissance and German graphic work.
26 A fine series of engravings of early views of Rome, much reprinted and issued in various
combinations of plates, titles and dedications by Giacomo Lauro (c. 1583–1650). Originally published
in four parts in 1612–28, the 165 plates were often bound together in one volume.
27 One of the major museums in Frankfurt, founded in 1815 with a notable collection of paintings,
drawings, prints and books.
28 Kenneth Clark, ‘Andrea Mantegna’, Old Master Drawings, vol. 4 (1929–30), pp. 60–62.
1929–1931 69

of periodicals. What ever you may say about the Burlington Club,29 it has an
excellent library, & as it is practically always empty, I can work there undisturbed.
Jane joins me in love to you all.
Yours ever,
K.C.
P.T.O.
In answer to Nicky’s postcard: I know no English travellers in Spain earlier than
Borrow and Ford,30 who were both there c. 1840. Of course Moorish architecture
was rampant in England at end of the 18th century – Beckford built a Moorish
wing on to the first Fonthill, & it appeared in gazebos etc. earlier still – but I
imagine the inspiration came directly from the east, probably as a result of the
translation of the Arabian Nights – I forget the date, & have no ready means of
finding it. The culmination was the pavillion at Brighton and Byron’s oriental
poems.

Dec. 22. 1929

Sainte-Claire le Chateau
Hyeres (Var)31
Tel: 2-29

Dear Kenneth.
My very good wishes to you both for a Merry Xmas a Happy New Year.
We got here a week ago having left Barcelona a few days before. Mary &
Nicky have already returned to Florence. I expect to remain here till Jan. 10. as
I can loaf here as I could not at I Tatti, & I need being away fr. works of art &
my desk. No spot on the Riviera is lovelier & my hostess is our dear old friend
Mrs Wharton. Plenty of talk, enchanting walks & drives & friends reading aloud.
Thanks for the photos you send. I don’t recall them & it is likely that I have
never seen them. I should not be surprised if the medallions for a crucifix turned

29 See n. 17.
30 Richard Ford and George Borrow were travellers to Spain in the mid-19th century. Ford wrote a
pioneering popular Handbook for travellers to Spain (1845). Borrow travelled extensively throughout
Europe and North Africa (mostly on foot) and wrote a travelogue about Spain in 1843.
31 Hyères, the southernmost point of Provence, east of Marseilles and Toulon, long appreciated for its
benign climate, was visited during the 19th century by Queen Victoria and Robert Louis Stevenson
and later by D. H. Lawrence. Edith Wharton’s house, Sainte-Claire Le Château, situated above
the old town, was originally a convent, transformed into a residence in 1849. Wharton had bought
the property in 1927 as a winter retreat and set about cultivating an extensive sub-tropical terraced
garden. In 1955 the property was acquired by the town of Hyerès and dedicated as a public park.
1929–1931 70

out to be by Carlo Crivelli himself.The headless full length female may likely be
a Bart. Montagna in his late phase.
Do look carefully for Florentine drawings at Chatsworth – close to Rosso,
Pontormo, & Bronzino. And if you find any of [them] get me photos.
I have not seen Koenig’s Benozzo sketch-book. Have you?
Please send me as soon as ready a catalogue of the Ital. Exhib. And if there turn
out to be anything of interest & unknown I hope you will be able to procure
me photo’s.
I return to I Tatti with the intention of finishing the lists before I undertake
another considerable journey. This last was one of the most satisfactory. Spanish
landscape is least appreciated by one who already knows Egypt, Syria & Greece
as well as Italy. And no Spanish church is boring. There are more grave, more
sublime works of art elsewhere but Spanish architecture is surely the most
amazing in all the world.
Ever yours
B.B.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau
Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Jan. 1. 1930

Dear Jane,
With my best wishes for 1930 each & all of you. I hasten to thank you for letter
of Dec. 21 which has just reached me. I look forward to finding the wooley boots
when I get home. I expect the utmost comfort from them & I shall write again
after testing them.
K. must have before this have received the answer to his letter that reached
me at Barcelona. There I was too done up each day to write. But I wrote soon
after I got here.
You must have heard that Mary & Nicky left me here with Mrs Wharton
while they returned to Florence. Mary with all her offspring to I Tatti, & Nicky
to Alda’s flat. Nicky returns here to fetch me & we leave for home the 10th.
Ojetti32 wrote a few days ago from London where he had seen K. hard at
work on the Italian Exposist. I asked K. to send me the catalogue of the fair & if
these turn up any bird or beast of plumage rare no matter how insignificant or

32 Ugo Ojetti
1929–1931 71

bedraggled I should be grateful for photo’s. And if new and revised editions of
the catalogue are produced I want to have them.
Truth to tell – if you want to hear it – Richmond would not seem particularly
suited for myself say. It is too near town to resist any of its allurements, and yet
far enough to waste one’s time coming and going. If country is too ‘squalido’
Oxford or Cambridge would attract me. I see life if I were yr. ages, in terms
of two months of intensive Bond Street cum Bloomsbury & ten months of
RATIONAL life far from the muddy crowd.
I look forward to seeing you on your way to Rome.You will then tell me all
about IT.
Affectionately
B. B.

[Undated but must be mid-March 1930]

Sixty Five Tufton Street
Victoria 3201

Dear BB.
I write in deep depression, the result of influenza which ceased a week or so ago.
We have just returned from Brighton, where it snowed. Last time Jane had ’flu
she was cured by getting snowed up at Viterbo & frozen at Cortona & now God
has thoughtfully provided the same remedy.We are quite cured but I am like the
almost Biblical character who eat well and slept well, but when he came to a job
of work went all over of a tremble.
But I mustn’t write any more about our woes without thanking you for
your New Year greetings & for the volume of introductions collected from your
little books. I have got halfway thru letters to you in the past two months, &
abandoned them all. Some had to be laid aside while I went to mop up a mess at
Burlington House, & others were so full of grammatical mistakes & erasures that
I became disheartened. They lie about my writing table like yesterday’s plates of
half-eaten pudding, and depress me.
Weeks ago I sent you a copy of the catalogue & illustrated souvenir,33 & I shall
send you a copy of the final edition when it appears in a week or two. I did not
catalogue the pictures from English & American collections, nor the drawings.

33 A relatively expensive (5 shillings) illustrated Souvenir of selected works from the exhibition was
published in 1930 with an introductory essay on Italian art by Ugo Ojetti.
1929–1931 72

The rest is mine. Of course such hasty work is full of omissions, & there are
several infelicitous precis of descriptions due to an odius female secretary
engaged by Constable34 for her training in scholarship, who infuriated me by
her unusual combination of ugliness, inefficiency & conceit. As you will see
attributions had to be chosen to allay ill feeling, but doubt is usually expressed in
a note. Constable & I are doing a big memorial volume, & I hope to make it so
accurate that whenever, in the future, I am accused of lack of scholarship, I can
bat critics on the head with it. Certainly there is nothing in the exhibition which
would be new to you. It does not aim at displaying novelties, & even if it did I
don’t suppose any would have been found. But seeing the pictures in different
surroundings & with different companions is really a great help to the beginner
& I have profited by it.
I must say I think you are wrong about Richmond. Our problem was to find
a house with a garden & among country parks for Alan, yet near enough London
for me to be able to consult the many books I can never hope to possess – sets of
l’Arte, Jahrbuchs etc. and to work away quietly. In any case I have bought a most
attractive house on Richmond Green,35 exactly the size & character we want.
What with moving into our new house, & the difficulty of leaving Alan now
that Jane’s mother has left Tunbridge Wells I doubt if we shall be able to go
to Italy this spring. We may come out in the Autumn & go to Siena, Perugia,
Urbino etc. Our visit to Rome must be postponed until next year.
We are so sorry to hear that you have toothache. What a horrible affliction it
is, making any use of the mind impossible.
Please give my love to Mary & Nicky. We are so much looking forward to
Mary’s book. I wonder how those terrible lists are getting on.
Yours ever,
Kenneth.
Jane bids me add that she has not written to you because I was always doing
so. Indeed my letters like Miss Gertrude Steins’ poetry are written in a
continuous present.

34 W. G. Constable
35 Old Palace Place; see Introduction above and n. 36 below.
1929–1931 73

10 Sept ’30
Old Palace Place36
Richmond
Surrey

Dear BB.,
We are so glad to get Nicky’s letter & hear news of you. Unfortunately it
reached us just as we were leaving for Windsor, & we have lived ever since in
a nightmare of packing cases, floodings, fusings, mysterious smells, & all the
usual accompaniments of house-moving. However I just had time to go around
the castle looking for your Licinio, & find that it has recently been moved to
Hampton Court,37 so recently that it has no number. I have asked Collins Baker38
for a photograph, & will try to keep him up to it. As to the Leonardos, I have
indeed a mass of notes, but they were taken when I still hoped to copy them
into the new edition myself, & they may be rather obscure – not in writing, but
in economy of expression – to anyone else. If you could wait a month or two I
could take my old notes down to Windsor, check & expand them & send you
the result. But if you are in a hurry I can send you the rough notes, specimens
of which I enclose. [Inserted in the margin: On second thoughts I won’t. I’ll
bring them with me to Italy.] As far as I know every drawing noted is not in
your catalogue, or, if in it, the entry has some small defect. There are a good
many which you do not include, either because you did not wish to make the
list unnecessarily full, or because you weren’t shown them – there may even be
as many as a hundred. To my mind only a very few of these are at all doubtful –
perhaps only four or five – but I hardly like to suggest you take so many on my
recommendation. Of course you passed them all when we went through them
together, but I don’t think we realised at the time that so many had been omitted
from your list, & we went very fast. However if you [were] to wait a few months
I can give you [it] with really good notes, as Morshead39 is proposing to publish
a Catalogue with bibliographies & a postage-stamp photo of every drawing, &
has asked me to help him over such questions as approximate date etc. This will
mean my working right through the drawings thoroughly.

36 The house was originally two separate houses which had been knocked through into one. Clark
kept the house until 1953, letting it and finally selling it to help fund the purchase of Saltwood. He
claimed that he made no money on it and that the rent barely paid for the upkeep. It was divided
back into two dwellings in 1983.
37 Perhaps Bernardino Licinio (c. 1490–1549), The Painter and his Family (RCIN 402586) or a portrait
of a man bearing a false inscription identifying him as the architect Palladio (RCIN 402789).
38 Collins Baker
39 Owen Morshead
1929–1931 74

On our recent stay at Windsor I was too busy moving in here to do much
work, but I had an interesting browse among the unclassified Antique Masters,
and found some very amusing copies of lost drawings – one of a Michelangelo
fun drawing for the big David (with a putto which appears again on the Berlin
sheet & a faked monogram of Durer which suggests that D. must have used
some such drawings for his Apollo-Adam drawings & engravings): also a copy
of Raphael’s drawing for the Jonah in the Chigi Chapel, & of a very fine lost
Pollayuolo battle of naked men.40 I found some fine unpublished originals, too,
especially Venetian.
We had a nice quiet summer at Chilling,41 & I managed to read the whole
of Alberti’s works42 as a preparation for the Classical revival: also Ghiberti’s
Commentarii,43 & several books on that period, including the whole of Voigt’s
Wiederbelebung.44 What a good book is this last, written with such humanity –
an entirely un-pedantic book, wrong on almost every detail I could check but
none the worse for that.
This is a pleasant Georgian-looking house of the ordinary red brick type, &
holds us quite comfortably. I am glad to have a garden, however small, & a decent
room to work in. It must originally have been an outhouse of Sheen palace & so
parts of it are 16th century. Did I tell you that we discovered a complete Gothic
mantelpiece dated 1655? – a perfect document for the first chapter of the Gothic
Revival.
Our plans are not quite fixed, but I think we shall be in Florence towards the
very end the month. Will you be there? I do hope we shall be able to see. Thank
you so much for the promise of your new book. Is it to be the medieval studies?
I hope so, & I very much hope you have added an introduction on the whole
subject.

40 A. E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His
Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, Phaidon, London, 1949, nos 811 (School of Raphael, Prophet
Jonah) and 27 (Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men). The copy of the Michelangelo has not been identified.
41 Logan Pearsall Smith’s house on the Solent.
42 Clark read the 19th edition of Leon Battista Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Anicio Bonucci, 5 vols,
Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1843–9, which contains most of Alberti’s vernacular literary works,
including the treatise on painting. (My thanks to Professor McLaughlin of Oxford University for this
information.)
43 In 1447, towards the end of his life, Ghiberti wrote his never completed memoirs, I Commentarii. In
three sections, the first is a theoretical assessment of classical art; the second is an art history, beginning
with Giotto and an account of his own life, the earliest autobiography of an artist; the third is a
discussion of the learning necessary for a sculptor, i.e. optics, anatomy and human proportion.
44 Georg Voigt (1827–1891), German art historian who with Jacob Burkhardt was one of the founders
of modern research into the Italian Renaissance. His principal work was Die Wiederbelebung des
classischen Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (Revival of Classical Antiquity or the first
Century of Humanism) in which he argued that Petrach was the originator of Italian Renaissance
humanism, thus leaving behind the medieval world and its intellectual structures, which had been
epitomised by Dante.
1929–1931 75

We both send our love to Nicky. Jane says she owes a letter, but she is really
too busy with the house right now. She has worked very hard over it, & needs
a holiday. She sends you many messages. We really are longing to see you again.
Yours ever, Kenneth

[Undated but must be pre-November 1930]

Old Palace Place
Richmond Green
Surrey
Richmond 1384

Dear BB.
After various delays I have managed to send off all I have of the Florentine
Drawings text. I don’t think I ever had more, for I always remember it being
quite fragmentary: on the other hand there are duplicate & even triplicate proofs
of much of it which swelled the bundle. If these duplicates were to be of any use
to you in revision I could send them – I also have a considerable fragment of the
catalogue & will send that too when I have sorted it.
To start with the most important of my news. Jane is much better, & is up &
about without feeling unduly tired. We are having the most wonderful weather
seen in England since Elizabethan times which is a great help.45
I have also various notizie about pictures. Balniel46 has persuaded Alendale
[sic]47 to lend his Sasetta [sic]48 etc to the Burlington Club for the winter
exhibition, so I hope we shall have a photo in time for the proofs. My American
parson from (or called) Shenandoah has indeed got a book which belonged to
Leonardo. It is the Problemata of Alexander Aphrodiseus49 which he bought in

45 October 1930 was unusually dry and warm, especially the third week.
46 David Balniel
47 Wentworth Henry Canning Beaumont, 2nd Viscount Allendale (1890–1956), came from a family
who owned 30,000 acres in northern England and whose seat was Bretton Hall near Wakefield (he
succeeded in 1923). The family fortune came from coal mines. He also inherited a fine collection of
‘old master’ pictures and jade which had been acquired in the 19th century. Bretton Hall was sold to
West Yorkshire County Council in 1947. For many years it was an education centre devoted to the
arts but is now a hotel and spa.The grounds and lakes are the setting for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
48 Sassetta, The Visit of St Antony to St Paul the Hermit. After the exhibition, Ellis Waterhouse wrote an
article about this picture in the Burlington Magazine,vol. 59, no. 342 (September 1931), pp. 108–9 and
112–13. The picture was sold by Viscount Allendale to Duveen Bros in 1937 and was bought by the
Samuel Kress Foundation who donated it to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, in 1939.
49 Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher, active c. ad 200, and the most celebrated
of the ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. A Latin edition of 1488, Problemata
Alexandri Aphrodisei, was produced in Venice by Antonius de Strata.
1929–1931 76

Florence simply because it was an incunabula (1488) & only afterwards discovered
various scribbles & notes at the end. There is absolutely no question that these
are by Leonardo.The book also contains the first specimen of L’s signature I have
ever seen.50 At present I only have two miserable photographs of the work, but I
am having the whole book sent to England, & will send you proper photographs
as soon as I can. Photos at Windsor are expensive & poor but I am having a good
many taken & will send you prints as some of them are really rather important.
Among them is what I imagine must be the only existing pure landscape by
Raphael.51 The drawing had puzzled me for ages, being obviously Raphaelesque
but so improbable in subject. However I left it out to be photographed, & quite
accidentally Morshead noticed that it was a sketch for the background of the
Morbetto of Marc Antonio.52 It is, of course, in reverse & has slight variations.
Most of the other drawings are Tintorets & a tiny Titian.
We are enjoying Richmond & find our new house most comfortable.
Did I tell you that the Marques of Lothian’s53 address is 30 St James’s Place?
Jane sends her love to you all,
Yours ever,
K.
Moravia,54 who is lunching here today, started by enjoying England, and now
begins to grow bored & is going to Ireland.

[Undated but must be November 1930]

Old Palace Place, Richmond Green

Dear BB.
Now that I am more or less better again I want to write and thank you for your
great kindness to me when I was ill.We would have had a sad holiday had I been
ill in a hotel. As it was K enjoyed being with you again more than anything else
we could have done and so did I in the intervals when I was up.
We were very distressed to hear of your horrid accident with Fausto55 and so
sorry to hear from Nicky’s postcard this morning that your leg is still sore. I do
hope you will be better soon but it must have been a horrid shock.

50 See letter from Clark, dated 10 ii 31, page 102. They turned out to be copies.
51 Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, no. 801.
52 Engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, The Plague (‘Il Morbetto’)
53 Philip Kerr
54 Alberto Moravia; see Appendix 1.
55 Fausto was the Berensons’ pet dog.
1929–1931 77

K says to tell you that he has seen the Allendale Sassetta and Matteo di
Giovanni.56 They are being photographed for the Burlington Exhibition which
opens on 8th December and he will of course send you them as soon as printed.
The Sassetta is very dirty but both are in good condition. The subject of the
Sassetta is the meeting of St Anthony and St Paul in the foreground; in the
background St Anthony and a centaur.
The Matteo di Giovanni is a fragment – the head of a bishop – apparently
from a large altarpiece which Waterhouse57 has identified. K has forgotten what
he said but hopes to send you the name on a card tonight.
The catalogue of the Dark Age exhibition at the Burlington is not yet out.
We are taking in Daedalo for your articles and are both enjoying them very
much indeed.
K has seen Lord Lee’s two new pictures. I expect you know the so-called
Giorgione of Moses and the Burning Bush. The Botticelli Madonna and Child
you probably know too. K thinks the latter may be genuine about 1485 or rather
part of it may, but it apparently is not a pretty picture. Lord Lee says the picture
had a moustache on when he bought it.58
We are beginning to settle down and like the new house very much. I do
hope something will bring you to England soon after all. K sends love to Nicky
and Mary. I shall write Nicky soon.
Much love from us both
Jane

56 See nn. 48 and 73.

57 Ellis Waterhouse
58 Moses and the Burning Bush, now attributed to Giorgione, rather than autograph, purchased by
Arthur Lee and now in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Lee bought The Madonna of the Veil, a
painting principally in tempera, in 1930 from an Italian dealer for a huge sum, $25,000. At the time
it was widely accepted by many authorities as a genuine work by Botticelli. The directors of the
Medici Society published the painting as a ‘superb composition of the greatest of all the Florentine
painters’, while the eminent critic Roger Fry acknowledged that it was ‘by a master’. Clark doubted
the attribution to Botticelli and suggested that it had ‘something of the silent cinema star’ about it,
comparing the Madonna with the leading film star Jean Harlow. Post-war scientific examination
showed that there were many reasons to disprove the picture’s authenticity, e.g. pigments not known
before the 18th and 19th centuries had been used, and the supposed worm holes in the wood panel
had been produced by a drill.The painting is now accepted as the work of the forger Umberto Giunti
(1886–1970), a teacher at the Institute of Fine Art in Siena, who developed a reputation primarily for
his convincing forgeries of fresco fragments. Lee donated the painting to the Courtauld Gallery in
1947. (Information courtesy of Juliet Chippindale, a National Gallery curatorial intern, in association
with the Courtauld Institute ma course ‘Curating the Art Museum’. The material was published on
30 June 2010 to coincide with the National Gallery exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and
Discoveries.)
1929–1931 78

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Nov. 29. 1930

Dear Jane & Kenneth.

I was delighted to hear from you first fr. K. and and now fr. Jane. As she says
nothing about her health I dare to hope it is much better.
Neither Mary nor I have been up to sample of late. Mary really alarms me at
times & it is in vain that I tell myself that she is being as bad as more than a few
times before. And I was struck down just a week ago with a kind of cold I never
had before & only now has it turned into a normal & odious & disgusting cold
in the head.
Before this last visitation I had already begun to frequent the drawings of the
Uffizi for a preliminary look. I hope to have a few more hours with them before
I leave Dec. 15 for Mrs Wharton’s at Hyeres-St.Claire du Chateau. Hyères will
be the address to Jan. 12.
No, I have no acquaintance with a ‘Burning Bush’ ascribable to Giorgione,
nor the Botticelli Mad.59 just acquired by Lord Lea [sic]. If his Lordship would
vouchsafe photos I should be grateful.
I look forward to the photos of the Sassetta & Matteo that you found at
Allendale’s & don’t forget to tell me what Waterhouse – who is he? – has to say
about the Matteo.
And thanks for the promise of photo’s of Windsor drawings & of the Leonardo
book in America.
I enclose a program of lectures on the Antique in English Culture to be
delivered at Hamburg. What an excellent initiative. Don’t I wish courses were
given on the same in both Oxford & Cambridge.
For my part I have been greatly enjoying several treatises by Blochet60 of
the Bibl. Nat. Paris, on the Islamic art in general & Islamic illumination in
particular. He arrives at all my extremes but not along the road of style but
thro’ an acquaintance of the historical and literary documents which is sheerly
staggering. I confess my appetite has seldom had greater satisfaction, & I have
never felt better nourished. It is also almost a pity that the Engl. book by him is
without notes of any sort & seems to be self assertive & arbitrary. Unluckily it
is besides not too well translated. (But please keep this criticism to yourself, for

59 See n. 58.
60 Edgard Blochet (b. 1870) published many volumes on Arabic, Persian and Turkish art and catalogued
the collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
1929–1931 79

it was done by Miss Binyon61 and I would not for the world hurt her feelings).
I am just finalising that masterpiece: Harold Nicolson’s Life of Lord Carnock.62
Do keep me informed of interesting emergings in the world of art & of
letters, & let Jane take very great care of herself.
Yours ever
B. B.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau
Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Xmas 1930

Dear Kenneth & Jane.

I have just opened & read out your wish in the presence of Mrs Wharton. And
she said ‘The dear things. I should love to see them again.’ Indeed I would
you were here. We should enjoy ourselves all round for in her own house Mrs
Wharton is simply enchanting, so gay, so un-preoccupied, so free for a walk &
talk, any kind of a lark, or what I enjoy so much reading aloud –
Now I wish to tell you that it has been naughty of you to leave me so long
without news. I wrote several weeks ago to Kenneth & have had no answer.
Then uncertain rumours reached me that neither of you was very well. And
every day I meant to write & inquire, but it has been the season when each day
all the ink there was in me had to be devoted to silly slob.
Now I trust you will follow the wire with a witty & clear statement as to
how you are standing the adventure of amphibian life in yr. native land. – Here
I am doing nothing, truly nothing connected with my job. When I read it is von
Bulow’s memoirs.63 We gossip and talk a great deal, Mrs W. Norton,64 Lapsley,65

61 Cicely Binyon, née Powell, was a historian (and the wife of Laurence Binyon) who translated Edgard
Blochet’s Musulman Painting, XIIth to XVIIth Century, with an introduction by Sir E. Denison Ross,
London: Methuen, 1929.
62 Harold Nicolson, Sir Arthur Nicolson, First Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy, London:
Constable, 1930. Sir Harold George Nicolson kcvo cmg (1886–1986) was well known as a diplomat,
author, diarist and politician, who was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. Arthur was his
father.
63 Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von Bülow (1849–1929), Prince von Bülow, was the German
statesman who served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for three years and then as Chancellor
of the German Empire from 1900 to 1909. His memoirs, which he stipulated should be published
after his death, appeared in four volumes in 1930–32.
64 The wife of Robert Norton.
65 Gaillard Lapsley
1929–1931 80

Hugh Smith66 & I. Hugh Smith seem a big-bug on the National Arts fund
& I have been preaching hard unto him on the iniquity of exhibitions with
their tendency to reduce art to front-page news, & the harm they do to the
objects exhibited – disastrous in the case of panel & tempera paintings. And
now the monstrosity of the proposal to allow works in British public museums
to wander abroad solliciting like wops for approval & support of financial &
political interests.
Enough & more thereon –
My best wishes to you both for a Happy New Year.
Affectionately
B. B.

30 Dec ’30
The Toft67
Bournemouth
Tel. 922

Dear BB.
Your letter arrived here this morning & naturally made me blush. This time I
have some excuse, as I really had begun to write to you when I was attacked by
influenza & spent a miserable week in bed, coming down here as soon as was
possible. Alan was also full of cold & Jane assumed the new role of strong man of
the family. In fact she really is very much better, & when we return to London,
in about ten days, she should be quite herself.Your first letter distressed us both
very much with its news of Mary, but this new one sounds so cheerful that I
hope she is stronger. What fools we are to live in England. You must be having
an enchanting time, & we have had six weeks of more or less uninterrupted
fog.68 Nevertheless we are delighted with Richmond. I find I hardly ever go into

66 Edith Wharton first met the lively minded John Hugh Smith, 20 years her junior, at a country
house party at Stanway in Gloucestershire in 1908. Their initial flirtatious relationship developed
into a deep and lasting friendship. At the same house party was Robert Norton. They, with Gaillard
Lapsley and Berenson, formed a key component of Wharton’s inner circle and were her regular
Christmas guests. In 1939 Wharton, Norton and Lapsley published an anthology of English love
poems, Eternal Passion in English Poetry: Selected by Edith Wharton and Robert Norton with the collaboration
of Gaillard Lapsley, New York and London: D. Appleton-Century, 1939.
67 See Ch. 1 n. 2.
68 Records show about 2 weeks of fog reaching a climax just before Christmas.
1929–1931 81

London and enjoy the work & comparative quiet immensely. It is just as well that
we like it, as we’ve spent a fortune doing up the house.
Last month I was invited to leave it. Apparently they can get no one to take
Baldwin Brown’s place in Edinburgh69 and in despair applied to me (unofficially,
but firmly). I was immensely flattered at the prospect, but reason prevailed &
I refused. I should have made a poor mess of stuffing future schoolmistresses
to pass degrees in the whole of art and archaeology. Besides which I am really
enthralled with the work I am doing. The work on the Leonardo’s at Windsor
has proved unexpectedly rewarding. I had thought, ‘such a great name, such a
famous collection, there will be nothing left to do but record other people’s
judgements.’ But I find that there is almost everything to do. I suppose no one has
ever worked there quite long enough – or perhaps they have not been allowed to
get the drawings out of order. From whatever reason I find that no one has ever
tried seriously to put them in chronological order & do the obvious things – for
example no one seems to have tried putting together the sketch books which
is quite easy as the watermarks are often clear. And if such gross mechanical
criteria are neglected, you can imagine how neglected are the esthetic. As for the
Florentine Drawings: of course you don’t want anything like the detail I have to
take. For example you have thirty or so horse drawings classed under one rubric,
& I imagine that if this were expanded to three or four, according to period &
intention, it would be detailed enough. Same with flower drawings & landscapes.
With your permission I shall make out a scheme for these parts & send it to you,
to accept or reject as you like (of course they are all drawings you have passed as
genuine). I really think that the catalogue when it is finished will be useful in a
pedestrian way. I fear it won’t be very popular as people like Malaguzzi Valeri,70
Venturi71 & co have made the wildest guesses at dating – but of course they’ll
never read it, so it doesn’t matter. I think the trouble is that Leonardo drawings
are amongst the very few things that can’t be studied from reproduction.
I have got about a dozen Windsor photographs & will send them off to the
Tatti when I return to Richmond. I’ve also got some photos of the little figure
on the tomb of Michelangelo, & some good details of the Bertoldo bronze battle
relief.72 I wish I knew if anyone had ever written on the influence of that piece

69 Gerard Baldwin Brown (1849–1932) was the first holder of the Watson-Gordon Professorship of
Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh in 1880 and held the chair for half a century until his
retirement in 1930.
70 Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri (1867–1928), Leonardo da Vinci e la scultura, Bologna, 1922. He was head
of the Fine Arts Service of the Comune di Bologna.
71 Adolfo Venturi, Leonardo da Vinci pittore, Bologna, 1920; Storia dell’arte in Italia, Milan, 1925. Lionello
Venturi, La Critica e l’arte di Leonardo da Vinci, Bologna, 1919.
72 The ‘little figure’ is possibly in the Royal Library, Windsor, RL 12355. Bertoldo di Giovanni (c.
1420–c. 1491) Battle (with Hercules), 1478, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
1929–1931 82

on high renaissance. But no Leonardo scholars seem to mention it in relation

with Anghiari.
We have seen a lot of Moravia, & I enjoy his company very much. I am afraid
we’ve done very little towards introducing him to the great, partly because Jane
was ill, partly because we know so few. However he seems to have met all the
celebrities, & found his bourgeois afternoons with us a rest: also we encouraged
him to talk as much as he liked which not all the celebrities did. His attitude
towards English intelligence is uncompromising & no doubt just, but he misses a
lot by his inability to learn the language. He understands little, is with difficulty
understood & refuses to speak French or Italian.
As for the new discoveries in Lady Allendale’s bathroom. The Matteo di
Giovanni is a Bishop who must certainly have formed the left hand corner of a
lunette the centrepiece of which is the Esztergom ‘Virgin & Angels’.73 The size &
the very complicated ornamental border both agree. The Sassetta, as I think Jane
told you, is extremely dirty & rather unattractive looking, the small fragment of
sky being regiet. Otherwise it is untouched. Waterhouse is going to publish it,
but has promised me an advance photo for you.74 The Allendales are naturally
furious, & say that it is a copy – Sir Lionel Cust75 (or Sir Lionel Earle76) told them
so years ago. Waterhouse I think I mentioned to you as a formidable young man
who had your lists interleaved with complete bibliographies. I think he is really
our white hope & may replace Constable (passed to another sphere) as our one
non dago Kunsthistorike.
I am re reading Wolfflins Grundbegriffe77 prior to giving a lecture on him at
London University & am horrified to find myself rather disappointed. Really
he does not seem to have improved on his Renaissance & Barok & gets very
muddled up on his taktilisch & malerisch. However he is such streets ahead of his
successors that I shall keep any denigrations to myself.We, too, have been reading
Lord Carnock. I really didn’t think Nicolson had it in him to write such a good
book, and it makes his present debacle all more lamentable.78 We have read two

73 There is a Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Matteo di Giovanni in the Christian Museum in
Esztergom, north-west of Budapest.
74 See n. 48.
75 Sir Lionel Henry Cust (1859–1929) was the Director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1895
to 1909 and co-edited the Burlington Magazine from 1909 to 1919. Of aristocratic stock himself, his
knowledge of the genealogy of the British nobility was prodigious. He was Surveyor of the King’s
Pictures from 1901 to 1927.
76 Sir Lionel Earle (1866–1948) was the civil servant who headed the Office of Works.
77 Heinrich Wölfflin
78 In 1931 Harold Nicolson joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party which by then had become
supportive of the idea of a fascist dictatorship for the uk.
1929–1931 83

fairly good novels, Lawrence’s Virgin & Gypsy,79 which has a sort of classical
breadth, & Somerset Maugham’s Cakes & Ale.80
I wonder if you and Mrs Wharton have tried Jorrocks yet. I nearly sen[t] you
an edition for Christmas, but thought I would wait and send you the Catalogue
of the Dark Ages Exhibition81 instead. It isn’t out yet, and if by any chance you’ve
ordered it, let me know & I shall have the fun of thinking of something else.
We were so touched that Mrs Wharton remembered us so kindly. Perhaps we
might be allowed to call on her on our way to Sospel82 this spring. But please
do not suggest this if you think she would find it impertinent or inconvenient.
Jane sends her love & joins me in good wishes,
Ever yours affectionately
K.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau
Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Address Settignano [in BB’s hand]
Jan. 13. 1931

Dear Kenneth.
I hope you are recovered fr. the flu & that you are enjoying all the pleasures of
warmth & safety that one can still easily enjoy in an English home.
I delivered yr. message to Mrs Wharton who expressed the wish that you both
would come to stay. She has written herself.
This place is a paradise. Climate, scenery variety of walks, possibility of
excursions put it beyond all other oases, and for me it has been a haven. For
a month I have not looked at a work of art or an art book. We have had no
outside company. Except [for] glimpses of the Aldous Huxleys.83 We have read

79 D. H. Lawrence’s short story written in 1926 and published posthumously in 1930.

80 An entertaining novel of social mores of the artistic and literary world in fin-de-siècle London, first
published in book form in September 1930. In it Somerset Maugham has a sly dig at aesthetes
and the impossibility of defining the fleeting qualities of beauty. The book caused a sensation when
first published because of its leading characters’ resemblance to real-life celebrities. Although Clark
claimed that he he did not like reading novels, the Clarks became close friends of Maugham and
after the war frequently stayed with him in his villa at Cap Ferrat in the South of France.
81 The exhibition Art in the Dark Ages was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, in spring/
summer 1930.
82 See Ch. 1 n. 15.
83 Aldous Huxley
1929–1931 84

aloud together and by myself I have galloped thro’ the memoirs of v. Bulow.84 I
doubt whether you & your generation can get the fun out of it that I do, for it
revives all the excitement & passions I was so keen about when the events Bulow
chronicles and comments, were occurring.
Something I must recommend to your perusal is Chesterton’s essay on Gilbert
& Sullivan in a vol. called ‘the 1890s’ that contains some real criticism.85
And I revelled in Edith Sitwell’s introduction in her ‘Pleasures of Poetry’.86
There at last something like justice is done to the sound-sensuality of verse. And
now my vacation is drawing to a close. I expect to be back at I Tatti the 21st. &
to go to work at once on the Drawings. I forsee no snags to delay me before I
reach Leonardo.
Then Windsor remains a difficulty.
What I need is a complete set of reproductions of all drawings save mere
diagrams. Each reproduction should have attached the inventory number of the
original, the technique and paper & the measurements. Is there nobody you
could employ at my expense to do this for me? Did you not tell me there now
was to be had a series of post-cards after the Windsor drawings? These & existing
photos could be used, and when both [fail] reproductions in publications could
be indicated. As a final resort, where absolutely necessary, new photos could be
made.
If you could ‘achieve’ – what a big word! – this for me, you would be doing
me a real service, & not me alone. For whether liked or not, the new edition of
the Flor. Drawings will be the ground in which further planting will be carried
on for some decades to come.
Of course I shall be happy to study all the classifications & chronology of the
Windsor drawings that you will submit to me, & write ample acknowledgement
about any of them that fit in with my schema.
Send me a Catal. of the Dark Ages Exhib by all means.
Offhand I can recall only Bode87 on Bertoldo, but I suspect if you look through
the Pruss. Jahrb. you will find a good bit. In his own field, Florence 1460–1490,
little escaped Bode.
With Nicky’s greetings to both of you as well as my own.
Affectionately
B.B.

84 See n. 63.
85 G. K. Chesterton wrote an introduction to A. H. Godwin, Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical Appreciation
of the Savoy Opera, London: J. M. Dent, 1926. Berenson’s reference has not been traced.
86 Edith Sitwell, The Pleasure of Poetry: A Critical Anthology, London: Duckworth, 1930.
87 Wilhelm von Bode
1929–1931 85

26.1.31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

Dear BB,
We were so delighted to hear from you again so soon. Your letter found us still
at Bournemouth, both very much recovered, & now we are home we are able to
enjoy our house for the first time.
Of course I shall see that you have all the material for the Windsor Leonardo.
There are not so many that have never been photographed if you include
Rouveyre’s miserable & swindling publication.88 A few out of the way horse
studies are in Malaguzzi Valeri’s Scultura.89 The trouble will lie with the flower &
landscape studies, I fancy. However you shall have a full list as soon as I can make
it, and I hope next week to give you a preliminary list of horses. I will give no.,
size, medium & reference to photo. of anything not in your list, or included with
some slight mistake. I will add supplementary remarks, for you to look at or not,
as to what I take to be approximate grouping.
You are not missing much in the Persian Exhibition,90 which is full of pretty
things, but does nothing to modify even my sketchy previous knowledge of
Persian culture. It is really too big an exhibition for such a small, esoteric art,
& a contradiction of its true nature – the exquisite made commonplace by
multiplication, & the aristocratic vulgarised. A culture must have pretty deep
roots to survive exportation to Burlington House.
I am sending separately a few photos. which may interest you. The ones
from Windsor are poor prints of rather poor things. I find that my copy of the
Michelangelo is mentioned by you as existing in a Grosvenor gallery photo,
but send you another as I believe some of your Michelangelo material went
astray. Isn’t it for the big David? The monogram of Durer is barely visible in the
photo between his right foot & the baby. I don’t think it is a Durer copy, but the
monogram is suggestive, & might have been used by your old chum Panofsky in
his Durer’s Stellung zur Antik (which seems to me his best effort).91

88 Edouard Rouveyre, Notes et dessins sur la génération et le mécanisme des fonctions intimes, feuillets inédits,
reproduits d’après les originaux conservés à la Bibliothèque du Chateau de Windsor, 23 vols, Paris, 1901, with
452 photographic reproductions of Leonardo’s sketches. See also Ch. 4 n. 11.
89 See n. 70.
90 The International Exhibition of Persian Art, Royal Academy, London, 1931.
91 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Dürers Stellung zur Antik’, Wiener Jahrbuch zur Kunstgeschichte, 1 (1921–2), pp. 43–
92.
1929–1931 86

The walks here are excellent & I often take them with Bogey92 who is a great
walker. He speaks most affectionately of you, as indeed do many people we
meet, & we all lament your fear of an English winter which makes you come
in September when everyone is away. We had just been to Cambridge & spent
two really delightful days with Cockerell.93 He is a grand man & has the most
wonderful books. Has he ever shown you his Florentine Picture Chronicle – it
appears to me to be a sort of Domenico di Michelino.94 His new galleries are
large and rather self-consciously bare – with really nothing good in them but
the Titian organist, Lucretia & the Paolo.95 But these look much better than ever
before.
Our love to Nicky and Mary,
Yours ever,
K.C.

10 ii 31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

Dear BB,
Here are some photographs. They don’t amount to much, I am afraid. [Written
as a footnote: Another Sebastiano to follow] I am still working away at the
Leonardos, but the later I put off sending you lists the more complete they will
be. I am also slaving at two recent papers I was cajoled (9 months ago) into
promising to read this March. After they are over we go out to Mrs Wharton &
Sospel;96 & are looking forward to the former extremely. I don’t think we shall
cross the Alps, but more likely tour about in Provence & perhaps visit Bayonne;
so let me know anything you want there. We should like to go to Venice, but

92 Bogey Harris
93 Sydney Cockerell
94 One of Cockerell’s predecessors at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was Sidney Colvin who
was the director in 1876–84. Colvin had a special interest in early Italian art. He purchased a book
of drawings from John Ruskin, which he attributed to Maso Finiguerra (1424–1464), the reputed
inventor of engraving, and reproduced in facsimile, with a detailed commentary, calling it A Florentine
Picture-Chronicle (1898).
95 Three of the outstanding masterpieces in the Fitzwilliam Museum are Titian’s Venus and Cupid with
a Lute Player, 1555–65 (a similar picture, but with an organist instead of a lute player, is in the Prado,
Madrid),Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, 1571, and Paolo Veronese’s Hermes, Herse and Aglauros, after 1576.
96 See Ch. 1 n. 15 above.
1929–1931 87

we may be motoring & our second hand car would hardly survive the Col de
Turda.
Just in case Lee has sent you a photograph of his new Botticelli may I ask
you to forget anything Jane may have reported me as having said of it.97 It is
one of those pictures about which it is best to be silent: in fact I am coming to
believe that it is best for me to be silent about every picture. Did I tell you that
my Leonardo book was a mare’s nest. The man had sent photographs of two
drawings from the middle of the Codice Atlantico.98 When I discovered this I
demanded the book itself & found that the drawings at the end were copies of
the Codice Atlantico drawings. They must have been early copies done with
some fraudulent motive – perhaps the book really did belong to Leonardo – he
certainly had read it – & some pupil thought to enhance its value.99
We were delighted to hear from Nicky that you are all so well. We are all
flourishing, & join in sending you all our love,
Yours affectionately,
K.C.
P. S. Lee won’t give anyone a photo of his
‘Giorgione’100 because he says it depends on the
colour!
P. P. S. Constable is going to America to study the
teaching of art-history!!

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 14, 1931

Dear Kenneth.
I hasten to thank you for yr. letter of the 10th and the enclosed photographs.
But how naughty to send me photos and drawings with no indication of
technique or size. And how I wish you had on the back of each written your

97 See n. 58.
98 The Codice Atlantico consists of 12 volumes of writings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, now
in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. The descriptive name derives from the size of the pages which
are similar in size to that of an Atlante (Atlas).
99 See undated letter from Clark, pre-November 1930, pp. 75–6.
100 See n. 58.
1929–1931 88

attribution.You who have seen the originals so recently should be able to make
valuable suggestions to one like me who does not know the originals. Which
does not mean that I am not very grateful for these photos.
The one you venture to attribute to Moretto is quite right,101 but I know
others besides the Morgan one.
So much for this cargo & invoice. By the way Sept. no. of the Art Bulletin,
the last received, contains an article on Leonardo’s bronzes which you should
glance at.
Turning to your letter of Jan. 26, I find that you promised to send the photo
of ‘my copy of a Michelangelo’ mentioned in my book as existing in a Grosvenor
Gallery photo.You say it has a monograph of Albert Durer.You have not included
this photo with those you have just sent.
Talking of photos we all have greatly enjoyed the one of your son and heir.
I have just finished the Earlier Quattrocento Missing Pictures, and shall devote
the coming weeks to the drawings of the same.102 We have been having Morra103
& Trevy104 and my sister Senda105 staying so that the addition of a few outsiders
made our lunch table huge.Vavala106 comes to do clerical work, & she is like the
rest of us, always more so. I wish I could like her as much as I approve of her, &
find I’m duty bound to stand by her.
If you retain any leisure for general reading get and read Maurice Hindus’s
‘Humanity Uprooted’.107 It is about Soviet Russia, & makes one think hard. Even
if we should have to go through with the dictatorship of the proletariat for as
long as we suffered primitive Christianity it would be awkward. And Hindus for
the first time makes me fear that the contagion may even reach Western Europa.

101 See Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, no 872 (published by Clark in
Old Master Drawings, vol. 5, p. 64, pl. 97). See also n. 40 above.
102 Berenson published a series of articles on missing pictures between 1929 and 1932 in International
Studio and in Italian translation in Dedalo.
103 Umberto Morra
104 Robert Trevelyan
105 Senda Berenson
106 Evelyn Sandberg-Vavala was a trained art historian who did most of the proof-reading for the Lists.
Berenson respected her but found her tiresome and did not enjoy her company (Mary thought
he ill-used her). He nicknamed her ‘Attila’, saying that where she had been harvesting there was
nothing left for others to glean (Mariano p. 141).
107 Maurice Hindus (1891–1969) was a writer and journalist of Jewish origin who was born in Tsarist
Russia and whose family migrated to New York in 1905. In 1929 he visited Soviet Russia and as
a result wrote Humanity Uprooted which is a chronicle of the impact on ordinary people of the
Socialist experiment, and his judgement on the moral decay of a society without religion but with
sexual freedom, without family ties and with equality for everyone, and the group dominant over
the individual.
1929–1931 89

I luckily shall be well out of the way & have no personal fears. But the House
of Life to which I am attached may come out severely damaged, & that grieves
me by anticipation.
Cockerell is a bit of the real thing. Most people grumble and wish he were a
bit less real.
Love to both of you
B.B.

[Dated 1930 but must be 1931]

20.11.30
Old Palace Place
Richmond Green
Surrey
Richmond 1384

Dear BB.,
Thank you so much for your letter: we love to hear news of you. I am conscience
stricken at not writing sizes & media on the photographs.The reason was that I am
weakly [sic] publishing the drawings in Parker’s108 magazine & have incorporated
my notes in the article – which was in the press when I wrote to you. You
will see these when the number appears. I imagine that there can be no doubt
about the Sebastianos, & one of the Venetian drawings must be Tintoret – the
standing man. The two men leaning forward I imagine probably Tintoret,109 the
reclining woman possibly Palma Giovane for a picture at Doughty House.110 Of
the others, the naked warriors must be a copy of, or a pastiche after, a Pollaiuolo
& might throw some light on the Sachs drawing, I suppose. The Jonah I take to
be a copy of a lost Raphael:111 if so isn’t it the only evidence outside tradition of

108 Karl Parker edited the magazine Old Master Drawings ‘for students and collectors’, from 1926
to 1940. The March 1931 edition contains Clark’s article ‘Venetian Drawings in Windsor Castle
Library’, illustrating the Sebastiano del Piombos (RCIN 904813 and RCIN 904815), a Tintoretto
(RCIN 904823) and a Moretto of two women (RCIN 4793).
109 Royal Collection, Windsor, catalogued as School of Tintoretto (RCIN 904797).
110 See Herbert Cook
111 Both these drawings are at Windsor: Battle of Nude Men (RCIN 990050) is attributed to Raphael and
The Prophet Jonah (RCIN 990804) is catalogued as School of Raphael.
1929–1931 90

his participation in that work.. It is no 0804, Pen bistre and white on brownish
paper, 30.7 x 20cm. On the verso are some scribbles, of which I enclose a photo.
The landscape112 is a fine drawing in the original – silver point & white on buff
paper, & interesting for its connection with Marcantonio’s Morbetto.113 I hope to
publish it in facsimile in the Walpole Soc.114 I think that was all I sent except the
Bertolodo detail & Michelangelo tomb. I enclose one which I hardly thought
worth sending, but which may amuse you as showing how those 15th-century
sculptors drew. Why are there so few of their drawings? (Can’t remember a single
Vincenzo Danti or Perino da Vinci still less Ammanati, (except architectural)
Tribolo or Della Porta.Yet they must all have been fine draughtsmen.
What with Leonardo & my papers I am pretty busy, but managed to go to
Cambridge again last week to hear Purcells Fairy Queen. It is rather thin stuff &
I thought the music ill suited to Shakespeare’s text.115 How tedious 17th-century
masques must have been. There seems to be nothing new in London except a
very fine statue of the Tel-el-lagash type,116 but with its head.
Your book on the Soviet state sounds alarming. I suppose we have reached
a period when anything might happen, & the end of the Roman empire is our
only guide. But I comfort myself by thinking that history never repeats itself.
We are going to Haigh117 this morning – a long journey to a cold house,
undertaken for love of Balniel, not in hopes of finding unknown pictures,
because all the pictures there are bad. Last night I had tea with Cook. He
seemed temporarily a little better & was very lively in mind. There can be few
people left in Europe who retain such an interest in the names of bad Italian

112 Royal Collection,Windsor, catalogued as Raphael, A Landscape with Fgures and the Ruins of a Column
(RCIN 990117).
113 See n. 52.
114 The Walpole Society, named after Horace Walpole, was formed in 1911 to promote the study of
the history of British art from the Middle Ages to the present day. The Society publishes an annual
volume of studies written by its members and scholars around the world.
115 Purcell’s Fairy Queen was performed at the New Theatre, Cambridge, on 10–14 February 1931, with
the dialogue taken from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in place of the alterations made by
the anonymous librettist of 1692.
116 Probably a reference to a sculpture of Gudea, dating to about 2000 bc and originating in Southern
Iraq. Gudea was a ‘Governor Priest’, the supreme ruler of Lagash, a small autonomous Sumerian
kingdom. He had statues set up in temples to represent himself as a pious servant of the gods. They
were carved from an exceptionally hard dark green stone called diorite.
117 Haigh Hall near Wigan was the seat of the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres until its sale to Wigan
Council in 1947. It is now a Leisure and Conference Centre.
1929–1931 91

painters, & I learnt a lot from going round with him. He told me of your calling
his little Madonna under a baldaquin Domenico Veneziano,118 which appeals to
me very much.
We are both flourishing, & join in love to you all,
Kenneth

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Address Hotel Transatlantique Tunis
March 16. 1931

Dear Kenneth.
We leave in two days Tunis & I had suspended work & am cleaning up my desk.
The first unanswered letter I attend to is yours, the one of March 20,119 I mean.
Many thanks for the photos enclosed. Talking of photos it must have been
yr. intention to send me the one of the really interesting Seb. del Piombo for a
Holy Family with Donor that you reprod. in March Old Master Drawings. Be
an Angel and make this good.
Nicky has sent you a list of photos we need at Bayonne in case you do get so
far. Perhaps you would take in Orleans on the way.
The two months since my return fr. Hyeres have passed in continuing Festival.
We almost never sit down to a meal without as many at table as the room would
hold. And seldom was anyone there I would have wished elsewhere. But fatigue
comes the more, not the less, from a long strain of good company.
Then the library is being more and more frequented, and the frequenters are
frequently asked to tea & I am expected to communicate a Jupiter Fruenpieneosis
[sic].120
So it will be a great relief to get away into an Anonimia121 where there are no
people whom it would be cruel to deprive of the privuledge of my acquaintance

118 This small pictue (29.2 x 21.6 cm; 11½ x 8½ in) is now attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli, The Virgin
and Child with Angels, National Gallery, London (NG 5581), purchased in 1945.
119 He must mean 20 February.
120 Meaning a divine ‘hander out of gladness’ (German freuen = gladness)?
121 Italian for ‘anonymity’.
1929–1931 92

(an American lady has just left thanking me for having been gracious enough to
receive her).
I am plunged into Gsell’s History of N. Africa in Antiquity.122 Why do the
French print books on monstrously heavy glossy paper that takes the ink badly &
tests your wrists? Why are they so pedantique in asking every possible question
to answer it Nous l’ignorons. I dare say there is something in killing your interest
in a subject. If that is their intention admirably do they do it.
I gloat over another vol. of the last edit. of Meyer’s Hist.123 This time it is
all about the Phoenicians, Carthage the Israelites, & comes apposite. And I am
going to live myself into S. Augustine. The more I know him the more he seems
to hold the keys to all that follows after in the West down to our own times.
Affectionate greetings fr. all three of us
B.B.

4 June ’31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

My dear BB.
As usual I find it difficult to begin, we seem to have done so much since I last
wrote. We have been to the South of France: that was very pleasant, especially
our stay with Mrs Wharton. What a perfect hostess, & what an escape from the
humbug of fashionable highbrow talk. We found our hotel at Sospel failing, but
otherwise our expedition was perfect. It was many years since I had been in Aix
& Avignon & I was astonished at the beauty of the Sienese frescoes in the Palais
de Papes.124 I found that the sculpture at Arles – I mean the porch of S.Tropheme

122 Stéphane Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du nord, Paris, 1913.

123 Eduard Meyer (1855–1930) was a German historian who held various professorships. His Geschichte
des Alterthums (History of Antiquity) was published in several volumes between 1884 and 1902. New
editions of single volumes were published sporadically but in order from 1925 onwards.
124 The frescoes are by the Italian artist Matteo Giovannetti (c. 1322–68), a follower of Simone Martini
and a friend of Petrarch. He was summoned to Avignon by Pope Clement vi to decorate the Palais
des Papes.
1929–1931 93

[sic] – disappointing: real Roman revival. S. Gilles is much better.125 We also saw
most of the good things en route from Havre to Provence, & arrived home bursting
with aesthetic experiences. I had to give two lectures on the study of Art History
at London University. They cost me infinite pains & were complete failures:
only twenty people in a vast hall & of the twenty 15 were elderly ladies recruited
by Jane. They neither heard nor understood a word, & my chairman greeted me
at the end with the words ‘You do not really think Riegl126 a serious writer, do
you’. So ended the first effort to spread the gospel in Great Britain.
Now I am working away at Windsor. I have nearly finished my first comb
over, & I will soon be sending you lists of notes. The work has been increasingly
interesting, & I believe useful. I hope to write the introduction this summer &
the books should be in the press this Autumn. Last week we went to Paris to see
the Byzantine exhibition.127 I think you ought to go & see it as it contains some
objects which are really hard to see & impossible to judge in reproduction. Have
you seen the painting of St Justus on silk from the Cathedral of Trieste,128 or the
enamelled cross from Cosenza.129 Probably you have, though Toesca, whom we
met there, had not. But even so the sight of all these objects together (& most
beautifully arranged) gives one an idea of the variety & splendour of Byzantine
art which can otherwise only be achieved by a great effort of imagination. Just in
case Tyler130 has not done so, I send you a copy of the catalogue. Of things which
I had never seen before the most impressive to me were the Rothschild cameo,131
a piece of silk from Auxerre, & some of the Coptic textiles – one in particular
recently discovered, of ladies riding on sea monsters. Familiar things, like the

125 The Church of St Trophime in Arles, built between the 12th and 15th centuries, is an important
example of Romanesque architecture. The sculptures over the portal, particularly the Last
Judgement, and the columns in the adjacent cloister, are considered to be among the best examples
of Romanesque sculpture. The nearby Abbey of Saint-Gilles is a Benedictine monastery that
prospered from the 11th century onwards, being enlarged and decorated from the 12th to the 15th
centuries, in a French Romanesque style.
126 Alois Riegl
127 The first exhibition devoted to Byzantine art was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1931.
128 The treasury of the Cathedral of Trieste, dedicated to St Justus, possesses, among other images of the
saint, a silk icon.
129 The 12th-century silver-gilt and enamel cross in the cathedral treasury at Cosenza (Calabria) was
presented in 1222 by the Emperor Frederic ii. It shows the enthroned Christ surrounded by the
Evangelists.
130 Royall Tyler
131 A rare, puzzling, and much discussed cameo belonging to the French Rothschild family in Paris.
Dating from the 1st century ad, it is said to depict the Imperial Couple Honorius and Maria; but at
a later time it was inscribed as purporting to depict the saints Sergius and Bacchus who were 3rd-
century Roman soldiers and who are commemorated as martyrs by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox
and Oriental Orthodox churches.
1929–1931 94

Utrecht ivory Virgin132 & the silver from the Cabinet des Medailles looked twice
as well, when surrounded by their fellows.
We were only in Paris three days & worked ourselves to a standstill. The third
day we went out for an evening & a night to Mrs Wharton at Sainte Brice,133
which made a calm & exquisite close to our labours.
Most unfortunately the Byzantine exhibition is to be reported in the
Burlington by a young man named Byron,134 whom we met & who does not
appear to know the first thing about the subject – but don’t let that prejudice
you against the exhibition.
We are just off to Cambridge, to a series of bean feasts organised by Cockerell
for the opening of his new wing at the Fitzwilliam.135 On Saturday we shall reel
home bloated with academic food. On the whole I look forward to the prospect
of pomp vanity & indigestion. I can’t imagine why I have been asked except
that, as the youngest person present, I am a potential historical document for
the occasion.
We have had the poet Yeats136 here. Did you ever know him? He is excellent
company, the most roaring lion I have ever encountered & no doubt wiser &
pleasanter now (as well as being a better poet) than he has ever been.
You must have been having a wonderful time – though rather warm at the
end, I should have imagined. At present I feel as if I shall never have seen enough
of Europe to embark for Africa.
I take a new page to ask your advice. I have been offered Charlie Bell’s post
at the Ashmolean.137 I did not stand for it, partly because a friend of mine named
Ashton138 was standing, but apparently he & all the other candidates have been

132 The Virgin Hodegetria, an ivory plaque of the 10–11th centuries, now in the Rijksmuseum het
Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, a former medieval monastery displaying the history of Christianity
in Holland.
133 In 1919 Edith Wharton bought, and gave the name to, the Pavillon Colombe at Saint-Brice-sous-
Forêt in the northern suburbs of Paris, carrying out works to the house and garden. She lived and
worked there and died there in 1937.The house was a folly built in about 1770 but it had been much
altered before Wharton bought it.
134 Robert Byron
135 A new two-storey extension, designed by Dunbar Smith, opened to wide public acclaim in 1931.
Sydney Cockerell’s spectacular acquisitions for the Fitzwilliam constantly left it short of space.
However, he always ensured that new collections came with funds for new galleries. In 1925
Cockerell approached the Courtauld family who funded the new wing. The new Courtauld
galleries were much praised for their innovative treatment of space and natural lighting.
136 Clark had been introduced to the Irish poet W. B.Yeats (1865–1939) by Maurice Bowra when he
was an undergraduate at Oxford and he maintained a life-long admiration for, and fascination with,
both the man and his poetry, which he learned by heart and often quoted.
137 Charles Bell. What Clark could not have known was that Bell had written to Berenson on 21
December 1930 telling him of his decision to resign.
138 Leigh Ashton
1929–1931 95

turned down & they have come to me in despair. The work entailed, if one
has a competent assistant, is almost nothing – only 212 days attendance a year,
& one has the handling of all the lovely things in the Collection. I am very
much tempted, though it means leaving our lovely house & garden, which
really distresses me, as well as costing several thousand pounds. Please forgive my
bothering you, and let me know what you think.
Jane joins me in sending love to you all,
Yours ever,
K.
96
Four

Oxford, the Ashmolean

1931–1933

Both Clark and Berenson were familiar with the realities and possibilities of
museum curatorship. The opportunity to be in charge of a high-quality and
prestigious museum collection is an inevitable temptation for anyone with a love
of objects and display and a passion for collecting. Berenson had been attracted
by the idea of becoming the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In late 1904 feelers had been put out by several members of the board of trustees,
including the president, William Rhinelander. After discussion with Mary, it was
decided that if an offer were to be forthcoming he would refuse it, not because
the work would have been inimical to him (although Mary thought such a
position would be ‘a waste of a man who could think’ (Samuels MC p. 421), but
because it would have meant leaving Europe. In the event no offer was made,
for Rhinelander was succeeded by J. Pierpont Morgan, who was no admirer of
Berenson.
Clark and Berenson both knew the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford well.
Charles Bell had worked there since 1896. As Keeper of Fine Art since 1908,
he had brought about many beneficial changes in the organisation of the
Museum, opened new galleries and radically improved the display of objects
and paintings. Clark knew that in being offered the post of Keeper of Fine Art
as successor to Bell, he was being tempted by an absorbing job at a particularly
interesting moment in an institution notable for many surprising developments
and reincarnations. Clark later claimed that he should have refused the offer and
that he accepted the post out of ‘vanity and filial piety’ (APW p. 198).
The Ashmolean claims to be Britain’s oldest public museum. It gains its name
from Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), the son of a saddler from the Midlands who
trained in the law and settled in Oxford at the moment when Charles i’s court
was in residence there. Ashmole married advantageously and gained lucrative
government office which enabled him to indulge his passion for collecting
books, manuscripts, coins and medals. He also acquired a remarkable collection
that had been formed by the Tradescant family. The elder Tradescant had been
Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens to Charles i and he and his son assembled and

97
1931–1933 98

created a Museum of Curiosities in Lambeth, London, open to the public and

known as The Ark, containing, inter alia, specimens of natural and marine history,
royal memorabilia, coins, curiosities from lands and peoples overseas – almost
nothing was excluded. Ashmole, who also had a deep interest in alchemy and
astrology, helped to catalogue the collection, and the Tradescant son made it over
to him by way of gift; Ashmole then bestowed the Tradescant Collection, and his
own, on Oxford University and the Ashmolean Museum came into existence in
1683, albeit as a completely different institution, and in another location, from
the one that Clark was to join.
Over the centuries the fortunes of the Ashmolean waxed and waned, as
did its purpose and status within the University. More than once it fell into
deep neglect and was on the point of extinction. The University was, over
time, the recipient of other collections of curiosities, antiquities, works of art,
coins, specimens of natural history and science, and at different times these were
shuffled round existing or new institutions. The Bodleian Library, for example,
amassed a collection of paintings, initially portraits of University notables but
later including landscapes, contemporary art and old masters. In 1755 a large
collection of Greek and Roman antiquities came the University’s way from the
Countess of Pomfret.The first steps towards sorting out the muddle and bringing
some clarity and structure to Oxford’s collections came in 1845 when a new
building (the focus of the present-day Ashmolean, but not then known by that
name) was opened at the corner of Beaumont Street and St Giles, to include the
University Galleries and the Taylorian Institution for teaching modern languages.
In 1860 the University opened a new Natural History Museum, devoted to the
sciences, and the natural history specimens which had been the mainstay of
the old Ashmolean were transferred there. In 1884 a bequest of ethnographic
material from Colonel Pitt-Rivers led to the creation of a new museum which
bears his name, and the Ashmolean lost its ethnographic material. However, the
void was filled by its acquisition of the University’s archaeological collections,
which were greatly expanded when the celebrated and energetic Sir Arthur
Evans was appointed Keeper in 1884; he oversaw the building of an extension in
Beaumont Street to house these new collections.
The complex mergers, negotiations and building projects culminated in 1908
when the title of ‘University Art Gallery’ was dropped and a new emergent
Institution was created as the ‘Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology’. It
consisted of two autonomous departments, the Department of Antiquities and
the Department of Fine Art, each headed by a keeper – the first director in overall
charge was not appointed until 1973. Thus the Ashmolean Museum, although
ancient in its origins, was to all intents and purposes, from 1908 onwards, a new
institution, ready for development and for the injection of new ideas.
Clark assumed responsibility for an outstanding collection. There were early
Italian paintings donated by the diplomat and politician W.T. H. Fox-Strangways
in 1850, Venetian pictures from Chambers Hall in 1855 and Pre-Raphaelites
1931–1933 99

bequeathed by the widow of Thomas Combe in 1893. In 1845 the University

had purchased hundreds of drawings, including sixty-eight by Raphael and fifty-
four by Michelangelo, from the estate of the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Lord
Ellesmere and Chambers Hall gave further drawings, including works by the
Carracci and Leonardo in the 1850s. John Ruskin made several gifts, including
Turner watercolours. Other prints and drawings were transferred from the
Bodleian.
There was also good new display space. Just before Clark arrived, three new
galleries had been created. The attractions of working there were obvious for
anybody with energy and imagination: fine objects and works of art, many
relatively recently acquired; new areas for display which needed the impetus of
creative flair; an opportunity to reach out to the the public; an autonomous
department with a tiny staff; a lack of bureaucracy and precedent; minimal, if any,
direct supervision.
For Berenson, Oxford had all sorts of resonances. When Berenson was an
undergraduate at Harvard he had (in his own word) ‘yearned’ to go to Oxford and
in 1888, during his all-important first journey to Europe, which changed his life
for ever, he spent the Hilary term, from January to March, in Oxford as the guest
of his compatriot Edward Perry (‘Ned’) Warren, who had established himself at
New College and was something of a role model as well as a friend. Warren was
the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer in New England and he had sponsored
Berenson’s admission to Harvard. Older than Berenson by four or five years, he
had decided to settle permanently in England and, en route to becoming an
erudite collector of art, had decided to go to Oxford.Warren had visited Berenson
in Paris, extending an invitation to visit Oxford and share his accommodation.
If Oxford had a deep influence on Clark, it arguably had an even greater
influence on Berenson. In the late nineteenth century, Harvard and Yale looked
to Oxford rather than Cambridge as their exemplar and in the first editorial of
the Harvard Monthly in 1886 the editors likened Harvard to a ‘new Oxford’ with
a love and a desire for truth such as is to be found in ‘that old Oxford across the
seas’. Berenson delighted in the beauty of Oxford, its social and intellectual life
and the friendly interest shown in him, for his fame as editor-in-chief of the
Harvard Monthly had preceded him. Aestheticism was then at its height in Oxford,
and Berenson was drawn into the circle which included Lord Alfred Douglas;
Berenson also got to know Oscar Wilde in London. The talented poet Lionel
Johnson became a particularly close friend. Johnson later recalled how Berenson
had charmed Oxford for a term and vanished, leaving behind a memory of
exotic epigrams. While at Oxford, Berenson had tried to meet the high priest of
aestheticism, Walter Pater, whose writings, especially Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885), had had a profound influence
on him, but his polite request to attend his lectures was rebuffed. He was also in
Oxford at the moment when the re-organisation of the University’s collections
was much in the air and actively discussed.
1931–1933 100

It may have been during his one-term stay in Oxford that Berenson became
set on the path that led to his abandonment of the idea of a literary career, which
had been his first intention, and to make aesthetics and the visual arts his priority.
In the first of two letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner, written near the beginning
of the Hilary Term of 1888, he said:
it had been my dream before I went to college at all to go to Oxford
and spend my life there. I was almost used up with longing for it, and I
never quite got over it, although in five years I have travelled far from the
aspirations I had then. Now I find that I should have been happy had I
been able to come here, that I should have found a place at least almost
perfectly beautiful, all the books I wanted, and the most congenial people
possible! At any rate I find all these things at Oxford now. I cannot get over
my surprise at the English whom I admire beyond measure. Poor Harvard
and its men; it is not fair to compare it and them, especially them to Oxford
men.These are all – in as far as I can see – very clever, brilliant, serious even,
although without too much gravity, and well-taught; just the men whom I
admire and even adore. There is something so crude and vulgar and stupid
about many if not most Harvard men. (27 January 1888, Hadley p. 12)
Later, towards the end of the term, he wrote to her:
I feel at times I am going to pieces, which is not a bad thing, but the sad thing
is I have not the least desire as yet to take these pieces and reconstruct another
life out of them. I have never drifted so long in all my life, not that I am doing
less or requiring less, only that it all seems aimless. I have cut with scholarship.
I am as yet far from being a writer and farther still am I from having the means
or the spirit to be what on the whole I might best be – a man of the world.
But you see that is not a profession anywhere – least of all in America. So I
am drifting, having a kind of faith that some day I get to a kind of jumping
off place. (25 February 1888, Hadley p. 17)
Within five years, by 1893, Berenson had discovered his own particular
abilities in art and aesthetics, was about to publish his first book, was advising
collectors and had met Mary, who brought with her an allowance and a
determination to turn their shared expertise in art into a steady income.
In later life both Berenson and Clark expressed regret about the course that
their lives had taken since their time at Oxford. For Berenson: ‘I took a wrong
turning when I swerved from more purely intellectual pursuits to one like the
archaeological study of art, gaining thereby a troublesome reputation as an
expert’ (Berenson SSP p. 47). Clark’s experience at the Ashmolean led directly
to his appointment as the Director of the National Gallery, of which he later
remarked: ‘I often regretted my decision’ (Clark APW p. 210).
Chronology

1931

March Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Tunisia and Algeria.

They return by way of Cumae and stop in Rome with
Walter Lippmann and John Walker
Summer Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen
July Edith Wharton visits the Clarks in Richmond
Mary Berenson visits the Clarks in Richmond
September Mary Berenson undergoes operation to cure her cystitis
October Berenson at work on Signorelli
Christmas Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères
Mary Berenson seriously ill at I Tatti

1932

January Mary Berenson suffers relapse and infection and nearly

dies
March Berenson and Nicky Mariano with Edith Wharton at
Hyères
April Mary Berenson goes to Switzerland for medical
treatment
May Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Rome with Edith
Wharton
June Berenson’s Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the
Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places
published
September/October Berenson in London and Paris
9 October Colin and Colette Clark born
19 October Clark’s father dies
November Berenson returns to I Tatti

101
Christmas Berenson and Nicky Mariano with Edith Wharton at
Hyères

1933

January Duveen made a peer in New Year’s Honours List

March Paul Sachs visits I Tatti to discuss Harvard’s taking on I
Tatti on Berenson’s death
April Clarks go to Paris to see Edith Wharton, then to Rome,
Naples, Cortona, Florence, Urbino, Siena, Milan
June Edith Wharton with the Clarks in Oxford
25 June Berenson’s intention to bequeath I Tatti to Harvard
announced in the New York Times
July Clark goes to Paris

102
1931–1933 103

Hôtel de la Ville
Rome
June 10, 1931

My dear Kenneth
Yours of the 4th was worth waiting for. My answer must be brief. I write fr. here
in an odd moment, for the first days at I Tatti after an absence of nearly three
months, will be over-crowded.
Leaving for the moment much that yr. letter invites one to discuss, I turn at
once to the question you ask namely whether you should or should not accept
the succession of Charlie Bell.
It is a most flattering offer. You certainly would be in clover to be in such a
toy-shop for grown-ups, & free to play at any time with any part of the moment.
You would at the same time take a high rank among the dignitaries of a great
university where so recently you were a mere boy. Your finger would be expected
in every pie that was being prepared within the range of Oxford’s rags – almost
cosmic. The advantages are so real, so splendid, & so alluring that you would –
perhaps – do well to seize them.
On the other hand the post will fix you down in the world of collectors,
curators, dons.1 You will, altho’ remaining a plum find yourself more & more
embogged in a pudding. It is perhaps the finest pudding in the world, but
pudding all the same.
My dear Kenneth you still are so young that I venture yet once again – but
positively for the last time – to ask you to reconsider what you are doing. Of
course if within your deepest depths you find an imperative call to live the
life of one who curates, collects, catalogues, makes discoveries, cheers novelties,
Burlington-Clubish, haunts exhibitions, etc. etc. etc. obey that call.
I go on believing that you can do better, that by getting away from the
newspaperial attitude toward art, & becoming a student of art as a realm, of being
with a formative influence upon the humanization of that fascinating biped man,
you will get much greater satisfaction & happiness in the long run, & achieving
a great deal more.
Please do not think I shall resent your accepting the offer. On the contrary.
But I followed the dictates of conscience & told you what I really think.
With much affection to both of you
Yours B.B.

1 Clark was elected to a fellowship of Magdalen College on 18 May 1933.

1931–1933 104

22 June ’31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

My dear BB,
I was more than grateful for your long kind letter, every word of which I
valued. Before it had time to arrive I was forced to take a decision, & after great
searchings of heart decided to accept. I was officially elected last week. The
reason why I accepted was partly that I should have, as you say, so many lovely
toys to play with, & partly that it really gets me out of the Burlington world far
more than into it. Living near London there was no escape for me, & would
soon have been less with the Courtauld Institute floated. All writing was made
as difficult as possible by every sort of invitation, & a refusal on the grounds of
private work was taken as rudeness & vanity. As you know the work at Oxford is
necessarily light. Bell made it a real scholar’s post. I shall be among friends who
really know what scholarship is, & value a man who gives his time to it. None of
the Burlington–Bond St. gang have any pull there. And after all if I find that all
the surmises have been too optimistic I can give it up, & return to independence.
The kind of work which you do me the honour of believing I can accomplish is
none the worse for a little added experience & maturity of mind. And I know all
too well that I shall not be able to do much of it under any circumstances, for it
really depends on ideas & anyone’s stock of ideas is soon exhausted.
I have stipulated that I cannot take over till my Leonardo work is over – in
about six weeks, I should think. As for your lists, they are nearly done. I will get
them typed in case an accident should overtake them in the post.
Of course we shall have to sell or rent this house: that will not take place for
some time, & we shall probably be here in the Autumn. We heard from Morra2
that you might be coming over then. I do hope that is true, & that we shall still
be here to see you & show you this house. Not but what we may find quite a
nice one in the country near Oxford. We are determined not to live in or too
near Oxford & become involved in University Society – which means that grave
of so many valuable abilities, University politics. I have just been reading Mark
Pattison’s memoirs,3 so have the whole horrible picture before my imagination.

2 Umberto Morra
3 Mark Pattison (1813–1885) was a Yorkshire-born author, priest and sometime tutor and Rector of
Lincoln College, Oxford. He was a stimulating teacher and well disposed towards the young but
1931–1933 105

Do you know the Liverpool Gallery4 well? I think I forgot to mention in

my last letter that I had been there with Balniel5 & found much of really great
interest – especially a, to me unknown, portrait of a young man. I see you have it
in as Rondinelli, & wonder if that still holds.6 There is also a fine Tintorettesque
picture & two trecento saints which I do not think are known, & a very fair
ducento object.7 But alas there is no curator – they are advertising for one – &
photographs are impossible.
Jane joins me in love to all,
Ever yours affectionately,
Kenneth Clark.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
June 26th. 1931

My dear Kenneth,
Thanks for your frank, cordial, detailed letter. I most sincerely wish you every
success temporal as well as spiritual in your new job. If you will, & of course you
will, your post will enable you to be endlessly helpful while I am preparing the
new ed. of Flor. Drawings. So it was the most rigid unselfishness that lead me to
advise you not to accept the offer.

became embroiled in college and university politics which caused him deep hurt and ill health. He
was married to the pioneering feminist and trade unionist Emily Francis Strong. His melancholy
autobiography, Memoirs, was published in 1885.
4 The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, founded by the Liverpool brewer Andrew Barclay Walker, was
opened in 1877. It contains a good collection of Italian and Netherlandish paintings many of which
belonged to the banker and historian William Roscoe. It was closed from the second half of 1931
until 1933, for the building of a major new extension.
5 David Balniel
6 The portrait first entered the Liverpool Royal Institution in c. 1843 when it was thought to be a
self-portrait by Giovanni Bellini, whose name appears on the parapet. It was ascribed to Niccolò
Rondinelli (a pupil of Bellini) by Berenson in 1894; but since cleaning in 1950 it has generally been
accepted as autograph.
7 The ‘Tintorettesque’ picture is probably by Andrea Vicentino (c. 1542–1617), Court of Heaven; the two
saints are possibly two small, tempera on panel roundels of St Peter and St Paul by Bicci di Lorenzo;
but if so they date from the early Quattrocento.
1931–1933 106

Harries [sic]8 & Fry9 are or have been here, & of course we talked of you.
Toesca10 is coming in a day or two. He too will be interested in your new
appointment.
Cordial greetings to you both.
Affectionately
B. B.

6 July ’31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

My dear BB,
First let me thank you for your very kind letter. Of course I shall do all I can
to help you with the Florentine Drawings. The collection of material in the
Ashmolean is said to be good – it is certainly very well arranged – & may be of
real use to you. As an earnest of future services I am sending you today a first
instalment of notes on your list of the Windsor Leonardos. It includes horses,
landscapes & botany, & some of the anatomies. These last I need hardly send
you in detail, as all are available, with full details (most accurate, too) in the
two Piumati & the six Vangesten volumes. Among the others you will find very
little of which there is no photo in Rouveyre’s rascally publication.11 A few of

8 Bogey Harris
9 Roger Fry
10 Pietro Toesca
11 The title page of the first of the two books referred to here, Foglio A, reads: I Manoscritti di Leonardo
da Vinci, Della Reale biblioteca di Windsor, Dell’anatomia, Foglio A, Pubblicate da Teodoro Sabachnikoff,
Transcritti e annotati da Giovanni Piumiati, Con traduzione in lingua Francese, Preceduti da uno studio
da Mathias-Duval, Parigi, Edoardo Rouveyre Editore, M DCCC XCVIII. Foglio A was published by
Rouveyre in Paris in 1898; Dell’anatomia, Foglio B was published in 1901 by Roux e Viarengo in
Turin. An account of the ownership and publication of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings is given by
Henry Schuman, Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body:The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological
Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, New York, 1952, republished Dover, 1983. He explained that the first
attempt to make the drawings available in facsimile had been made by Theodore Sabachnikoff.
Sabachnikoff photographed the drawings at Windsor and deposited the negatives with Rouveyre,
who was the publisher of Foglio A. Rouveyre then published an edition of the photographs without
waiting for the transcription of Leonardo’s text that accompanied the drawings. Schuman wrote:
‘While this unethical if not piratical act is said to have hastened the death of Sabachnikoff, it also
meant that the work would have to be done over again. Between 1911 and 1916 the need for a
proper edition of the remainder of the Anatomical Drawings, that is those pirated by Rouveyre, was
finally met by the appearance of the Quaderni d’Anatomia published in Oslo [in 6 vols] through the
1931–1933 107

the unpublished horse drawings are in a rotten little book by Malaguzzi Valeri12
– Leonardo da Vinci e la Sculptura. The drawings of Deluges are almost all in
Popp.13 Now anything you cannot find in these three – for example numbers
12562 & 12567 which are important – you will probably be able to get from the
Commissione Vinciana.14 They have negatives of all the Windsor drawings taken by
Carusi15 before the war, and are supplying us with prints at a very cheap rate. Of
course they may be unwilling to give prints to any one as formidable as yourself
(they suppose me to be perfectly harmless) but if you know Carusi no doubt he
will let you have them. Only please do not quote me, as they only supplied us
with prints as a favour, & might turn huffy if they thought we were broadcasting
the fact.
My work at Windsor is finished for the time being. I shall now retire & brood
on it until I go to the Ashmolean in August. Sometime in the Autumn I shall
have to go back to Windsor for a general revision.
I have written to Oppenheimer16 about the pilgrimage drawing. Incidentally
it will be available in the illustrated Catalogue of the drawings in the Italian
Exhibition.17 The other fragment to which Nicky refers – that with a Ship in a
Storm – is presumably that in the Metropolitan Museum.
Jane joins me in love to you all,
Yours ever
K.

editorial efforts of C. L.Vangesten, A. Fonahn and H. Hopstock and contains an Italian transcription
and translations into English and German.’
12 See Ch. 3 n. 70.
13 A. E. Popp, Leonardo da Vinci: Zeichnungen, Munich, 1928. Clark had a high opinion of Popp’s
scholarship and artistic sensibility. She was the first to attempt a chronology of Leonardo’s drawings.
14 The Reale Commissione Vinciana under the auspices of the Ministero dell’ Educazione Nazionale
published I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci, 5 vols, 1934–6.
15 Enrico Carusi was one of the scholars who worked on the Reale Commissione Vinciana project.
16 Henry Oppenheimer
17 The Oppenheimer drawing is Incidents of a Pilgrimage, Tuscan School, 1417, pen and ink and
watercolour on vellum, Italian Exhibition cat. 613 (see also Clark’s entry for 614 and his article
‘Italian Drawings at Burlington House’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 56, no. 325 (April 1930), pp. 174–7,
180–83, 187. Oppenheimer had lent more than fifty drawings to the Italian Exhibition.
1931–1933 108

Poggio al Spino18
Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 23, 1931

Dear Kenneth,
Thanks upon thanks for the catal. of the Ital. Exhib. I expected it to be magnificent,
but I had no idea it was to be so sumptuous & so generous.19 I congratulate you
in every way. It is a splendid souvenir.
We came out here less than 48 hours ago. It is almost cold, but beautiful. I have
discovered that I am tapered out & that it is no use my trying to work till I feel
less slack & empty-headed. It’s a pity, as I have so much to do, & at 66 one knows
how to appreciate what there is in each minute that passes.
Have you read in the last ‘Life & Letters’ ‘Under the Band-Stand’ & ‘In the
Sunny South’?20 Who are the young gentleman who write like that & why do
they get picked? I truly want information.
Mary looks forward to seeing you.
Affectionate greetings to you both
Yours
B.B.

16 Aug. ’31
Old Palace Place,
Richmond Green,
Surrey
Richmond 1384

My dear BB,
Our friend David Balniel is coming to Florence in September & has asked if
he might see the Tatti. He is a very delightful man with a real interest in Italian

18 See Ch. 3 n. 5 above.

19 Kenneth Clark and David Balniel, eds, A Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Italian Art held
,
in the Galleries of the Royal Academy, Burlington House with the assistance of Ettore Modigliani, intro.
Roger Fry, 2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1931, was a lavish folio size with a combined weight of
over 10 kg. The volume of plates contained more than 200 illustrations.
20 Life and Letters was the monthly literary magazine edited and published by Desmond MacCarthy.
It contained writings and reviews by well-known luminaries as well as unknown young authors.The
1931–1933 109

art & a good deal more knowledge than one expects in an amateur; & I think
you would like him immensely. However I imagine you will be at the Consuma
& will not want to be bothered with visitors. May he visit the Tatti to see the
pictures? If so perhaps Nicky could give his name to Celestino so that when he
rings up he will be offered admittance. I am reluctant to add one more to the
stream of people who disturb your peace, but there is no one in England I could
recommend with so much confidence.
We go to Oxford tomorrow. I have paid a number of visits for the day, but this
will be my first sustained period of office. Bell has left things in good order, &
until my Leonardo catalogue is finished I shall simply keep the machine moving
by an occasional touch – at least this is my ambition; but what with re hanging
to accommodate some new acquisitions, & training a new & entirely ignorant
assistant, I know that my hands will be full. My future assistant, a young man
from an Insurance Office,21 seems to me to have a real feeling for pictures, & I
chose him in preference to some more scholarly, but less sensuous, candidates.
My present assistant, Charlie Bell’s friend Rienaecker, leaves this week.
As to Leonardo: I have now signed a contract to publish with the Cambridge
press.22 The Book will reproduce every drawing – about 4–6 on a page, & will
be in two volumes, one of text & one of plates. I am pledged to have it ready by
December. I don’t see how it can fail to be useful however much it falls short of
perfection or even ordinary decency.
Your last letter contains a question about the young men who write short
stories in Life & Letters. Unfortunately I have no time for the researches into
ethno-, bio- or pathology which would make the study of such a question really
interesting. God knows where Desmond fishes them up.
We enjoyed Mary’s visit very much indeed. It was all too short, but do not
believe her if she says to you, as she said to us, that our house is luxurious. That
was only provoked by contrast with the rigours of Jeremy’s Corner.23 However

issue for July 1931 contains two short stories, one by Peter Fleming, ‘Under the Bandstand’, and one
by Shaw Desmond, ‘Children of the Sun’, about southern Italy. Shaw Desmond (1877–1960) was an
Irish dramatist and novelist with an interest in spiritualism.
21 Ian Robertson (d. 1982), who claimed to be a cousin of Clark, spent his entire career at the Ashmolean,
succeeding Sir Karl Parker in 1972. His predecessor,Victor Rienaecker, was a prominent collector
and writer mostly on British art.
22 Kenneth Clark, A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King
at Windsor Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1935.
23 James Stourton suggested that this might be a reference to Logan Pearsall Smith. In 1930 he had
published The Golden Grove: Selected Passages from the Sermons and Writings of Jeremy Taylor.Taylor, born
in Cambridge in 1613, the talented son of a barber, obtained a place at Caius College, Cambridge,
and entered the ministry at the age of 21. He became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, then the
Rector of Uppingham. Expelled from his living by Cromwell, he opened a school in Wales. Charles
ii appointed him Bishop of Down and Connor in 1660. He is most celebrated for his learned and
witty sermons which demonstrate a subtle mastery of the English language.
1931–1933 110

you will see it for yourself as we shall probably still be here when you come over
in the Autumn.
Ever yours affectionately.
Kenneth.

Poggio al Spino
Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
Aug. 20. 1931

Dear Kenneth,
Let Balniel telephone to Alda24 21.079 directly he comes to Florence & she will
arrange about his seeing I Tatti. I shall still be here, & if he has the time to come
up here for luncheon, I shall be glad to receive him. Tell him we are just an hour
away from the heart of Florence.
I am delighted to hear that yr. Leonardo catalogue will be ready for the press
by Dec.1. I ask you here & now to let me have the advance sheets as soon as
ready. I shall refer to it constantly in my catalogue – in fact to each item.
Mary was enchanted with her visit to to Old Palace Place. If you give it up
before the end of 1932 there is scant chance of my seeing it,25 for I do not expect
to go North this autumn. Up here I have been idle, more idle than in years. If
I get to work I may keep at it with almost no interruption till Xmas holidays.
Nicky & Alda are here.Trevy26 turned up today just before Morra & Alberti left.
Bracci’s27 mother has just died, wh. prevented their coming here for Ferragosto,
& precipitated Morra’s departure.
The best that has come to me recently in the way of general literature is
Daniel Halévy’s Décadence de la Liberté.28
Love to you both
Yours
B. B.

24 Alda von Anrep

25 Old Palace Place was put on the market in July 1931 and advertised twice, in The Times, through an
estate agent, in the first half of July. It was described as a ten-bedroom house ‘carefully restored by
the current owner at a cost of several thousand pounds . . . Freehold for sale at much less than cost.
Or may be let on lease.’
26 Robert Trevelyan
27 See Appendix 1.
28 Daniel Halévy (1872–1962), the French historian, came from the haute bourgeoisie and was a
school-mate of Marcel Proust. Décadence de la liberté, published in 1931, denounced the political
1931–1933 111

8 xi 31
Shotover Cleve
Headington
NR. Oxford29
Headington 6832

My dear BB,
It is a long time since we had news of you, except the sad news that Mary had
undergone a serious operation.30 I hope she is recovering rapidly: we have heard
from Logan that the operation was successful. What with this & with economic
alarms you must have been having a troubled time.
We have had a busy but an agreeable Autumn. I have enjoyed playing about
in my toy shop, which really looks very pretty now. And I am delighted to find
how little there is to do. Even though I have rehung the whole gallery I have
had plenty of spare time. Most of this has been spent on my Leonardo Catalogue
which is now almost finished – all but the mechanical arrangements which
as you & Nicky know are the worst part of any catalogue. Charlie Bell is not
returned to Oxford. I don’t believe he ever will, as he couldn’t bear to see the
mess I was making. As the enclosed shows we are trying to commemorate him.
It is an unpleasant time to ask anyone to give, but on the whole his friends have
been extraordinarily generous. We only sent the appeal to people who really
liked and admired [him], & as you know the number was limited. However we
have got close on £130.31
We live here in what Bell describes as suburban squalor. It is a plain modern
villa with most of the advantages of a new house, one of which, that it is not in
a valley, is particularly necessary here. On the whole we prefer it to Richmond,
where we had bored ourselves with our own boasting. This house is nothing to
boast about. We do not find ourselves cut off from London – pur troppo: after a
weeks work I would gladly have a weekend alone, but it is impossible. Hammell

system in France which he saw as dominated by professional politicians operating through Masonic
committees. He was nostalgic for a ‘Republic of Notables’ and for the independent artisan. His views
led him to welcome the Vichy regime as a last chance to preserve that France.
29 Headington is a suburb of Oxford, with views over the city centre. Alys Russell, Mary Berenson’s
sister, described the Clarks’ house as a ‘delightful white Italian villa with a tame and wild garden’.
Clark described it as a ‘featureless modern house’ and ‘irredeemably commonplace’ (Clark APW
p. 198) but with good views over the Thames Valley.
30 Mary’s declining health persuaded her to undergo an operation in the hope of curing her persistent
nagging cystitis. Following the operation she developed a fever which nearly killed her and her
health continued to worsen.
31 The proceeds of the appeal went to purchase a portrait of Luca Carlevarjis by Bartolomeo Nazari.
Bell asked Clark to list it in memory of his entire length of service at the Ashmolean (which he
joined in 1896), not simply his years as Keeper (1908–31).
1931–1933 112

is our most recent visitor – & most exhausting. However thank heaven I was
able to praise his famous picture of the Adultress with sincerity. Please forgive a
short & foolish letter, flowing from an exhausted pen. Jane sends love to you all.
Ever yours affectionately,
Kenneth.

Sainte Claire Le Chateau

Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Dec. 23. 1931

Dear Jane,
I got here last night & found your & K’s greeting. Thanks & altri tanti a Loro.
Mary was enough better to allow me to leave her without great anxiety. As
you know Alys is with her. I shall however scarcely remain here as long as usual.
For one thing I must get back to my work.
Edith is very fit, & her Xmas Trio32 is now complete. The weather is of
paradise. In Florence for some time past it has been purgatorial.
If you see Charlie Bell give him my love & good wishes.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

Sainte Claire Le Chateau

Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Jan. 1. 1932

Dear Jane
Thanks for yr. delightful letter of four days ago, & take my further good wishes
for a satisfactory 1932.
Our plans depend on Mary. If she has made a real recovery, & if we are not
ruined first, we shall probably be travelling in N. Africa from about March 15
to the end of May. We also plan to spend some time in England next autumn. I
should be only too happy to stay, & see all the Oxford drawings, & all the photo’s

32 Edith Wharton. See Ch. 3 n. 66.

1931–1933 113

& engravings thereto appertaining. K. could be most helpful & will be of course.
I am making despairingly slow progress with the Florentine Drawings. So I
am still far from Leonardo. I hope therefore that K’s proof – or rather advanced
sheets with the illustrations will reach me in good time.
Mrs Wharton speaks of you both with affection. She is pretty fit, altho’ a trifle
tested over all the holiday performances & her new novels.33
Affectionately
B.B.

31 1 32
Shotover Cleve
Headington
NR. Oxford
Headington 6832

My dear BB,
We hear from Logan a sad account of Mary’s health. How terrible that she
should have had such a serious relapse. Please give her our love & warmest
sympathy. It must be a most distressing time for you, too.
Thank you very much for the lists. They reached me about a fortnight ago
& I could scarcely believe my eyes. They have been fabulous for so long that
even as I held the book in my hands I expected it to dissolve.34 However it has
remained solid, & I have looked through the greater part. Of course I can’t begin
to appreciate it. That will only be possible after I had been using them for thirty
years. I can only join with everyone interested in pictures in thanking you for
having taken the trouble to compress the esthetic experiences of your lifetime. I
wish you could find a way of compressing, & so expressing, your ideas.There has
only been one Boswell35 – even Eckermann36 was not satisfactory – so you must
find some other method of crystallising the fountain.

33 She was working on her penultimate novel, The Gods Arrive, published in 1932.
34 Bernard Berenson, The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A list of the Principal Artists and their Works,
with an Index of Places, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, pocket-size, 723 pp., listing more than 15,000
paintings by artist and location.
35 James Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, was published in 1791.
36 Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), whose Conversations with Goethe (Gespräche mit Goethe)
recorded their conversations during the last nine years of the great man’s life. He acted as Goethe’s
personal secretary.
1931–1933 114

We have been in trouble. We had Fry down to lecture in Oxford (in the face
of bitter opposition) & he developed violent influenza which the doctor feared
would turn to pneumonia. He was staying with us. We had to send away Alan &
call in two nurses: & after Ricketts and Lytton Strachey37 we were fully prepared
for him not to recover. However he did, in a fortnight. And no sooner had he
left us than Jane had a motoring accident. She ran into a lamp post, when driving
her small car, at such a speed that she upset the lamp post, and overturned the
car.The car was smashed to atoms & it is a miracle that she came out alive. She is
badly bruised and strained, and apparently has no broken bones. It is difficult to
say how badly she is hurt for a few days (the accident was two days ago), as she
is still unable to move much. She seems to be less well today.
I have no news of myself. In the museum I make a few changes of arrangement,
which give me small, but positivi [sic], satisfaction. And I go on at my Leonardos,
groaning & grumbling as the mouthful grows more difficult to chew at every
bite. We have had little chance of visiting the french exhibition.38 It is, as it
was bound to be, most enjoyable, but should have been better. The selection is
chauvinistic – et puis c’est si français has been the highest praise. As a result there
is too much Le Sueur, too much Le Nain too little Cézanne (who is suspected
of being an Italian) and badly chosen Degas (also too Italian). Manet is the best
represented.
Have you seen that you have got into an anthology of English prose, compiled
by H. Read? That seems to me the most enviable kind of fame – as no doubt
it will to Logan. But he might object to rubbing shoulders with the Infantry
Training Regulations,39 which I am sure you will not.
Jane bids me thank you for her letter, & sends her love to you all.
Yours ever,
K.

37 Charles Ricketts had died on 7 October 1931, aged 70. Lytton Strachey had died of stomach
cancer on 21 January 1932, aged 52, shortly before this letter was written.
38 The Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900 was held at Burlington House, London, in 1932, curated by W. G.
Constable and Trenchard Cox (later the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1955–66).
39 Herbert Read was interested in the art of writing and cared deeply about style and structure. In
1928 he published English Prose Style, a handbook on the elements and philosophy of good writing.
In 1932 he published (in collaboration with Bonamy Dobree) The London Book of English Prose,
an anthology which examines the various purposes for which prose is written. A short passage
from Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance was included as an example of ‘Criticism’. Field
Service Regulations, Part II (1924), I.i.(2) was quoted as an example of ‘Strategy and Tactics’. Both were
deemed to fall under the rubric of ‘Scientific Prose (the desire to describe a thing)’.
1931–1933 115

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 4. 1932

Dear Kenneth,
We are all distressed to hear of Jane’s accident, & congratulate you and her on
her narrow escape.
And Roger too? I am so very glad he has recovered. I don’t want to be left
the one & only survivor of my generation. Besides he works for me, & he has no
idea how much I want him to go on.
Mary has given me the worst fright I have had in my life. A week ago we as
good as gave her up, & for two or three days I expected the end. Luckily she
took a turn for the better & now I dare hope again that she will recover. It will
be a long pull at best. In what state will she be? Will she still be able to travel?
My work is creeping along ever so slowly, & of course Mary’s illness absorbs
me almost entirely.
By the way it is no longer probable that we shall stray far fr. I Tatti for the next
few months. So you will most likely find us here when you come to Italy later,
& of course you must stay with us – unless the unforeseen happens.
I am sending for Read’s anthology. No, I never expected to see myself in any
such book.
Affectionate greetings to you both
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
May 15, 1932

Dear Kenneth,
Your letter was most interesting.40 So you really have got into the Lhasa, into the
Portala, into the great dragon-guarded mouth, & had Pisgah sights of treasury of
drawings.41 I hope it will be granted to you to penetrate further & to bring back

40 Letter missing.
41 The collection referred to is probably that of Henry Oppenheimer. ‘Pisgah sights’ is a phrase used
more than once by Berenson and was admirably described by George Landow in his Victorian
1931–1933 116

detailed reports. Already I feel like cataloguing the Benozzo on your authority
& responsibility.42
This is not going to be a letter but thanks only for yours. It is written in the
midst of packing, visitors, proofs to read, & an article I want to get off before
leaving for Roma tomorrow to join Edith who, by the way spent two days here
on the way down. I expect to spend four weeks there – Hotel de la Ville, Via
Sistina.
If you both are there any how, & if it is perfectly convenient, we could come
to you on landing in England. Don’t fear we should be bored. I can always find
amusement enough in the Ashmolean, at Christ Church Library & perhaps even
in the Bodleian. Are there no drawings there, no illuminated & illuminating
quattrocento mss?
Affectionate greetings to you both
yr.s
B.B.

Pavillon Colombe
St Brice-Sous-Foret (S&O)
Telephone: St Brice-Sous-Foret, 12
Oct. 10. 1932

Dear Kenneth,
Edith has just sent me in yr. wish, & I am happy to congratulate you. Boy &
girl.43 It could not be better.You must have done your duty.You have produced
three children & paid your debt to the race. More would be self-indulgence.

Types,Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980. In Deuteronomy 34: 1–4, God commands Moses to ascend to Mount Pisgah and
there He grants him a sight of the Promised Land. As He had explained to Moses in Deut. 32: 51–2,
he could not enter the Promised Land because he had disobeyed His command by striking rather
than praying to bring forth water from the rock in Kadesh (Numbers 20: 1–13). The Pisgah sight is
thus the coming together, a confrontation, of human and divine, temporal and eternal, immediately
before the death of a prophet who has given his life to serving God and His chosen people; it
therefore stands simultaneously as the culmination, reward and punishment for the acts of that life.
42 Oppenheimer owned a well-known drawing of The Crucifixion, then attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli,
which is now attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi. Berenson published it as by Lippi in 1932. Sold in
the Oppenheimer sale at Christie’s, London, 10 July 1936 (Lot 15), it was acquired by the British
Museum.
43 The Clark twins, Colin and Colette, were born on 9 October 1932. Edith Wharton was Colin’s
godmother.
1931–1933 117

I find Edith in her best form. She read out what she has already written for her
memoirs about Henry James.44 It is first rate. She may even thro’ the door of
narrative, & along the corridor of biography attain to creativity.

Love to you both

B.B.

26.ii.33
Shotover Cleve
Headington
NR. Oxford
Headington 6832

My dear BB,
Some weeks ago I was over in Cambridge seeing about the printing of the
Leonardo Catalogue, & was told that the ms. was so complicated that proofs of
it would not be ready for ages. Thinking of you I set to work to reconstruct the
catalogue as best I could out of duplicates of my typewritten entries & I have
managed to make it fairly complete. In the set I sent to the press every entry has
been revised & often rewritten, but I think the set I’ve put aside for you will
serve your purpose fairly well. What you want chiefly is the sizes, descriptions,
bibliographies etc., & the chief difference between your set & that sent to press
is in my notes, which are not so important to you. If by any chance you look at
them, do remember that they are likely to have been revised. I am afraid that my
duplicate photos are hardly worth sending, but I will send them too. Without
Rouveyre’s publication45 it will be difficult to find reproductions of everything,
though the most important are reproduced in Bodmer.46 Incidentally I am afraid
that some of the entries I send you will not have the Bodmer references written
in, as I only copy them into my final draft. But they can easily be found, as B.
always gives a Windsor no.
We have had a full winter. Most of my time has been taken up, I am ashamed
to say, with lecturing. I have to give three a year here (Bell always ignored this
statute, but I am not fierce enough to do so) & I also give six at the Courtauld
Institute. It is rewarding work in a way, as four I gave here were really well
attended by an audience consisting inevitably of undergraduates – about 200 a

44 Edith Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, was published in 1934.

45 See Ch. 3 n. 88, and n. 11 above.
46 Heinrich Bodmer (1885–1950) was a German scholar of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. In
1931 he published Leonardo: des Meisters Gemälde und Zeichnungen.
1931–1933 118

time; & it was pleasant to find that there was some interest in the subject among
the young here, when there is so little among the old. Apart from this there have
been several alarms & fatigues at the museum, & a great deal of business for my
mother.47 She has been staying with us all the time, & is a good deal stronger
and more cheerful: but has no idea that anyone need work or busy themselves in
any way & has an almost Russian gift for spending my time & Jane’s in aimless
conversation. Jane has been well on the whole, though a little tired of domestic
life. The twins have waxed beyond belief, & really are a pleasant spectacle, unless
one believes as Lady Cunard said to me the day after they born, that anyone who
has a baby nowadays ought to be put in prison.
You will have seen in the papers – or perhaps you will not have seen as you
take in the Times, which gives no news – that Oxford has been distinguishing
itself. The decision that the youth here would not fight for King & Country48
has made a glorious rumpus, even more agreeable than the Australian fear of
fast bowling49 which is going to lead to a dissolution of the Empire. There have
been some excellent letters, none more nauseating than one from Lord Allen
of Hurtwood.50 He may be a very nice man, but in his public utterances he is a
loathsome prig.

47 Clark’s father died in Scotland ten days after after the twins were born. Indeed, Clark missed their
birth because he was in Scotland attending to his ailing father. His mother relied on him to handle
all her affairs and those of his father’s estate.
48 The now notorious debate at the Oxford Union on 9 February 1933 ‘That this House will in
no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ was won by 275 votes to 153. The event caused
a sensation. The popular press was outraged, Winston Churchill condemned it and Cambridge
University threatened to pull out of the Boat Race on the grounds of ‘incompatibility of
temperament’ (see Derek Round and Kenelm Digby, Barbed Wire Between Us: A Story of Love and
War, Auckland: Random House, 2002). The Nazis took it to be proof that the English had gone soft.
49 ‘Bodyline’ bowling became a matter of the fiercest controversy during the 1932–3 cricket season.
Properly known as ‘fast leg theory’, it was devised by the English team as a means of defeating the
Australians during their ‘Ashes’ tour of Australia, in particular to overcome the masterly batting of
Don Bradman: they adopted the policy of pitching the ball short so as to rise towards the body of
the Australian batsman. The theory was that Bradman in particular was vulnerable to such a ball
and was afraid. The Australians regarded the tactic as endangering their batsmen and contrary to the
spirit, if not the actual rules, of the game. England won the series 4–1. There was intense bad feeling
and many Australians refused to buy British goods. In 1935 the rules of cricket were changed to give
umpires the power to intervene if they thought batsmen were being endangered.
50 Reginal Clifford Allen (1st Baron Allen of Hurtwood; 1889–1939) was a politician, journalist and
active Socialist, who was the Treasurer and Chairman of the Independent Labour Party (1922–6)
and a director of the Daily Herald (1925–30). He was a conscientious objector during the First World
War and was made a peer by Ramsay MacDonald. He was a sincere and vociferous campaigner
for disarmament by the Allies, appeasement of Hitler, and the cause of international Socialism. On
22 February 1933 he had written to the Manchester Guardian to protest that the Oxford Union
Debate had diverted attention away from ‘a rapid carrying out of a courageous Socialist and Pacifist
programme.’
1931–1933 119

We are leaving the country on March 14th, & will probably stay a few nights
in Paris: then we shall go through to Florence where we shall only stay a day or
two on our way to Rome. Will you be there? I am afraid you are almost sure to
be in Africa: or if not it will be because Mary is not well. How is she, by the way?
We heard a mixed account from Logan. Our chief objective is Naples, where
I have never been; so we shall not stay in Florence longer than to break the
journey, and then go on to Rome.
To return to my first sheet: if you are not going away I shall send you the
Leonardo entries at once But if you are going to be away all Spring, then I would
rather not send them till you return. They are the only duplicates I have & are
useful for reference until the proofs come in.
Love to you all from us both,
Yours ever,
K

10.3.33
Shotover Cleve
Headington
NR. Oxford
Headington 6832

Dear BB,
Our letters continue to cross. However all is clear about the Leonardo notes. I
shall bring them out & leave them as long as you like. It is very kind of you &
Mary to ask us to stay, & sweet of Nicky to offer her room. But we shouldn’t
dream of turning her out. We shall stay in a hotel for the few nights we are in
Florence, probably the Grande Bretagne.
A young man I know named Greenlees51 has asked me for an introduction to
you. He is very keen, quite agreeable & a good specimen of his generation (aged
about 19, I suppose) so I told him I did not think you would mind his coming
up. I hope I did right.

51 Ian Greenlees
1931–1933 120

It is wonderful to think that in a few days we shall have left England, home
and duty behind us: that is if we survive our present frenzied bout of letter
writing, bill paying & committee meetings, which is the necessary prelude to a
holiday.
Yours ever,
K

2.[vii].33
Shotover Cleve
Headington
Oxford

My dear Mary,
I should have written before to thank you for sending us your Modern
Pilgrimage:52 but I wanted to read some of it first, so that I might with more
than the conventional congratulations. I can now write with truth that we have
both enjoyed it immensely. I liked not only the descriptions of your life & of the
country, but also the number of wise observations on life in general which you
have been able to include. And it all comes so straightforwardly that it is never
dull.
We have had a very busy summer. I find that Oxford with its official round of
work & social life is becoming more & more exacting, & I shall have to struggle
hard if I am to find any time for my own work. The only consolation is that we
really are doing something to improve the Museum. As I think we told you, we
are adding a new wing for the early Italian pictures;53 & I have been able to buy,
or have presented some interesting things.
The last of these is Paul of Jugo Slavia’s Piero di Cosimo, the Forest Fire which
I managed to get for a very reasonable price.The National Art-Collections Fund
are putting up the money. It will make a good pendant to the Uccello Hunt, and

52 Mary Berenson, A Modern Pilgrimage, New York: Appleton, 1933.

53 Clark had offered, and the University had accepted, an interest-free loan of £8000 to be repaid
in five years’ time, being half the cost of erecting an extension to the Mediaeval Room, for a new
lecture room and additional gallery and for the conversion of the existing Archaeological Lecture
Room into a library. In today’s money the loan would be the equivalent of £1 million or more.
1931–1933 121

will amuse the young.54 With those two pictures they can’t complain that the
old masters are dull.
We are all very well. The twins have never been ill, & swell visibly. Colin is
most active & walks round his pen already. Colette is placid & rather pretty. It is
fascinating to see how different they are in everything they do.
Please apologise to Nicky for the scandalous way in which I have ignored
her requests. I was waiting to get proofs on my own ms. from Cambridge, as
the copy I sent you was very defective. But nothing has come, so I shall have
to do the best I can without. How is the ‘drawing book’ going? Has BB got to
Michelangelo, I wonder. Edith Wharton has just been here, naturally rather sad,
but very brave, considering the whole scaffolding of her well-ordered life has
been kicked away.55
Jane sends her love,
yours ever
K

54 Prince Paul of Yugoslavia’s painting by Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire (c. 1505), had been shown
in the Italian Exhibition in 1930. Jon Whiteley was told by Ian Robertson (see n. 21 above) that as
soon as the lawyer, Archie Balfour, alerted him to the imminent sale of the painting he passed on
the news to Clark, who immediately bought the picture with his own money to secure it for the
Ashmolean. Clark sold it at cost to the Ashmolean, the acquisition being funded by the National
Art Collections Fund for £3000. According to a letter of 17 March 1972 (Ashmolean Archive) from
Christopher Lloyd, then working in the department of Western art of the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford, enquiring about provenance, the picture had belonged to Count Giulio Ruccellai who sold
it after the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Harold Acton’s father, Arthur Acton, who then sold it to
Prince Paul. Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest (c. 1470) was given to the Ashmolean by Fox-
Strangways in 1850.
55 In spring 1933, Edith Wharton’s household was visited with a double disaster. Her personal and
devoted maid, Elise, suffered a nervous collapse and was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia. She
died at Hyères on 29 May 1933. In April her beloved, faithful housekeeper, Catharine Gross, a calmly
competent Alsatian, who had been with Wharton since her early married life in the 1880s, was
suddenly transformed from an 80-year-old invalid into a ‘a wild, frightened and obstinate stranger’,
expressing hatred for everyone and for Wharton in particular. She was taken to a convent where she
sank into unconsciousness, dying in October 1933.
122
Five

The National Gallery, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures,

Predicaments and Crises
1933–1939

On 2 September 1933, The Times announced that Kenneth Clark, aged thirty, was
to succeed Sir Augustus Moore Daniel, aged sixty-seven, as the Director of the
National Gallery, his appointment to be for a term of five years. In the brief press
announcement, the rationale for his appointment, besides his experience at the
Ashmolean, was that he had worked for Berenson, participated in the Exhibition
of Italian Art at Burlington House and was the author of a ‘remarkably able study
of the Gothic Revival’. However, Clark’s appointment was not a unanimous
decision. For some of the Trustees he was too young and their preference was for
W. G. Constable, the Assistant Keeper, aged forty-seven. The principal advocate
for Clark was Lord Lee of Fareham who threatened to withdraw support for his
pet project, the embryonic Courtauld Institute, unless he got his wish: namely
that Clark should be appointed to the National Gallery and Constable become
the first Director of the Courtauld Institute.
When Clark took up his directorship on 1 January 1934 morale in the National
Gallery was at a low ebb. For nearly four decades there had been a history of
bad relations, and sometimes outright hostility, between the Trustees and the
director and staff of the gallery. Clark’s immediate predecessor, Sir Augustus
Daniel, had previously been a trustee and became the director in 1929. It had
not been a successful appointment and the atmosphere at the gallery had been
poisonous. Several members of staff including a talented young Assistant Keeper,
Ellis Waterhouse, and the Keeper Collins Baker had resigned. Daniel had sided
with his staff against the trustees, as had his predecessor Sir Charles Holmes
(1916–28). Holmes’s predecessor, Sir Charles Holroyd (1906–16), had also had
a bad relationship with his trustees. One of the principal points of contention
was over who should decide on acquisitions – the director or the trustees?
Directors also constantly complained that their trustees treated them as if they
were domestic servants. The administration and the scholarship at the gallery
were also amateurish compared with German and American counterparts, and
the facilities were inadequate. For example, when Clark took office there was no
artificial lighting of any sort, or staff or department responsible for conservation.

123
1933–1939 124

Clark’s appointment was supposed to represent a new beginning. He

established a good relationship with his trustees and became a close friend of
his first chairman, Sir Philip Sassoon. He also set about modernising the gallery,
one of his first acts being the introduction of electric lighting. He established
a scientific and conservation department, extended opening times until 8 pm,
introduced public lectures and organised small temporary exhibitions. He also
worked on popular publications.
The trustees were drawn principally from the socially and politically illustrious.
When Clark took up office, the longest serving trustee was Viscount d’Abernon
(then seventy-seven years old), who was an international financier, collector and
former ambassador in Berlin, who had held office since 1909. Sir Philip Sassoon,
aged forty-six, was a suave bachelor, connoisseur and collector, astute Member of
Parliament (Under Secretary of State for Air) and heir to an immense merchant
fortune.The other trustees (most were born in the era of Gladstone and Disraeli)
were Sir Robert Witt, a prominent London lawyer, dedicated supporter of the
arts and Chairman of the National Art Collections Fund (nacf);William George
Arthur Ormsby-Gore, the future 4th Baron Harlech, a politician and banker with
an extensive knowledge of art and architecture on which he was a published
authority; Ramsay MacDonald, the ailing and beleaguered Prime Minister;
Sir Joseph Duveen, the notorious and charismatic art dealer; the Prince of
Wales, ‘who rarely attended meetings because he was not allowed to smoke’
(Clark APW p. 225); Samuel Courtauld, the industrialist, collector and
benefactor; Sir Evan Charteris, an aristocrat, barrister, biographer and the Tate
Gallery’s Chairman of Trustees; and Sir William Llewellyn, the portrait-painter
and President of the Royal Academy. Those who became trustees during Clark’s
tenure, up to 1939, were: Henry Harris, an eccentric connoisseur; David Balniel,
the future 28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres, whose family were
noted for their interest in the arts; Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary and
future Prime Minister; Viscount Bearsted, an art collector and philanthropist,
whose family fortune was derived from Shell oil and merchant banking; Paul
Methuen, 4th Baron Methuen, a painter.and landowner, who had inherited
Corsham Court with its fine art collection; the Hon. Sir Jasper Ridley, a banker
and collector.
In 1934, the National Gallery collection consisted of less than 2000 paintings,
displayed in some 30 rooms, and there were approximately 500,000 visitors a year.
Like the other great London museums at that time, the gallery was essentially
a national institution whose audience was principally domestic. Besides the
director, there was a small professional staff of four keepers and curators. It
was not until the 1960s that museums and galleries began to assume the now
familiar role of international tourist attractions. (Today there are more than
1933–1939 125

5 million visitors a year, the collection, which contains more than 2300 paintings,
is displayed in more than 60 rooms and there is a professional staff of 120 who
are organised into 24 departments.)
During the 1930s, the Royal Collection was regarded as the preserve of the
monarch, rather than the property of the nation, and none of it was open to
view, although the public had access to the collections at several of the royal
residences, including Windsor Castle and Hampton Court. Extensive in its scope,
it contained some 7000 paintings, 40,000 watercolours and drawings and about
150,000 old master prints, as well as tapestries, furniture, ceramics, books and
other works of art.The office of the Surveyor of the King’s (or Queen’s) Pictures
dates from 1625 and the appointee is responsible for the care and maintenance
of the Royal Collection’s pictures. Until 1972 the office was a part-time
appointment and it was not until then that the staffing and supervision of the
collection was professionally organised with, besides the Royal Librarian, two
new full-time Surveyors – one for pictures and one for works of art – supported
by teams of trained assistants. Clark’s immediate predecessor as Surveyor was the
gentle and unworldly Collins Baker, who had been the Keeper at the National
Gallery, and who had resigned in 1932 to take up a research appointment at the
Huntington Collection in California. Clark was appointed as the Surveyor only
seven months after taking up the directorship of the National Gallery. According
to Clark himself, he was reluctant to become the Surveyor but George v was
insistent to the point where he made a private visit to the National Gallery and
during a tour of the collection commanded Clark to accept.
Clark’s natural habitat, like that of the Berensons, was not the groves of
academe and the scholar’s cell but the salons of society and the inner sanctum
of the passionate collector. When they moved back to London, the Clarks took
a lease on a grand eighteenth-century town-house at 30 Portland Place, a short
walk from Regent’s Park and an even shorter walk from the new headquarters
of the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc). ‘Jane and K’ soon became the
darlings of society hostesses such as Lady Cunard and Sibyl Colefax, in what
Clark later described as the ‘Great Clark Boom’. They lunched with the Prime
Minister at 10 Downing Street, dined with the King and Queen at Windsor
Castle (and reciprocated with invitations to Portland Place); they stayed with
Winston Churchill and he came to dine; they were invited to lavish weekend
house-parties and were frequent guests of Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in
Kent. Jane was dressed by Schiaparelli. Their house, decked out in the height of
fashion, was full of servants and nannies. Such a lifestyle was a bond between
Clark and his trustees – they were mutually at ease socially and met at dinner
parties and house parties – but such grandeur was the cause of an increasingly
bad relationship with his staff who, while acknowledging Clark’s abilities as a
1933–1939 126

scholar, regarded him as too rich and too worldly and disliked his policy of
popularising the gallery. At first they had welcomed him, seeing him as someone
who would be on their side in any battle against the trustees. However, they
soon came to regard him, especially after his appointment as the Surveyor of the
King’s Pictures, as a place-seeker and no better than one of the trustees.
The relationship between Clark and his curatorial staff degenerated to the
point where they locked him out of their offices and the gallery’s library. Their
difficulties were succinctly summed up by his friend and contemporary, John
Walker, who commented that although the staff acknowledged that Clark
was brilliant they found him arrogant. He looked down on his subordinates,
delegated to them reluctantly and when he did, criticised their efforts. ‘In the
end he aroused the hostility of his staff, who then proceeded to make his life
miserable’ (Walker p. 293).
Clark’s directorship was notable for many eye-catching acquisitions. He
persuaded his trustees to fill some of the gaps in the collection and made a
number of major additions with overt popular appeal, by Bosch, Rubens, Ingres,
Constable and Gainsborough. However, one potentially spectacular acquisition
brought nothing but anguish. In 1937, Clark persuaded the trustees to consider
four small Venetian panels. He had seen them in Vienna and had been bewitched
by them. They were in the style of, although not necessarily by, the rarest of
Venetian Renaissance painters, Giorgione. The trustees decided to buy them
although the asking price was a problem: it was beyond their budget. However, if
the panels were by Giorgione himself they were a bargain; if not by Giorgione,
but by some lesser artist, they were too expensive. Sir Robert Witt offered a way
out of the dilemma by saying that the nacf would purchase and present them
provided they were catalogued as by Giorgione himself. Clark hesitated but
agreed. Once the acquisition and the attribution became known, scholars and
academics came forward to prove that they were probably by a minor Venetian
artist called Andrea Previtali, and there was a campaign to have Clark dismissed. It
was a long drawn-out and painful episode. The four panels can now be found in
the mostly unvisited reference section in the basement of the gallery, catalogued
as by Previtali.
There was one milieu which Clark enjoyed and cultivated but which was
alien to Berenson. Clark liked avant-garde modern and contemporary art and
purchased works for himself by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
and by the Bloomsbury Group. He sought out young artists whom he thought
had talent, and whose company he enjoyed, such as Henry Moore, Graham
Sutherland, John Piper and Victor Pasmore. Before he had gone up to Oxford, he
had had ideas of becoming a painter himself, although he was perceptive enough
to realise that this was not where his true talents lay. The company of creative
1933–1939 127

artists, conversation with them and the atmosphere of the studio appealed greatly
to him.
In 1935, Berenson celebrated his seventieth birthday and with the clock ticking
he knew he had certain things he wished to complete or bring to a conclusion
before he died.The new edition of The Florentine Drawings was a priority but there
was no publisher committed to it. The original edition had been published by
John Murray. Oxford’s Clarendon Press, which was in discussion about the new
edition, was proving recalcitrant. In the event it was published by the University
of Chicago Press in September 1938, the cost being shared by the University
and the Carnegie Foundation. The three-volume edition was workmanlike
rather than sumptuous (unlike the first edition) and the price was $25. It was
what Berenson wanted, for he wished it to be accessible to, and to be used by,
students.
New German scholarship gave Berenson much anguish. His approach to
art had its roots in nineteenth-century aestheticism, which placed emphasis on
personal perception and feeling, and concerned itself principally with the object
rather than with documentation. He had been a pioneer in identifying and
attributing Renaissance paintings, and his four essays on Italian art had brought its
appreciation to a wide audience. His skills and philosophy were, however, highly
personal and although he had many followers – Clark and John Walker being two
prime examples – he established no disciplined school of thought. In Germany
and Central Europe, a new and much more rigorously objective approach to art
history was being established, whose priorities were documentary evidence and
the reading of works of art for symbolic and contextual, rather than aesthetic,
content and meaning. Berenson sensed, correctly, that these scholars, with their
ideas which were often in conflict with his, were a new and powerful force and
he railed against them. The fact that many of the scholars were both German
and Jewish increased his vitriol. Berenson’s relationship with the Germans,
individually, culturally and historically, and with the Jews into whose faith and
community he had been born, was a complex one. Brought up in the Jewish
faith, he had been accepted into the Episcopalian Church in Boston in 1885 and
accepted into the Catholic Church in Italy in 1891. As a boy in Lithuania, living
near the German border, German was his first language at the insistence of his
father, and by the age of twelve he was already steeped in Goethe whom he
idolised. In Boston, however, as a young immigrant, he suffered from the scorn
of the older German-Jewish immigrants, who regarded themselves as superior to
the Jewish Slavs from Lithuania and Latvia who lived alongside them. Berenson
determined that he would show that it was he who was superior to them and
that one day he would be avenged. A principal object of his spleen was Erwin
Panofsky (1892–1968), who had been a professor of art history at the University
1933–1939 128

of Hamburg until forced out by the Nazis in 1933, when he emigrated to the usa,
where he held posts at New York University, Princeton and Harvard. Berenson
was horrified when he learned that Panofsky had been invited to become the
Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard for 1947/8.
Berenson could see that these new scholars were taking over or establishing
academic departments of art history where their methods and ideologies would
be taught and examined, and that the migration of these scholars from Central
Europe to the United States would mean that they would become dominant
there. This mattered greatly to him because of what he hoped for the future of I
Tatti. He wished to give I Tatti, complete with its works of art and library to his
(and Mary’s) alma mater, Harvard, and he had clear ideas about what sort of an
institution he wished it to be. (See Appendix 2.)
Clark was not unaware of the merits of the ideas offered by the new
generation of art historians, and a lecture by Aby Warburg, in Rome in early
1929, made him conscious of the limitations of Berenson’s approach. However,
Clark’s principal relationship with works of art remained visual and aesthetic
and in the Berenson tradition. One of his early acts as director of the National
Gallery was to start to rehang the collection. This he did by eye and feel and
aesthetic response, rather than according to any theory. He wanted the place
to look beautiful and visitors to have a memorable aesthetic experience. His
newly established scientific department set to work to take large, high-quality,
black and white photographs of the major paintings and close-up details. These
were rare commodities at that time, and to be in a position to choose which
details was a heaven-sent opportunity, the results of which excited both Clark
and Berenson. The latter was greedy for as many as he could get hold of for his
photographic archive, which was an essential tool in his work of attribution.
Clark, however, saw their potential in a different way. ‘I had always taken pride in
our publications department,’ he later wrote, ‘and had encouraged our excellent
photographers to take photographs of details, ostensibly for scientific purposes,
but actually because they gave me pleasure’. In 1938, he edited 100 Details from
Pictures in the National Gallery, a volume of large-scale black-and-white details,
selecting them so that two images, placed on facing pages, would have some
visual correspondence and would suggest the possibility of a visual conversation.
This he elucidated in simply written, but not facile, notes discoursing freely over
a wide range of topics and ideas. The book was intended to encourage the lay
person and the scholar to look at works of art more closely and with a fresh eye,
and because the details ‘have been chosen for their beauty’. Looking back on
that book, he said: ‘I wrote in an informal and quasi-conversational style that I
was later to attempt on television . . . re-reading it, I recognise for the first time
the sound of my own voice’ (Clark APW p. 259). The seed that was sown in
100 Details would come to full bloom thirty years later in his television series
‘Civilisation’.
1933–1939 129

In 1937, Berenson and Clark each brought to a close one of the chapters in
the life and career of the charismatic and duplicitous dealer, Joseph Duveen, who
was the king of the international commercial art world. Twenty years earlier, he
and Berenson had signed a contract (which they kept secret) whereby Berenson
would supply him with expertise and inside information and Duveen would
pay him a retainer and fees. Berenson could not have supported his lifestyle at
I Tatti, or his work on the Lists and Florentine Drawings, without this income.
The arrangement caused Berenson much anguish, although Mary was thrilled
both by the man and the income he provided, and was often the one who dealt
directly with Duveen.
By 1935 Duveen was a dying man (he had cancer and died in 1939, although
he kept his illness secret) and in 1937 Berenson terminated their business
arrangement. It had been causing trouble for some time and matters finally came
to a head over a picture known as the Allendale Adoration. Duveen had bought the
painting, which depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds, from Lord Allendale, and
was looking for a high price from an American buyer. He hoped that Berenson
would give an authoritative opinion confirming it to be by Giorgione. Berenson
refused to do so, believing it to be an early work by Titian, which would mean a
considerably lower value. Although he came under much pressure to change his
mind, he refused and the refusal effectively terminated their arrangement. (The
picture now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, with an
attribution to Giorgione. By 1956 Berenson changed his mind, attributing it to
Giorgione with the landscape finished by Titian.)
When Clark became the Director of the National Gallery in London, Duveen
was one of the trustees, as noted earlier. It is true that Duveen was a benefactor
of the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, among others, but even so, and
even by the much laxer standards of those days, it was an unusual appointment
and caused problems. For the reality was that Duveen was in the market for
exactly the same pictures that the National’s trustees wished to buy, was privy
to useful information which he chose to withhold and gained access to sensitive
commercial information, such as what works of art might become available for
sale from an owner who wished to avoid publicity, and which works rival dealers
were offering to the National.
Clark came face to face with Duveen’s conflicted interests early on in his
directorship. Seven panels by the Sienese artist Sassetta were put before the trustees
at Clark’s suggestion, he having heard that the owner was in financial difficulties
and wanted to sell. Anecdotal and charming, they depicted scenes from the life
of St Francis. They had obvious popular appeal and would strengthen one of the
areas of weakness in the gallery’s collection. Furthermore, they had a Berenson
connection in that he owned the principal panel of the altarpiece from the
church of San Francesco in San Sepolcro, to which they had all once belonged.
Duveen had sold the seven panels to one of his principal clients, Clarence
1933–1939 130

Mackay of Long Island. Ostensibly, it was Mackay who wished to sell them at
a suggested price of £35,000. However, it then turned out that Mackay could
not sell them because he had never paid Duveen, so to all intents and purposes
they belonged to Duveen and it was he who was putting them on the market.
Furthermore, Mackay’s butler was in Duveen’s pay and had passed on to Duveen
the trustees’ correspondence with Mackay. In the end the trustees purchased the
panels for £42,000 ‘through the good services of Lord Duveen’, according to
the press release. It was an uneasy situation, especially when it turned out that
Duveen had carried out extensive and not subtle restoration work on the panels.
Calouste Gulbenkian had assembled in Paris one of the finest collections in
Europe. It included paintings, French decorative art, ancient Greek coins and
Islamic and Egyptian artefacts.Taking a liking to Clark, Gulbenkian lent thirty of
his pictures to the National Gallery in 1936 and, liking even more the way Clark
displayed them, he suggested that he would be willing to give his entire collection
to the National Gallery, with an endowment of his revenues from Iraqi oil, if it
could be housed in a separate annexe. However, Gulbenkian told Clark that he
would not make his bequest if Duveen remained a trustee. In 1936, Duveen’s
term of office was due to expire but he was eligible for re-appointment. He had
supporters among his fellow trustees but the chairman, Samuel Courtauld, was
opposed. Consequently it fell to Clark to arrange for Duveen’s removal from the
board of trustees, a task which he undertook in 1937 (as noted, the year when
Berenson terminated his contract).To bring the matter to a conclusion, at Clark’s
initiative the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was asked to intervene, and
Duveen’s fate was sealed. Clark never saw Duveen again. Several trustees were
outraged to the point of refusing to speak to Clark. In the end, Gulbenkian’s
proposed bequest never came to fruition. At the outbreak of war he was deemed
by the British government to be, technically, an ‘enemy alien’ and in 1945 Clark’s
successor as director was opposed to largesse from rich capitalists.
The 1930s presented Berenson with two particular personal problems: the
deterioration of his finances and Mary’s declining health. His recently negotiated
new contract with Duveen nominally gave him sufficient income to continue to
run I Tatti and maintain his lifestyle but payments were often delayed.The turmoil
on the world’s financial markets affected his investments and the income he
derived from them. Harvard constantly demurred about making a commitment
to taking on I Tatti because they considered.that Berenson’s endowment, with
less than £1 million in securities, would be insufficient to maintain the property,
the library and the art collection. For his part, Berenson always wondered how
committed they would be to his vision for I Tatti. All these matters weighed
considerably on his mind but his heaviest emotional burden to carry was the
physical and mental state of Mary. She had played many roles in his life: mistress,
professional colleague, wife, critic, scold, business manager, châtelaine, occasional
1933–1939 131

enemy and, finally, after the arrival of Nicky Mariano, ‘wife emeritus’, as his
biographer Ernest Samuels aptly put it (Samuels ML p. 431). In all these roles
she was, however, always a much needed companion. She had nearly died at
Christmas 1931 and from then on the state of her health was a roller-coaster ride,
a succession of bouts of seeming good health followed by genuine physical pain
and depressive hypochondria. In July 1935, she spent four months in a hospital in
Vienna and contemplated suicide, relaying details of her bodily and mental state
by letter to Berenson.
Contemplating his seventh decade, and conscious of the loss of close friends,
Berenson observed that ‘one should prepare oneself with young friends for one’s
old age, and transfer the enjoyment from oneself to them’ (Morra p. 4). He was as
good as his word, for he added many young friends to his entourage, Clark, Morra
and Walker being among the most prominent, and to each he transferred much.
One of the grievous losses for him was the death in 1937 of Edith Wharton, who
had been his best friend outside the walls of the I Tatti family.
Clark also had his worries, although not of a financial kind. He already had
an income of £2,000 p.a. from the family cotton business, and when his father
died in 1932 he was left the income from a trust fund of £100,000 (say £20
million equivalent in today’s terms), and the prospect of the residue of a further
£400,000 when his mother died. He could therefore afford the lifestyle which
he and Jane conducted but, with Jane’s uncertain health and wellbeing, that
put heavy demands on their marriage and affected their relationship with their
young children, whom they rarely saw. Consequently the close and harmonious
family life which Clark might have wished for proved elusive.
Over the wider world, the political storm clouds gathered. Hitler pronounced
in 1934 that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years. From then on
came the actions that led to war in 1939: the occupation of the Rhineland, the
annexation of Austria, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Munich Agreement,
and finally the invasion of Poland. British anxieties were heightened by the
Abdication Crisis in 1936. From Italy, Mussolini went to war in Abyssinia and
his strident dictatorship put Berenson in an increasingly difficult situation. He
was an American citizen and a long-standing resident in a country which he
loved but whose current regime he despised. His movements and views were
watched and monitored by the authorities and he was careful not to express his
anti-fascist views in written correspondence, for letters, especially those to and
from abroad, were liable to be read: Morra, when writing to Berenson about
European politics, wrote in coded language.
In spite of the worsening political situation and the threat of war, both
Berenson and Clark were able to travel extensively and with freedom, and
between them their journeyings took them from America to Russia, to
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Spain, Greece and around the Mediterranean
1933–1939 132

from Turkey to Tunisia. It was on such journeys that both were probably at
their easiest and happiest, free from the demands and antagonisms of day-to-day
routine and able to whet their appetites for curiosity about new experiences,
new sights, and to share the pleasures of looking.Yet, like many others, they both
must have wondered how long these freedoms would last and they must have
been conscious that the philosophical, humanist and aesthetic values which they
held dear might soon disappear completely.
Chronology

1933

Late Summer Berenson and Nicky go to Vienna to meet Duveen, then

travel in Austria, and to Czechoslovakia to visit President
Tomas Masaryk
2 September Clark announced as next Director of National Gallery as
from 1 January 1934
September Clarks tour England
Clarks go to Madrid
Berenson’s sister Senda dies
30 October Harvard votes in favour of the gift of I Tatti on
condition that it is sufficiently endowed
Christmas/January Berenson stays with Edith Wharton at Hyères

1934

June Mary Berenson in London with Duveen

October Clarks stay with Edith Wharton near Paris
Christmas Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères

1935

23 March Barbara Strachey arrives at I Tatti with Mary’s first great-

grandchild, Roger
28 March Berenson and Nicky Mariano depart for a 6-week tour
of the Barbary Coast: Naples, Tripoli, Malta, Syracuse,
Messina. Letters sent to Mary result in her book A
Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast (1938)
July Clarks visit Edith Wharton in Paris
Clark family holiday in Norfolk

133
July/September Mary in a clinic in Vienna for treatment of tuberculous
ulcer
Clarks go to Holland, Russia and Germany
Clarks go to Paris to see Edith Wharton
October Berenson, Nicky Mariano and Umberto Morra depart
for the Titian exhibition in Venice, joined by John
Walker to go to Urbino and Rimini
Christmas Berenson stays at I Tatti because Edith Wharton is ill

1936

January University of Chicago Press offers to take on publishing

of new edition of the Florentine Drawings
February Berenson goes to see Edith Wharton at Hyères with
Nicky Mariano
Berenson’s brother Abie dies
March Berenson visits Rome with Nicky Mariano
March–April Clarks visit Edith Wharton at Hyères
Clarks go to Vienna
May Berenson departs with Nicky Mariano on a two-month
trip to Yugoslavia
June Berenson and Nicky Mariano return home via Salzburg
and Czechoslovakia, followed by a trip down the Rhine
and visit to Rotterdam
September/October Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit London and Paris
Clarks go to usa
November Edith Wharton comes to stay at I Tatti
John Walker visits I Tatti with his new bride
December Berenson declines invitation to see Edith Wharton at
Hyères because of pressure of work

134
1937

February Clarks visit Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris

May Berenson and Nicky visit Cyprus and Rhodes. Mary
goes to Viareggio
June Mary goes to Haslemere in England
July Clarks visit Edith Wharton
August Edith Wharton dies. Clarks go to Constantinople
October Berenson elected to the American Academy of Arts
August Benedict Nicolson arrives at I Tatti
Berenson goes to Vienna for medical treatment
Berenson terminates his contract with Duveen

1938

February Berenson receives final payment.from Duveen

Clarks visit Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris
April–June Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Smyrna (Turkey) and
Near East
May Duveen and Co. goes into voluntary liquidation

1939

February Clarks go to I Tatti

March–April Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Rome
May Duveen dies
May–June Clarks go to New York. Philip Sassoon dies
July Clark goes to Geneva to see exhibiton of pictures from
the Prado, Madrid
July Berenson in Paris

135
1933–1939 136

[28 Aug ’33 written at the bottom]

Shotover Cleve
Headington
Nr. Oxford
Headington 6832

My dear BB,
I have just received a letter offering me the directorship of the National Gallery,
which I have accepted. It would have been the act of mugwump [sic]1 to refuse.
My appointment is a melancholy proof of the lack of serious interest taken in
art-history in England, & I do not regard it in any other light – except, perhaps,
as a tribute to my conciliatory disposition. My chief duty will be to end a long
period of quarrelling. My appointment is only for five years, after which I can
retire & lead a reasonable life, having worked the poison out of my system. I
shall only be 35 so with God’s help I shall not altogether have lost the power of
contemplation & composition. Naturally I am very pleased at my appointment.
The work here, though petty, was burdensome, & if I must give up my time to
administration I would rather it were the National Gallery. Of course it will stop
me writing books – but then they might have been bad books.
We are very much enjoying all your articles on drawings, & looking forward
to the Dedalo with the article on Verrocchio.2 I don’t believe I ever thanked you
for sending me a number of tirages apart,3 which I was delighted to have. How is
Mary? We heard rather a bad report of her lately. I wrote to her about her travel
book,4 which I much enjoyed. Unfortunately she did not believe my praise to be
sincere, & wrote me a letter to that effect, which I did not enjoy.5 She is mistaken.
I thought it very well done & most interesting. I have lent it to several friends
who have liked it as much as I did.
We have had a wonderful summer,6 each day more beautiful than the last.
Most of our time has been spent in moving my mother into a new house,
and we have not had any official holiday, though no doubt the life of museum
director is one long holiday. We are going away at the end of this week, more as
a holiday for Jane, who needs a rest from children & servants. We are going for
a motor tour in England; & at the end of the month we are going to Madrid

1 A North American expression meaning someone who chooses to remain aloof, notably independent
of party politics. A great chief of the Algonquin tribe was called a ‘mugquomp’.
2 See n. 42.
3 Fr. tirage à part = offprint.
4 See Ch. 4, letter to Mary Berenson of 2 July 1933.
5 Letter missing.
6 August 1933 broke all then records for hot weather and the temperature reached 33.9C (93F).
1933–1939 137

for a few days as I can hardly take on my new work without having visited the
Prado. Meanwhile the Ashmolean is being eviscerated. I have made a plan for
rearrangement & extension which I fear will not be finished before me – rather
annoying as I am paying for it.7 You will have heard that we got the Piero di
Cosimo Forest Fire – yes, I told Mary.8 I have had it cleaned and the result is
really magnificent – it has the colour of a Hieronymous Bosch or Brueghel, &
is in really lovely condition.
With love to you all from us both,
yours ever,
K [monogram]
28 Aug ’33

Aug. 31. 1933

Poggio Al Spino
Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)

My dear Kenneth,
We are all delighted with yr. appointment to the directorship of the N. G.
You can do a great deal while occupying it for the institution as well as for
yr. own education.
One’s education is the important point, & its importance increases with one’s
years. And it is not a merely self regarding matter. The better educated one gets
the more one educates society. God knows society needs it.
The N. G. will be a school in which you can be headmaster and first pupil all
at the same time.
Nicky9 & I are just leaving for Vienna. I want to look over the drawings &
other art treasures before the worst happens there.Then we shall pay visits & end
up perhaps with a run down to Spoleto. I want to see how much I shall have to
do there in connection with my next big undertaking.
Dedalo has died & not en beauté.10 My Verrocchio article nearly got buried
with it. Only today have I got back the mss & the photo’s are still out. Without
these I cannot as much as offer the article to another mag. I may send it to

7 See Ch. 4 n. 53.

8 See Ch. 4, letter to Mary Berenson of 2 July 1933.
9 Nicky Mariano
10 The art journal Dedalo was published by Ugo Ojetti between 1920 and 1933.
1933–1939 138

the Bolletino11 but the new director general of the Fine Arts thinks of nothing
but economy & the existence of the Bolletino as more than a noticeboard is
doubtful.
You know they have reintroduced payment to museums etc. So as usual
during the last 45 years I sent in the request for free entrance. After two months
I got the answer that it could not be granted as I came in under no category to
whom this privilege was extended.
Here too we have had a most beautiful summer. Mary on the whole has been
gaining since she came up here, & her spirits are ever so much better.The certain
success of her book and other books she is preparing have given her a new zest
for life.
Nicky has been with all three Anreps at Sorrento12 for four weeks.
Again my heartfelt congratulations, & every good wish.
Affectionate greetings to both of you.
Yours
B.B.

9.10.33
Shotover Cleve
Headington
Nr. Oxford
Headington 6832

My dear BB,
I have been waiting for a lucid interval in which to write an adequate answer
to your exceedingly kind & wise letter. But since it came I have had, as you can
imagine, a deluge of letters – as kind but less wise; & we have been away from
home. I do appreciate all that you say, and will try to make the N. G. a school, &
to profit by my opportunities to learn. The trouble, I foresee, is that the trustees
are all longing to spend money, & will much dislike it if I try to deprive them
of their legitimate excitement. If they can be persuaded to spend it on framing
& decoration all will be well, but heaven preserve me from flashy acquisitions.

11 An Italian, semi-official monthly art journal, first published in 1907, with information on the
national artistic patrimony, especially concerning acquisitions, restorations and rediscoveries. The
magazine’s editor is the Direttore Generale dell’Amministrazione di Antichità e Belle Arti.
12 Alda, Bertie and Cecil von Anrep.The Ruffino family, who were introduced to Berenson by Umberto
Morra and were a significant part of the anti-fascist underground, owned a house called La Rufola
at Sorrento. Members of the I Tatti household were frequent visitors. See Appendix 1.
1933–1939 139

Our holiday was in two parts – of which only the first was holiday & the
second hard work. The first was a motor tour in England, in the course of
which we saw the most wonderful scenery & architecture & some fine pictures.
Amongst other things I made a discovery – quite unimportant, but may interest
you for historical reasons. You remember the list of early pictures belonging to
Dennistoun of Dennistoun & published at the beginning of Hutton’s edition of
the Dukes of Urbino.13 I have often wondered what became of them, so I was
delighted to find some parts of old Dennistoun’s collection in a back bedroom
of the Bishop of Durham’s Castle at Bishop Auckland. We had been taken in to
see the view. All Dennistoun’s collection of miniatures – mostly Sienese trecento
– was there, stuck into old mirror frames with drawing pins. The Bishop’s wife,
who was Dennistoun’s great niece, – was prepared to give them away, but finally
I bought them from her, (for about twice their value, as I now find), & now
possess a really amusing monument in the history of early collecting. They were
all (I suppose there are about 60) bought in Italy in the ’40s, & Dennistoun has
left his notes of how he got them – mostly from Sacristans, I fear. I shall have one
or two of the best photographed. But when you are in England again you must
study the originals with the help of Dennistoun’s notes. They will amuse you.14
After our tour in England we went to Madrid, & did a week’s intensive work
in the Prado. I will spare you my reflections on the Prado, except to say that I
think Titian’s St Margaret almost the most beautiful picture in the world.15 I
will also refrain from saying anything about Toledo and El Greco. We returned
home rather exhausted after our orgy, & immediately sank beneath a wave of
domesticity – Jane with a bad cold trying to look after the twins & so forth. We
are consoled by the fortunate purchase of two small Renoirs,16 which would

13 The Dennistouns are a Scottish family of Norman descent whose surname derives from the ancient
barony of Danzielstoun, in Renfrewshire.The head of the family is styled Dennistoun of Dennistoun.
James Dennistoun of Dennistoun (1803–1855), an antiquarian of Jacobite sympathies, practised as
an advocate. His book of 1851, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino: Illustrating the Arms, Arts and Literature
of Italy from 1440–1630, was inspired by his meeting the German Nazarene artists in Rome. It was
a pioneering and scholarly book which was influential in promoting an interest in early Italian art
(pre-Raphael) in Britain. A new edition edited by E. Hutton was published in 1908. Dennistoun’s
collection of early Italian art was sold at Christie’s, London, in 1855. Hutton’s book includes a reprint
of the Christie’s catalogue, complete with the prices achieved at the sale.
14 Those miniatures still in Clark’s possession at his death were in the Clark sale at Sotheby’s, London,
on 3 July 1984. The catalogue contains comprehensive notes about the origins of the Dennistoun
Collection and individual items.
15 Titian’s life-size St Margaret and the Dragon is a late work, c. 1559, notable for its brushwork and
handling of light and colour.
16 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Baigneuse Blonde (now Agnelli Collection, Italy), and Femme en Blouse
Blanche, 1907 (now Nahmad Collection, Switzerland).
1933–1939 140

make Mary sick, but seem to me most exquisitely lovely. The Ashmolean is all
upside down but will emerge better and brighter just before I have to leave it.
I must stop. Please give our love to Mary & Nicky.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.
I have been making friends with a most devoted admirer of yours, Paul of
Jugo Slavia.17 When I told him I was writing he sent you all kinds of messages.

Sainte-Claire Le Chateau
Hyeres (Var)
Tel: 2-29
Jan. 16. 1934

Dear Jane,
I am sorry to hear that yr. eldest has been so alarmingly ill. Here we all hope
that he is now out of danger.18 We shall be grateful if you send a p.c. to reassure
us. Mary will be equally eager for better news. She is with her cousin’s Cary
Thomas19 at Roquebrunne but expects to join us here Saturday. We shall then
stay here another week before returning to I Tatti. Mary writes that she is feeling
well, & can lead an almost normal life. Would it were so!
I wonder how Kenneth is inserting himself into his new charge, how he is
filling it with his own personality & whether it is still softly & cosily upholstered,
or whether already showing the points of the Nuremberg Virgin.20 Not that I

17 Prince Paul of Yugoslavia

18 After the arrival of the twins, Alan became ill. He complained of a bad chest and high temperature
but the doctors never diagnosed the cause. In Alan Clark: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 2009, Ion Trewin suggests that the sympotms were precipitated by the arrival of Colin and
Colette and their claims on his parents’ affection.
19 Martha Carey Thomas
20 An instrument of medieval torture. The prototype originated in Nuremberg. It was a wooden
container somewhat like a coffin, which stood vertically and was surmounted by a carved head of
a young woman. Inside were spikes that pierced different parts of the body but never damaged vital
organs, in order to keep the victim alive.The device was so solid that no shriek could be heard from
outside unless its doors were opened. The doors opened from the front and back so that when they
were shut back the spikes penetrated the same parts of the body and into the same wounds as before,
thus inflicting excruciating pain.
1933–1939 141

hope, altho’ one can scarcely expect roses, roses all the way & never a stab at all.21
If only Kenneth had the leisure to keep a detailed diary!
I wonder whether Mary wrote to thank you for ‘Jack Robinson’.22 I read
it with interest. The picaresque narratives amused & delighted me, reflective
discourses made me wonder. They seem to be of such a very young man, & yet
I am told he is no longer, the author I mean, a mere youth.
When we were here together Kenneth sort of promised to make for me a
selection of Yates’ [sic] best poems. I understand that the verses of this Yates have
appeared at last in one volume.23 So Kenneth might, at his convenience mark
his favourites in this book, & send it to me. I should try to follow him in his
admiration.
Keep well, reserves of energy for future use, & let us hear very soon about
Allan [sic].
Ever yrs.
B.B.

Burlington Hotel24
w.1.
Thursday 18th [January 1934]

Dear BB,
We are both very touched by your kind letter about Alan. I wish I could tell
you he was better but alas his temperature is slowly mounting each week and
after more consultations with the doctors K and I feel they are not really quite
sure what is the matter themselves. All the ordinary tests and the Xrays we
are told are negative apparently an obscure fever in a child is diagnosed as the

21 ‘It was roses, roses, all the way,/ With myrtle mixed in my path like mad’ are the opening lines of
Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Patriot, An Old Story’. Dorothy Parker wrote in ‘Thought for a
Sunshiny Morning’: ‘It costs me never a stab or squirm/ to tread by chance upon a worm/ ‘Aha, my
little dear,’ I say,/‘Your clan will pay me back one day.’
22 Jack Robinson: A Picaresque Novel, 1933, was the first published work of Gerald Brenan (writing as
George Beaton). Edward FitzGerald ‘Gerald’ Brenan (1894–1987) was a British writer.who spent
much of his life in Spain. Aged 18, and to spite his father who wanted him to train at Sandhurst
military academy, he set off with an older friend, the occasional photographer and eccentric, John
Hope-Johnstone, to walk to China. Between August 1912 and January 1913 they walked 1560
miles, reaching Bosnia before lack of money made them turn back.
23 W. B.Yeats, The Winding Stair, and Other Poems, London: Macmillan, 1933. (The Collected Poems of W.
B.Yeats was published by Macmillan in 1935.)
24 Until they were settled in Portland Place, Jane and the children remained in Oxford and Clark stayed
in hotels in London.
1933–1939 142

mediastinal glands. However they are to try a new medicine next week, and after
they have observed its effect they will allow us to take him home from Ascot in
an ambulance and treat him there. There doesn’t seem much hope of the fever
ending quickly. I will write to Nicky next week as soon as we have further news
and we are most grateful for your sympathy. Please thank Edith25 too with all our
heart and give her our news. I’ll write her later.
You couldn’t have set us a more delightful task than to send you a marked
Yeats and we have already got your copy and shall start this evening. We will
hope to have it at I Tatti in time to greet your return.
Kenneth is enjoying himself hugely! If it weren’t for poor Alan, he says he
wouldn’t have a care – however I expect they will come. So far the Trustees, the
Treasury and the Office of Works are lying down with the lamb – pour mieux
sauter Je suppose. But it really is great fun and he much looks forward to your
next visit so that he can share some of the jokes with you. The rival rackets in
London have been in great form, but that sort of gossip is too long for a letter.
We have just found a very pleasant house in Regents Park No 1 Cumberland
Place which I think we shall probably buy and move into in a few months time,
in the meantime we are very well off here.
Charles Parker26 seems very happy at the Ashmolean. I think Oxford were
very lucky to get him.
Jack Brennan [sic] who wrote Jack Robinson, is now about 35 or even less
and as you know is a great friend of Hope-Johnstones and shares a house with
him in Spain.27 The book was written some time ago and over a period of seven
years. We enjoyed the book and hoped you would too. Kenneth feels it is really
two books which are never connected – the picaresque part and the symbolist
last half so very influenced by de Quincy.
It is marvellous that Mary is so much better. I do hope she will continue this.
You have had such terrible worries with her. Much love to you all from us both
Yours affectionately
Jane Clark

25 Edith Wharton
26 Karl Parker
27 See n. 22.
1933–1939 143

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 2. 1934

Dear K
In the last Jahrb. Kunsthistr. Samml. Wein28 a certain Lauts (not Laut as one
would think) says that Antonello’s Crucifixion in the N.G. is dated 1475 & not
1477.29 Kindly tell me whether he is right.
Yrs B.B.

[Typewritten letter on National Gallery headed paper]

National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
5th February, 1934.
Bernhard30 Berenson, Esq.,
I Tatti,
Settignano, Florence.

Dear B.B.,
I was delighted to get your postcard with its official question, which gives me
the excuse of sending you a typewritten letter, because I have to write so much
in the way of lectures and articles at the moment that I really cannot face the
thought of sitting down to a long eigenhändig,31 holograph.32
As to your question, we all went up to look at the Antonello and there can
be no shadow of doubt that the date is 1475, not 1477. The top of the 5 has been
cut in two by a worm-hole and a crack, it is clearly visible and its bottom could
never have been a 7 as it is too low down in relation to the preceding 7.

28 Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien.

29 Antonello da Messina, Christ Crucified, 1475, oil on panel, signed and dated, acquired by the National
Gallery in 1884 (NG 1166).
30 Berenson was named ‘Bernhard’ by his parents. He changed the spelling of his name to ‘Bernard’
when the.usa entered the First World War in 1917. Nonetheless, his The Italian Painters of the
Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) and his The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A list of the
Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) were published
with the name ‘Bernhard’ (the first of 4 volumes of which had been published in 1894); whereas his
Three Essays in Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) was published with the name ‘Bernard’.
31 German and Dutch, meaning ‘with one’s own hand’.
32 A manuscript handwritten by the person named as its author.
1933–1939 144

I am enjoying myself immensely here. The spikes which you so rightly

anticipate are hardly perceptible as yet, though I very much appreciate a sentence
in a letter you wrote to Witt,33 indiscretely [sic] repeated to me by him, about L.
of F.34 forcing me to walk the plank. I am glad you understand the position so
well and can only tell you that I will not be caught like that again, though no
doubt I shall be forced into other equally uncomfortable positions. I have had a
small share of difficulties already, especially over the question of an art laboratory,
the rival picture cleaning rackets all bringing their forces to bear on me. But as
long as I have the support and goodwill of the Trustees I think it will be possible
to deal with the crooks. No one can tell how long that will last, but you can see
for yourself that they are a much more amenable body than they have been at
any time in the past.
As far as I can see, I am extremely lucky in my Staff who have shown great
generosity in not resenting my intrusion. At present there is lots to do which we
can all agree on and I believe that this state of affairs will last for a few years.The
problem will then be how to keep the Trustees amused without letting them
make exciting purchases; because it is obvious that the fewer purchases we make
the better. So in the intervals of being a manager of a large department store
I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes. I
cannot honestly say that I dislike either occupation and there is a great deal to
be learned incidentally, more I suppose than one is aware of, by constant contact
with such wonderful pictures.
We have got Alan home and I think that he is really much better, though no
credit is due to any doctor as they have not yet found out what is, or was, wrong
with him. Jane and the twins are flourishing. I am so glad to hear such a good
account of Mary.
With love to you all,
Yours ever,
K.

33 Robert Witt
34 Arthur Lee
1933–1939 145

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 8. 1934

Dear Kenneth,
Yr. s of the the 5th is too delightful not to be answered at once even tho’ the
reading of my script may be a burthen.
In the first place take my thanks for the date of the Antonello Crucifixion.
Then let me express the satisfaction of all of us that Alan is better, and that the
rest of you are flourishing.
The contents of the rest of yr. letter pleased me more than a little & if you can
manage to keep control, I shall be happy.
At yr. leisure look over Yates’ [sic] complete poems & mark those you think I
should try to understand.
We are having our halcyonic February weather. One can scarcely bear to
remain indoors. If Mary were well, I should confine my worries to the removing
of the heaps of rubbish that the Popps,35 & [illegible] have piled up over
Michelangelo to which Frey36 has contributed not a little, & Tolnai37 is busily
barbwiring & spiking. Why do the toughest problems attract the softest fools, or
the most crashing sledge-hammers! Don’t hesitate to send type-written letters. I
have no dandy prejudices against them.
Affectionate greetings to you all
Yrs
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 17, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
Thanks for sending me the lecture on architectural backgrounds in Ren. Pict.38 I
have read it with real pleasure. It is charming, well phrased, and suggestive. How

35 See Ch. 4 n. 13. Her Die Medici-kapelle Michelangelos was published in 1922.
36 Karl Frey
37 Charles de Tolnay
38 The lectures were published in The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1934.
1933–1939 146

many problems are raised that would lead to discussion almost endless. And that
is, its charm apart, the greatest value of yr. lecture. So much of the work the rest
of us do is so extinguishing that we ourselves were perhaps better extinguished.
It is wonderful out here just now. If only Mary’s health did not worry me,
& the Proto Nazis, whether or not possessed of Aryan grand-mothers, had left
Michelangelo alone in the last 25 years!
I hope Alan is better & better.
Affectionate greetings to you both.
Yrs,
B.B.

Burlington Hotel
Cork Street, w.1.
27 February 1934

Dear BB,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I would never have dared to send you
a copy of my lecture, but Jane did so before I could stop her. I was horrified to
think of your reading anything so full of the approximations and ill-established
generalities, but I hope you understand that it was written in great haste for an
unlearned audience. I am very glad that you think the subject has possibilities,
because it is the sort of thing which I feel I could do at the National Gallery.
My work there really takes every moment of time and atom of energy all day,
so that I can’t set down to a heavy task in the evenings. Things continue to go
quite smoothly. Courtauld has presented us with his Manet, Un bar aux Folies
Bergeres, and Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and I have managed
to get back the Renoir from the Tate39 so that we have made a slightly more
reputable French room. Eventually I should like to make a whole room of 19th
century French painting, but our 18th century is too weak to stand alone. Before
long I hope to send you some of our new photographs and details which I think
will amuse you.We have got some splendid heads of the Pollaiuolo St. Sebastian40
and the big Paul Veroneses.41

39 Samuel Courtauld bought Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergères and Renoir’s La Loge in 1926 for
£22,600 each (not including commission). All three pictures were given to the Courtauld Institute
in 1934.
40 Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of St Sebastian 1475 (NG 292).
41 Paolo Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565–7 (NG 294); Veronese, Adoration of the
Kings, 1573 (NG 268).
1933–1939 147

It suddenly strikes me that I have never thanked you for sending your articles
on Verrocchio and Leonardo42 which as you can imagine, I read with the greatest
interest. I am entirely persuaded by your Verrocchio and your Leonardos and
the new Ghirlandajo attributions seem to me very convincing. But it is rather
difficult to believe that such an ass as Credi was ever as accomplished as you make
him. Even the earliest datable Credis always seem very poor. I have almost been
forced to believe that Verrocchio drew in two styles, a broad and a fine manner,
and that the Dresden Silver point43 and the V. and A. design for monument44 are
really Verrocchio in his fine manner. How I wish I could see you talk over other
puzzles in the article. But I cannot pretend that there is any hope of coming to
Florence this spring.
I am sorry to say that Alan is very little better. He seemed to improve for a
little, but he was never without fever and now he has developed another bad
cold which has raised the temperature again. Otherwise we are all well. How
disappointing that Mary should have had such a relapse after her wonderful
return to health.
Love to you all
Ever yours affectionately
K.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 18. 1934

Dear Kenneth,
We all were distressed – all includes Morra – to hear that Alan was not as well as
you could wish him to be. Poor little chap we are sorry for him, & sympathise
with you. It must furnish a constant ground swell of worry. I hope you will soon
if not immediately be able to give us more comforting news.
I am interested in yr. suggestion that Verrocchio may have done two manners
of drawing a fine & a broad. I wish you could work it out. It might yield startling
results.

42 Bernard Berenson, ‘Verrocchio e Leonardo’ and ‘Leonardo e Credi’, Bollettino d’arte (November
1933), pp. 193–214; (December 1933), pp. 241–64.
43 The Young Madonna (now attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, c. 1459–1537), Kupferstich-Kabinett der
Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
44 Verrocchio, Design for a Monument, 1470s,Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. 2314).
1933–1939 148

Roger Fry45 has just been here, most enthusiastic about yr. way of running the
N. G. I look forward to seeing with my own eyes, perhaps in the autumn. That
will give you time to make a defining start.
Do send detailed photos, Pollaiuolo, Veronese, you make my mouth water.
I wish I could have details of the Sebastiano Resurrection of Lazarus.46 I have
Braun,47 Hanfstaengl48 & Anderson.49 The part on our right is blurred in all
of them. Could it be managed? To be of use, I should have them before two
months, nay earlier.
Love fr. all of us to both of you
Affectionately
B.B.

[Typewritten letter]
Burlington Hotel,
Cork Street, W.1
23rd March 1934

My dear BB,
Thank you very much for your letter, and your kind enquiries for Alan. After his
second attack had abated we sent him down to Brighton, and I really believe that
he is getting better at last. His temperature has been normal for the last week, and
he has been out and about on the beach. We are no nearer to knowing what has
been the matter with him however, and we have been disappointed so often that
I do not like to crow too much just yet. At all events he is very happy playing

45 Roger Fry
46 Sebastiano del Piombo, Raising of Lazarus, c. 1517–19, is the second-largest picture in the National
Gallery, measuring nearly 4 x 3 metres. Acquired in the original purchase from the Russian-born
John Julius Angerstein (1732–1823) who established himself in business in London. He accumulated
an especially fine collection of pictures and after his death 38 of these were bought by the government
to form the nucleus of the collection of the newly founded National Gallery in London. The
Sebastiano has the distinction of bearing the inventory number NG 1.
47 Jean Adolphe Braun (1812–1877) was a French textile designer who, in 1853, took up photography.
As well as making 300 flower studies as an aid to artists and designers, he became a major supplier of
reproductions of paintings.
48 Franz Hanfstaengl, Catalogue of Reproductions of Works of Old Masters: Carbon Prints, Silver Prints,
Pigment Prints, Photogravures, Facsimiles, London: F. Hanfstaengl, 1907.The German firm of Hanfstaengl
published what were considered the finest available black and white carbon prints of paintings.
49 James Anderson (1813–1877) was a British photographer working mainly in Rome. His son
Domenico Anderson (1854–1938) took over the business after his father’s death; at Domenico’s death
the archive was bought by Fratelli Alinari in Florence.
1933–1939 149

with the penny-in-the-slot machines with the Balniels50 two little boys who are
just about his age.
I am sending you in a separate package a few of our detailed photographs.
I dare not send you more as I am not quite sure what you have already. If you
have had any of these please send them back as I should like to have them for
myself. The most interesting are the series from the Pollaijuolo St. Sebastian,51
which I am sure will delight you if you have not had them already. I am afraid
you may have seen the detail of the early Botticelli52 which was done some time
ago, but you cannot have seen the detail in the Paul Veronese as I only did it last
week, when I made it change places with the Sebastiano ‘Raising of Lazarus’.
Most unfortunately I did not have a detailed photograph taken of the Sebastiano,
because I thought that our print, which I have included with the others, was so
clear that no-one would ever need a detail. It would be a terrible job to take one
now, as the picture has not got a removable glass and it needs a portable crane
to shift it. The next time it is out of its frame for cleaning the glass, I will have
those details taken. By that time I am afraid you will have finished your work on
Sebastiano. The detail of the Bronzino53 is one of a series which I have taken to
show the character of different crackleures [sic].54 If this sort of thing interests you
we have many more of the same kind. We have got the best results in crackleure
with stereoscopic photographs looked at through a magnifying stereoscope.
The work in the Gallery continues to be most enjoyable. I have not yet made
any purchases and as far as I can see am not likely to do so, though there is one
which I should like to make, the Chalandon Sassettas.55 Duveen tells me that

50 David Balniel
51 The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, mid-1470s, ascribed to Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, purchased by
the National Gallery in 1857 (NG 292).
52 Probably Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with two Angels, a studio work of c. 1480 (NG 275).
53 Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1545, now An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (NG 651).
54 Craquelure is the fine pattern of minute ‘cracking’ formed on the surface of ageing paintwork.
55 The ‘Chalandon Sassettas’ had a special interest for the Berensons. Shortly after they were married
and had decided to live at I Tatti, they found, in an antique shop in Florence, three unidentified
panels, which they later established as Sassetta’s St Francis in Glory, Blessed Ranieri and St John the
Baptist. ‘That adorable Sienese Sassetta’ (Mary Berenson’s words; Samuels MC p. 348) being then
un-rediscovered as an artistic personality, and the dealer being unaware of what he had got, Mary
was able to haggle the price down to £80. The Berensons re-established Sassetta’s place in the art
historical canon, and the three panels became one of the treasured possessions in the I Tatti collection
(and still are). The panels came from an altarpiece which had been created for the Franciscans in
Borgo San Selpolcro, which also included eight small panels depicting incidents in the life of St
Francis. Six of these had, by 1903, come into the possession of a M. Chalandon in Paris; the seventh
was separately owned and the eighth had come into the possession of the Comte de Saint Ferréol
in Isère (it is now in Chantilly). Mary Berenson saw the panels in 1903 and, as a result of her report
and photographs, Berenson (who had not seen the panels) wrote a famous article in the Burlington
Magazine (September 1903) in which he compared Sassetta’s spirituality to that of Chinese art. The
six Chalandon panels were acquired by Joseph Duveen in 1925, who, after he had acquired the
seventh from a different source, had them restored. He then ‘sold’ them to the American collector
Clarence Mackay who never paid for them (see Introduction).
1933–1939 150

Mr. Mackay is prepared to sell these for considerably less than he gave for them,
but even so the cost would be enormous, and we could not possibly afford them
without Government aid: and that is impossible at present, since the National
craze for the Bible has diverted all possible funds to the purchase of the miserable
Codex Siniaticus.56 I have little enough time for my own work and my Leonardo
catalogue is now nearing publication, & even the proofs of the collotypes are
being finished. Incidentally I could send you a complete set of the proofs if
you would like to have them, but they are bulky and tiresome things to read,
and before the end of the year you should have the book itself. If it would be
convenient to you to have the proofs at once, do let me know and the Press will
send them; and of course I should be infinitely grateful for any corrections you
could make.
We are so glad to think that you may be in London in the autumn. If you come
in October you will find the big Tuscan room closed for re-decoration, and you
will be able to see all the pictures out of their frames and on the ground. The
re-arrangement of this room will be the biggest job I have tried, and it will not
be completed till November, so I hope you will be able to give me some advice.
Jane and sends her love to you all.
Ever yours affectionately,
K. [monogram]

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Apr. 1. 1934

My dear Kenneth,
We all were delighted, truly glad, to learn fr. yr. letter of March 23 that Alan is
really getting better. I hope you will be able to tell of continued improvement
when you write again.

56 In 1933 the Soviet government sold the Codex Siniaticus to the British Museum for £100,000,
raised by public subscription. The Codex is written on parchment in an ancient hand and is a copy
of the Greek Bible dating from the 4th century. As originally written it contained the whole of both
Testaments. The Codex now consists of half the Old Testament and the whole of the New. Most of
the surviving Codex had been acquired, not without skulduggery, by Tsar Alexander ii in the mid-
19th century.
1933–1939 151

The photo. of details you speak of sending have not reached me yet. I have
none of the details you speak, unless it be of the Botticelli. I had some details
done for me several years ago. If I have any of these that you send, I will send
them back at once.
How can you ask whether craquelures interest me! Was I not the first –
certainly did it before Laurie57 – to draw attention to them as a significant
calligraphic element in identifying a painter? So please send all you can, & I shall
be very grateful.
And do have the Sebastiano in mind for the next occasion that you have to
remove the glass.
It would be wonderful if you could acquire Mackays Sassettas for the N. G. I
have a special interest in the matter naturally.
It is good of you to offer to send the proofs of yr. Leonardo. I fear I should
have no time to look at them now as I am so fearfully busy.
Since the first publication of my Flor. Drawings the German-speaking peoples
of Central & East Central Europe have turned the subject of Michelangelo into a
mishandled privy. I have to hold my nose to approach it, & at first like Goloubev
when he entered Ajanta58 I all but fainted. But I am recovering, & I hope to
clear the place so well that all but those who love a befouled & bestenched
Michelangelo will be able to approach him with unoffended senses.
Yes there is a chance of our coming to London in the autumn, particularly if
the book is done & I can take mss & photos to printers.
Have you seen Al. Huxley’s paper on Nationalism in the ‘Life & Letters’?59
Best wishes & affectionate greetings fr. all of us. How lovely it is here now.
Yours
B. B.

57 A. P. Laurie, ‘Crackle and Forgeries of Primitives’, Connoisseur Magazine, no. 81 (1928).

58 The Ajanta Caves are situated in West Central India (Hyderabad) and the rock cut decorations and
frescoes inside them date from about the 2nd century bce to about 480 or 650 ce. They are also
noted for their stench resulting from centuries of bat droppings. They were rediscovered by chance
by British soldiers in the early 19th century. Victor Goloubev published two books about them (in
French) in 1927.
59 Aldous Huxley. Life and Letters was a literary magazine edited by Desmond MacCarthy.
1933–1939 152

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
April 10. 1934

Dear Kenneth,
Thanks upon thanks for the photo’s of details. I have never seen anything quite
so good. I only wish I had as many of every important picture as thanks to you
I now have yr. great Pollaiuolo. Do send more & more as you have them made.
The photo. of the Sebastiano is far more satisfactory than any I have had
hitherto, altho’ I must own all.
I wonder whether photos exist of the Pace frescoes by Sebastiano now at
Alnwick?60 They represent the Annunciation. I don’t think the Nativity is there.
If they exist & I could have them, if only on loan, they would be most convenient
just now.
And do you know anything about the Mantegna Mad. just purchased by the
Boston Mus. of Fine Arts?61 In the reproduction it is hard to accept & as hard to
reject. Perhaps it has been too much rubbed, or possibly it is only an old, almost
contemporary copy. I can’t make up my mind.
With nose closed I dig my way through the learning piled up by the German
writing tribes of Central & East Central Europa on the drawings of Michelangelo.
The stench is almost as intolerable as what Goloubev encountered at Ajanta
where for ten centuries bats piled up their droppings.
Surely the learning of one generation is the rubbish that the next has to clear
away, and so ad-infinitum.
We all hope that Alan is getting better & better and that the rest of you are
flourishing.
Affectionately
B.B.

60 At Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, in a small

antechamber, there is part of a fresco by Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485–1587) depicting the
Visitation of Mary with Elizabeth. It was painted for Santa Maria della Pace in Rome; removed by
the French, it was purchased by the French Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763–1839), a close associate of
the family of Napoleon and a celebrated collector. He retired to Rome on Napoleon’s downfall.The
fresco was purchased by the 5th Duke from Walter Davenport-Bromley in 1853.
61 The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, purchased Virgin and Child in 1933 for $80,000 as by Mantegna,
now attributed to a follower of Mantegna.
1933–1939 153

[This is a postcard written to Clark at the National Gallery]

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
July 1, 1934

Delighted with yr. talk on ‘What I like in Art’ & yr. approach to Piero.62 That is
the way to do it. I congratulate you. Continuez!
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
July 6, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
My congratulations on the appointment to be surveyor of the King’s pictures.
I am doubly glad as I shall feel free to ask you for photos & information about
said pictures.
To begin at once, do you remember a floating Venus, at once Bronzinesque
& Lottesque at Hampton Ct.,63 that we saw together several years ago? A photo
would be welcome, & eventually of all others as yet unphoto’d there.
Any hope of a photo. of the S. del Piombo fragments at Alnwick?
I expect Mary in two or three days, & in about a week we shall be going up
to Consuma.64
I hope you all are flourishing.You must be off to the country or sea-side.
Wither?
I am sure you have no time to read me, so I will write no more now.

Affectionate greetings to you all

Yours
B.B.

62 The Listener magazine ran a short series of articles, ‘What I like in Art’. On 27 June 1934, Clark wrote
about Piero della Francesca’s Nativity in the National Gallery. The other contributors were Eric
Maclagan and Clive Bell.
63 Probably Giovanni Cariani’s Venus, c. 1530–5, at Hampton Court (RCIN 402912).
64 See Ch. 3 n. 5.
1933–1939 154

National Gallery
begun June 10. finished 1465

Dear BB,
I had just written you a letter of thanks for your postcard when your
congratulations on the Kings pictures arrived, so I must write a new one. Thank
you very much for both, & especially for the postcard, of which I am so proud
that I sit and look at it in moments of depression. I am so glad you found
something to interest you in my approach to the Piero. It was at least an attempt
to tell the truth, & to do what was asked of me, which is more than can be said
of some others in the series. As for the surveyorship – that is an unmitigated
nuisance to me, & nothing more. I have always hated palaces as a tourist & I
hate them even more as a servant. The exception is Hampton Court, which is
of course really a public gallery, tho’ as badly run as if it were private. However
I suppose it is of value to this gallery to have some connection with the Kings
pictures, & that this may be more valuable still under Edward viii. Meanwhile
you shall have all the photos you require. I shall be delighted at the opportunity
of having some of the pictures taken. But alas, I fear I can’t supply you with them
free as we do here, as every penny has to be squeezed out of the Privy Purse,
which does not recognise the claims of scholarship.
You will here [sic] about our house66 from Mary. I am hardly ever in it, but it
makes a pleasant impression on me as I pass through it on the way from the front
door to my bedroom.We enjoy London. It is a full & interesting life & makes up
for the rather dim & colourless years I passed at home before I married. Logan67
is full of the awful misery awaiting us when we are finally dropped by our
(according to him) grand friends. We look forward to the period with rapture.
Today we decide the fate of the Chalandon Sassettas,68 & I will keep this letter
open in order to let you know it. On the whole I should be glad to have them
here, though I am inclined to think that the money could be laid out to better
advantage.
Four days later: it is fatal to interrupt a letter. For four days I haven’t had a
free five minutes to finish this one. We have decided to try to buy the Sassettas,
& with Duveen’s help we probably shall succeed. He says he can persuade Mr
Mackay’s lawyer.

65 Clark must mean July, not June.

66 In 1934 the Clarks took a lease on 30 Portland Place. Fashionably decorated by Jane and Sibyl
Colefax, and full of servants, it was suitable for entertaining on a grand scale.
67 Logan Pearsall Smith
68 See n. 55.
1933–1939 155

Since beginning this letter I have been to Hampton Court, & have ordered
your photograph.The picture is hung in a better light now & looks worse.There
are an immense number of pictures tucked away in Hampton Court which I
doubt few can have seen since you first went there – chiefly Bassanos, of course,
but a few interesting sub Titianesque Venetians.
We wonder how you are & what you are writing. Are you still ploughing
through the German theories of Michelangelo? I imagine that you will have a
good deal of fresh material for the later Florentines, especially Pontormo. It must
be lovely at the Consuma. We have had a glorious summer.69
Love from Jane to you & Nicky,
yours ever,
K.

Poggio al Spino
Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
Aug. 9, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
Nicky forwarded me a word of yrs to her in wh. you speak about myself & my
doubts & troubles in a way that touches me deeply. I assure you yr. sympathy &
appreciation mean a great deal to me.
As for the Clarendon Press I certainly should not care to bring such an
unwilling bride to bed. She may be only standing out for a meaner dowry. I was
upset by the tone of Chapman’s letter more than by its content.
Meanwhile the work is proceeding & but for the impudent, befouling,
bestenching writers fr. darkest Central Europe, it would have already been
finished.
Logan & Desmond arrived a few days ago, & I need not tell you what good
company they are. Even Logan is not neighing & prancing but quite orderly &
feeds rather than jams talk. Next week Eric McLagan [sic] comes for a few days.
So all would be pleasant if only my poor Mary were not so invalidish and
seeming I fear to get worse rather than better.
Plans uncertain. If possible I shall come in Oct. but I fear there is little chance.

69 In 1934 there was a fairly warm June and a very warm July. There was a notable heatwave 7–11 July.
1933–1939 156

If you take a vac do send thro’ the vol. of Yates’ [sic] complete poems & mark
those that are of faith & obligation.
Affectionate greetings to you both.
Ever devotedly
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Oct. 10, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
I am sorry not to be in London just now. I could with yr. help have my belly-full
of looking at pictures nose to nose as I now enjoy doing.
But Mary’s condition does not allow me to leave her. She is in almost
continuous pain, and when she has intervals of comparative peace she wants
attention & sympathy. I am a poor hand at either, but I do what I can. The
compensation is that I stick to my desk, & every day brings my superfluous task
nearer to the end.
I want to ask you while the pictures are down to make photo. details of the
Sebastiano Resurrection of Lazarus.70 Even yr. photo of the whole leave certain
parts dim. It would be desirable to have those parts taken in detail, & all the portr.
heads of course. Of these there is one at least to r. & another to l. Also the small
groups in the middle distance.Then the big Pollaiuolo. I should be most grateful
for photo’s of the medallions in the arch.

What a bad business this assassination at Marseilles! It certainly will change

Prince Paul’s status, & I am really anxious for him.71 I wish he were safe in
England. If he is there make a point of giving him all my sympathy. I scarcely

70 See n. 46.
71 On 9 October 1934 King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseilles and his cousin
Prince Paul assumed the regency until Alexander’s son should come of age in 1941. He pursued a
policy of delegating power to the regions in order to tackle the ancient Serb–Croat antipathy. At
the start of the war in 1939, Yugoslavia declared neutrality but after the fall of France Paul deemed
it expedient to accommodate the Axis powers while at the same time remaining quietly pro-Allies.
In 1941 he was removed from power and remained under British house arrest in Kenya. He died in
exile in Paris having never returned to Yugoslavia.
1933–1939 157

dare to write or even write to Belgrade. Besides nella confusione no word would
reach him.
Edith has written most appreciatively of both her visits to you. I fear she had
too good a time to leave her with any desire to come to us in Nov. as usual.
I am so glad that the Leonardo is ready. I look forward to it.
Yours
B.B.

Pavillon Colombe
St Brice-Sous-Foret (S&O)
Telephone: St Brice-Sous-Foret, 12
14 Oct. 34

My dear BB,
By good luck your letter reached me here, so that I am able to give Edith your
news & have the leisure in which to reply. But what sad news it is. I am terribly
sorry that Mary has taken such a disastrous turn for the worse. I can imagine all
too well what you must all be going through in anxiety & in that horrible feeling
of helplessness & insufficiency which overwhelms one at such moments. At all
events you mustn’t add to your depression by thinking that your work on the
Florentine Drawings is to no purpose. Strictly speaking I suppose I am no longer
entitled to represent the opinion of ‘the youngs’; but as the quasi-youngs are
concerned I do know how much genuine interest is in your work, & especially
in that work. Like most classics you are far more widely & intelligently read than
the published work, at present, would show.You will see all this when the book
comes out.
It is sad that you can’t come to London, although the Gallery will be looking
better next year, & after all you can have down any picture with which you
want to rub noses. A good deal has been done, but I hope to have much more
to show in 18 months.You will have seen Duveen’s gift of a Hogarth illustrated
in the Times.72 We have also bought a very fine Hieronymous Bosch,73 which I
managed to carry in face of opposition on all sides. Now it is clean and its most
bitter assailants have come round, & I think it will have a really great success
of estime tho’ I don’t suppose it can be popular in the same way as Hogarth.
I think it is safe to say that we have also bought the Chalandon Sassettas. The

72 Hogarth’s The Graham Children, 1742 (NG 4756), was presented by Lord Duveen through the nacf
and announced in The Times on 8 October 1934.
73 Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns; NG 4744).
1933–1939 158

steps by which this was achieved have been very elaborate & indirect. However
the great thing is that we should have them. Only a small sum now remains to
be raised,74 & I think I see my way to it. When they are finally ours I am going
to ask you a favour. Do you think you would publish them in the Burlington
Magazine? I note that you don’t usually write for the Burlington: & I know that
there is probably very little new to say about the Sassettas. But don’t you think
there would be a certain dramatic appropriateness in your introducing your own
children to the National Gallery. You would not need to write a long article
unless you wanted to – just something to accompany good reproductions of the
pictures – which I don’t think have ever appeared before, since the photos in
your original article were taken before cleaning, & are not distinct in details.Will
you think it over & let me know how you feel.
You shall have all the details we take. At present I am having great fun with
our ‘Cimabue’, which is being most successfully cleaned.75 We have taken some
most interesting details of the heads. The medallions in the Pollajuolo have been
done already. I thought I had sent them to you. Did you ever get the photograph
from Hampton Court. The people there are sometimes very slow.
We both feel the loss of Paul of Jugo Slavia very much.We had looked forward
to seeing him in Paris this time. He really was one of the most sympathetic of
our recent friends, & the perfect amateur. What a tragic position for him. I think
he has plenty of determination & infinite public spirit: but I am afraid he is
rather die hard, & has inherited some of the prejudices of the Russian aristocrat.
Jane & Edith join me in love & sympathy. Let us hope that when Mary has so
often taken a sudden turn of the better, she may do so again.
Ever yours affectionately
K. [monogram]

74 The Sassettas (NG 4757–63), were bought with contributions from the nacf, Benjamin Guinness
and Lord Bearstead.
75 The Virgin and Child with Six Angels by the Master of the Albertini (Master of the Casole Fresco),
c. 1310–15 (?, NG 565), had been acquired in 1857 as by Cimabue. It was cleaned and restored in
1934–5. See also n. 110.
1933–1939 159

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Oct. 21, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
I cannot thank you enough for yr. words of comfort & sympathy.
All other worries & vexations disappear in the presence of Mary’s condition.
She suffers almost continuously, & again & again she drives me out of her room
because she cannot bear to have me hear & see her being tortured. I leave her &
go to my study & try to go on with my work. It is a track upon which even the
most rusty locomotive can crawl up & down carrying fr. one stop to another. So
I can still do something over my task in hand.
At no time can I easily switch off fr. what I happen to be doing & do
something to order. I am a poor in fact utterly inexperienced writer of occasional
or ceremonial things. And in the conditions in which I find myself now I fear it
would be impossible to attempt to present in the Burlington the Sassettas you
[are] about to acquire.
Let me add that no event not touching my own skin could give me greater
satisfaction & pleasure than this purchase. And it is not diminished may I add
[sic], likely guess that I make as to who is ready to supply the lacking funds.
Let me for a moment return to Mary. The doctors are disposed to make light
of her case, & to put most of her pains down as ‘cortical.’76 As if that made any
difference to the subjective reality of the torture. And doctors are naturally too
ready to ascribe to imagination what they cannot account for.
Unhappily their inability to find a cause (because being ‘cortical’ it is not
in their province) leaves us with a feeling of helpless despondency. The only
alleviation is the animal hopefulness that never quite deserts one.
While Mary is in this condition I can only make believe that I am at work.
And yet my interests and curiosities cannot wholly disappear. Therefore I
thank you in advance for the photo’s you promised to send of the Sebastiano
Resurrection. I enclose a slip I wrote months ago, which I discovered among my
notes.You are right about the Pollaiuolo.You have already sent them.
I wonder what is going to happen to the Burlington Mag.77 Will it continue
as it has been almost fr. the beginning? Will most of its articles on Italian painting
be written by brainless pedants or utter humbugs? Who will own it, & who will
control it? I believe you know what I think could be done with good will.

76 The outer layer of the grey matter of the brain.

77 Herbert Read took over as Editor in 1933.
1933–1939 160

Let me turn back & tell you that I am truly sorry to find so definitely that
under present circumstances I cannot do the small favour you ask for.
I suppose we can now safely transfer them fr. Mackays to the N.G. for the Ital.
transl. of wh. we are already correcting the proofs.78
With affectionate greetings to you
Always yrs.
B.B.

National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
7th November, 1934.

Bernhard Berenson, Esq.,

I Tatti
Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB,
As soon as I got your last letter I set about photographing the Sebastiano..It was
not one of the pictures we had intended moving and it is such an enormous
picture that it would take several days hard work to get it out of its frame; it
requires a crane to lift the glass and frame. I was therefore forced to photograph
it in situ, with the glass. It hangs in rather a dark place and for several days we had
real November weather, so that any attempt at photography was impossible. On
the first bright day, I had a tower erected and black curtains stretched between
two other towers. The lens of the camera poked through a hole in the middle of
the black curtains. It was like Cellini’s casting of the Perseus.79 The Signorine who
take our photographs enjoyed the necessary feats of equilibrium and altogether
you are regarded as a public benefactor. Considering the darkness of the glass,
I think the results are quite creditable. As you will see, there are two different
scales; the photographs of the figures above Christ’s arm being on a larger scale
than the other three. If ever the picture comes out of its frame again, which
is not probable during my time here, I shall have it properly photographed in
detail, because really these detailed photographs are the only possible way of

78 Berenson’s Pitture italiane del rinascimento: Catologo dei principi artisti e delle loro opere con un indice dei
luoghi, trans. Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Hoepli, 1936.
79 Cellini’s casting of his bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545, which adorns the Loggia dei
Lanzi in Florence, was dramatically recounted in his autobiography. The furnace temperature got
too high and its lid exploded, causing the roof of the house to catch fire. To lower the temperature,
Cellini threw in all his tin plates and bowls. The cast was, in the end, perfect.
1933–1939 161

enjoying it. The group of mourning women is really magnificent and worthy
of Michelangelo; indeed it seems to foreshadow that indescribably marvellous
group in the bottom right-hand corner of his ‘Crucifixion of S. Peter’.80 Talking
of Sebastiano, how magnificent is the portrait at Bowood.81 I only saw it recently
and immediately longed to have it in the National Gallery.
We were dreadfully distressed by your news of Mary. Placci,82 whom I saw
a few days ago, gave rather a better account of her and I hope this means some
signs of recovery. We have not yet seen Logan, who has been in bed since his
return.
We are all well & send love
Yours ever,
K. [monogram]

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Nov. 10, 1934

Dear Kenneth,
Considering that the glass could not be moved – & I understand the reason only
too well – the photos are a triumph. I am truly grateful. I wish only that it had
been feasible to make one of the lower r. hand corner – the bit wh. in all photo’s
of the entire composition, comes off worst.
I share your enthusiasm for the picture. It is perhaps the first where grandeur
is deliberately aimed at.You know the beginnings of evil are apt to be very good.
Here the sky is a trifle less gloomy. Mary is improving, but so slowly that she
cannot believe it yet. And I can hope that she will be well soon to let me return
to my job. I dare say you know already from Edith that she is coming here in a

80 Michaelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter, Cappella Paolina, Vatican. Dating to 1546–50, it is the last
fresco executed by him. Michelangelo made sketches which were used by Sebastiano for the Raising
of Lazarus.
81 Sebastiano, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1520 (acquired by Samuel Kress in 1955; now in the NGA,
Washington). Bowood is the seat of the Marquis and Marchioness of Lansdowne.
82 Carlo Placci
1933–1939 162

week. Harries [sic]83 must be back in London, & will be able to tell you about I
Tatti & it denizens.
Affectionate greetings to you all
B.B.
Thank the Signorina with my congratulations.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec. 17, 1934

Dear Kenneth
Could you get me a photo of the late Henry Oppenheimer’s drawing where the
Madonna is so close to my (Windsor) 1608 wh. you believe to be by Bugiardini
& I as Michelangelo for the Daniel in the Sixtine?84 It would be of great use to
me.
Oh those Germans, O those Germans! Really they invented Dachau85 long
ago & Frey is Goering & Panofsky Goebels.86 I have a sneaking fondness for

83 Bogey Harris
84 Henry Oppenheimer. The Oppenheimer drawing, later owned by Clark (see Ch 2, n. 39), has
generated much discussion. It is included in Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 3 vols,
University of Chicago Press, 1938, vol. i, pp. 364–5, and vol. ii, no. 1694 (fig. 797) where it is attributed
to ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’. See also Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and his Influence: Drawings from
Windsor Castle, National Gallery of Washington and London: Lund Humphries, 1996, p. 37, where he
attributes it to ‘Unidentified Artist after Michelangelo’. The Oppenheimer/ Clark drawing includes
a copy of the head of a young person which is taken from the recto of a drawing at Windsor Castle:
Berenson, ibid., no. 1608 (fig. 785), which Berenson attributed to Michelangelo, as did Popham
and Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV & XVI Centuries, London: Phaidon, 1949, pp. 257–8. In
their discussion of the Windsor drawing, Popham and Wilde commented that Clark thought that
the verso was possibly the work of Michelangelo’s friend Giuliano Bugiardini (1475–1554) and that
Berenson thought it was ‘done by some such as Sogliani’. Joannides, ibid., considered both the recto
and verso to be by Michelangelo. Berenson’s reference to ‘Daniel’ is probably a slip: he must mean
‘Joseph’ since in his discussion of 1608 he considered that both heads ‘recall’ that figure in the Sistine
Chapel ceiling.
85 Dachau, near Munich, was the Nazis’ first concentration camp. It was opened in March 1933 and was
publicly known about.The press release issued at the time of its opening stated that:‘All Communists
and – where necessary – Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state
security are to be concentrated here.’ The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold was a liberal, pro-
constitution group formed during the Weimar Republic (the colours of the German flag adopted in
1919 were black, red and gold).
86 Karl Frey and Erwin Panofsky
1933–1939 163

Goering as compared with Goebels.87 The only half decent biped in that jungle
is Frau Dr. Popp.88
Mary would be better if only she could believe it. I fear ‘the wish to be ill’ is
too strong in her.
Best wishes for Xmas & Happy New Year
Yours
B. B.

[Typewritten letter]
30 Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417
1st January 1935

Dear BB,
Please forgive me sending you a type written letter, but I have strained my heart
and have got to stay in bed for a few days until it is right again.
I will do all I can to get you a photo of the Oppenheimer drawing, but
another time if you want a photograph of anything in that collection a quicker
and surer way of getting it would be to write to Parker89 who is still more less
in charge. I say this to save you, not myself, trouble. As soon as I am better I will
send you a few new photographs from the Gallery. We have taken some very
beautiful details of the Piero della Francescas.90 When I left just before Christmas
I was investigating that tiresome portrait of a lady with an inscription stating
that it represents Constanza dei Medici, which you will remember used to be
called Credi and then Ghirlandaio. I see you have it in under Ghirlandaio.91 I
must say I regard it with the gravest suspicions, as although it purports to be in
a pure unvarnished tempera, it is painted in an oil technique, and what is worse
the modelling of the face is carried out in the substance which is suppose to be
dirty varnish. In short, I think it is a fake; and I find that Ruhemann,92 who as
you probably know was turned away from the Kaiser Friedrich and is now doing
some of our work for us, had come independently to the same conclusion purely

87 Joseph Goebbels was the most highly educated of the Nazi hierarchy and Hitler’s Minister of Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda. Hermann Goering was responsible for the Luftwaffe.
88 See Ch. 4, n. 13.
89 Karl Parker helped Christie’s to catalogue the Oppenheimer drawings.
90 Piero’s Baptism of Christ, 1450s (NG 665), and Nativity, 1475 (NG 908).
91 The Portrait of Constanza Caetani, c. 1480–90, now attributed as Style of Domenico Ghirlandaio (NG
2490).
92 Helmut Ruhemann
1933–1939 164

on technical grounds. It also has a very unconvincing x-ray, totally unlike that
of the Filippino which was once supposed to be painted on Australian wood.93
I will take some magnified photographs of the crackleyure [sic] for you to see.
As you do not feel able to publish the Sassettas, I shall have to do so myself
in order to save them from Langton Douglas,94 but my article will be that of a
Museum official, and will be undertaken in order that students may have good
photographs of them in their clean condition.
I think I told you that all being well I shall be going to America in the
Autumn.95 I should be grateful for any advice you can give me as to which
collections to avoid etc.
We are glad to know that Mary shows some signs of improvement, and if it is
chiefly her nerves which are at fault, I know from my own Mother that a change
may come when least expected.
With best wishes for the New Year,
Yours ever,
K.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Jan. 5, 193496

Dear Kenneth,
I am distressed that you have to stay in bed with a strained heart. I will not preach
for others abundantly must have told you what it means.
What you tell me about the portr. of Constanza de’ Medici97 excited me, & I
shall be palpitating with eagerness to know the results. It was I who attributed
it to Ghirlandajo & I confirm it never, simply never occurred to me to question
its genuineness – No, it is news to me that you mean to go to America in the

93 Probably Filippino Lippi, An Angel Adoring, c. 1495? (NG 927). It is a fragment of a larger work and
painted on wood.
94 Robert Langton Douglas would have been an obvious choice by the editors of the Burlington
Magazine for an article on Sassetta in the absence of any other candidate. Clark wrote a short article,
‘Seven Sassettas for the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine vol. 66, no. 385 (April 1935), pp. 152–5,
158, praising the paintings rather than their historical significance, and acknowledging Berenson’s
1903 article.
95 Clark had been invited by Yale University to deliver the Ryerson Lectures at the School of Fine Arts,
which he did in October and November 1936. The lectures were on Leonardo da Vinci.
96 He must mean 1935.
97 See n. 91.
1933–1939 165

autumn. Why do you ask what collections to avoid? Surely if you have the time
you should see them all. Needless to tell you that if we can do anything for you
we should be delighted.
Both Nicky & I are pretty thoroughly used up, & Karin Stephen.98 Nick & I
will go to Edith’s on the 8th to remain away about a fortnight.
Take good care of yourself.
With all our best wishes for 1935.
Yours
B.B.

20 June ’35
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417

Dear Mary,
I was deeply touched by your letter. It was so good of you to write when the
effort cost you so much & when I am such a bad letter writer. I am also most
grateful for what you say about the book.99 My friends have written kindly
about it, but none of them are in a position to judge, as you are. It was finished
three years ago, so I can view it with a certain detachment & there is a good deal
I should like to alter in it.
We were delighted with your photographs, with its evidence that you all able
to find pleasure in life in spite of all you have been through, & still endure, I am
afraid, although I hope less acutely.
The work here is still of the greatest interest, but I believe it will come to
[take] less of my energy & I shall be able to find some time for writing. We
have no very exciting new purchases in view: the Sassettas almost exhausted our
funds. My time is filled with minor improvements in arrangement, framing etc.
& in trying to prepare a good catalogue.
Jane & the family are all well.The twins are a great joy to us: it is a misfortune
for the human race that children don’t always come in twos & threes.

98 Karin Stephen
99 Clark’s Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King, at Windsor
Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, had just been published.
1933–1939 166

Please forgive me for writing a short letter.You will realise why when I tell you
that it has taken me four days & in writing it I have been interrupted 14 times.
With love from Jane,
Yours ever,
Kenneth Clark

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
June 26, 1935

Dear Jane and Kenneth

Thanks for thinking of me on this day.100 It makes me happy that you have, and
helps to reconcile me to the fact that no matter how un-grown-up I feel within
I now count with the ancients. As a matter of fact, excepting A. Venturi101 I seem
to be the oldest in our job.
Mary leaves for Vienna in a week, and Nicky and I for Consuma. I think of
you both very often and wish I saw you as often
Ever affectionately
B.B.

Poggio Allo Spino

Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 14, 1935

Dear Kenneth
My congratulations on the review of yr. Leonardo in the last Lit. Sup.
Who wrote it? Certainly not Fils. Mutton-Chop.102 It is rather intelligent and
mature, as if the writer had pursued an incredibly new method. He seems to have
thought first, and thought a good deal, and then written.

100 Berenson’s 70th birthday.

101 Adolfo Venturi
102 Clark’s catalogue of the Leonardo Windsor drawings (see n. 99) was reviewed, as the leading article,
in the Times Literary Supplement on Thursday 11 July 1935. The article was anonymous but was, in
fact, written by Alan Clutton-Brock (‘Mutton Chop’).
1933–1939 167

Why do you not send me yr. Hertz103 lecture.

When I wrote in answer to yr. telegram of good wishes on my birthday, I
had not yet seen or even heard of the letter to the Times.104 Now I thank you
for having signed it, and for all I know for having written it and collected the
signatures. It has touched me deeply.
Mary is in Vienna Cottage Senatorium, Starnwartengasse 74 Wien xviii. She
is undergoing rather distressing and even alarming examinations
As for me, if God is good, He will allow me to stay here till end of Sept.
You probably are with Edith today. What of yr. summer?
Affectionately
B.B.

National Gallery
16 July ’35

My dear BB,
On the table in front of me is a letter to you begun exactly a month ago, &
timed to arrive on your birthday. Between then & now lie heaven knows how
many interruptions & annoyances & rather than finish it I am beginning a new
one. I am truly sorry that it didn’t reach you at the right time, because I should
have liked my congratulations to reach you with this first. Though I’m afraid I
have done some things which are unworthy of your teaching, I still remain your
pupil, & never forget how much I owe you. Indeed I realise it more than ever
now that I know the apathy & pedantry of most of my countryman in all that
concerns our shop. Their interest in art scholarship is still confined to pedigrees
& pentimenti, & I have the greatest difficulty in persuading the senior assistants

103 The British Academy hosts an annual lecture, ‘Aspects of Art’, established by the Henriette
Hertz Trust in 1916. The lecture is ‘on some problem or aspect of the relation of Art in any of its
manifestations to human culture; Art including Poetry and Music as well as Sculpture and Painting’.
Clark gave the lecture in 1935: ‘On the Painting of English Landscape’.
104 On 26 June 1935 there appeared a letter in The Times as follows: ‘Sir – Bernhard Berenson is 70 on
June 26. And it is just over 40 years since there appeared the first of those four closely packed essays
on the Venetian, Florentine, Central and North Italian painters which were a new revelation to
those of us who were beginning to study and to enjoy the art of the Renaissance; slim predecessors
of the two massive volumes on the Drawings of the Florentine Painters of which we are now
promised a revised edition. We ask the hospitality of your columns to express on behalf of his
English admirers our indebtedness, our gratitude, and our homage. We have the honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient servants, C. F. Bell, Laurence Binyon, Kenneth Clark, W. G. Constable, Herbert
Cook, Campbell Dodgson, George Hill, A. M. Hind, C. J. Holmes, D. S. MacColl, Eric Maclagan,
Eugenie Strong, Robert Witt. June 25.
1933–1939 168

here that critical notes will be necessary in a new edition of our catalogue. All
of which shows that if I hadn’t been well grounded at i Tatti I might now have
been stuck in the morass of country house archaeology which takes the place of
criticism & connoisseurship here.
Then I have never thanked you properly for your letter about my Leonardo
Catalogue. I wish I could have made it into a festschrift & presented it to you
on your birthday with a suitable dedication; but I was told that the dedication
of a Royal Book to a private person was against the rules, and I had to leave it
out altogether. There is one awful mistake in the book – they have reproduced
the wrong drawing. This is what Holmes refers to in his (asinine) Burlington
review105 – only as he had not read my description of the drawing he thinks
that I have mistaken a Luinesque head for a Pollajuolo profile. The mistake is so
gross that I shall have to issue an erratum slip.There are a few other minor errors
which can also go on the slip. My H. Hertz lecture was a most annoying business.
I was asked to do it a year ahead & protested that English landscape was not
my subject; however I was told that they wanted a non-specialist lecture. I then
found that all their lectures were strictly by specialists, & that I had been asked
to write about landscape because they thought that anyone who knew about
Art would know about it all. It cost me great pains to write, & inevitably it is no
more than a literary exercise – chiefly in the art of evasion. However I will send
you a copy as soon as it is printed.
We go away for a country holiday on the 19th. We have taken a house – or
rather a cottage, – on the north coast of Norfolk. It is lovely country & will be a
rest in some ways. But three children & two grandmothers, which are included
in the troupe, will make it a rather stiff dose of family life. I am going to try
& write six lectures, making a short book, on Leonardo:106 which lectures I
promised to give in your country this autumn, but have had to put it off till next.
I suppose I shall have to write the book, & then make up the lectures from it, as
printed lectures are always a failure. I have only given one lecture (the Hertz) this
year, as they are a great waste of energy. By the bye, I don’t know who wrote the
Lit. Sup. leader on Leonardo, but I think it must have been Clutton Brock. He is
a perfect ass in the flesh (also grubby and querulous) but rather good on paper.
I do hope that Mary enjoys Vienna & returns the better of it; and that you
recuperate all your forces at the Consuma.
Love to you & Nicky from us both, yours ever,
K.

105 Charles Holmes’s review appeared in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 67, no. 388 (July 1935), pp. 45–7.
106 See n. 95.
1933–1939 169

It strikes me that you may like to know how I found Edith, so I am enclosing
a copy of the letter I wrote to her niece Mrs Ferrand107 and, as I can’t add
much to it. She is better than I had expected.
K.

Poggio Allo Spino

Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 27, 1935

My dear Kenneth
It did me good to read yr. long letter, in wh. you say such nice things about
our relations to one another. Of course it would have delighted me if you had
dedicated yr. Leonardo to me, but it pleased me greatly that you thought of
doing it, and would have had it been in yr. power.
Speaking of this book Nicky has already checked every item with my catalogue,
and read yr. preface. She gave me some interesting and even entertaining tidbits.
I wish I could get out my Flor. Drawings as you have yr. book. I wish I could
reproduce every drawing catalogued. I wish even that I could reproduce the
finished works for wh. they were intended. Then and then only would my Flor.
Draw. teach the student.
As it is the publication may have to appear with no illustrations. In that case
it will remain a dead letter except for those who have access to a library as well
stocked at least as the Tattiana. And even those happy students will have to lose
much time looking up the illustrations in books.
Happily my share in the work is progressing. This time I can venture to hope
that the manuscript will be ready before the end of the year. How glad I shall be
to have it off my shoulders – how glad to turn to studies that in the course of the
last 25 years have been growing more and more attractive!
All this if I am not interrupted, and the interruption may come, for Mary’s
health is pre-occupying me more and more. She is at Vienna and has been put
thro’ an examination by the best that Vienna can offer. They declare that she
suffers fr. a wide spread tubercular condition. I fear that means there is no chance

107 Beatrix May Jones (1872–1959), who in 1924 married Max Ferrand (a professor of history at
Yale), was the daughter of Edith Wharton’s brother Freddy. She had established herself as a notable
international landscape gardener – e.g. a commission from Mrs Woodrow Wilson for a new garden
at the White House, gardens at Yale and Dumbarton Oaks, gardens at Glyndebourne and Dartington
in England.
1933–1939 170

of recovery, that at best she will linger on in her present state with less suffering
it is to be hoped.
If she gets no worse and has her own kith and kin to entertain her, the great-
grandson particularly, I shall remain here till the end of Sept.
It is all but perfect for my wants. It feels not Alpine but like good homely
country in the summer.The temperature stays almost unchanging at ab’t ’70.The
walks are endless. No neighbours. And the Tattiana not an hour away.
Nicky leaves me today for Sorrento108 but Morra is here and will be with me
till she returns.
What you say of Edith sounds alarming. You can’t imagine what it means
to hear the main beams of one’s life cracking and threatening to break and
disappear in the flood.
I should like to see the Chinese show109 and if my mss is ready, and Mary well
enough, I may come to London in Dec. or Jan. In that case I should like to find
an unluxurious un-Ritzonian but a comfy warm house or lodgings for a month.
Write when you have the leisure and inclination.
With love to you both
B.B.

Poggio Allo Spino

Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 30. 1935

My dear Kenneth
The batch of details is a most welcome surprise. How interesting and delightful!
Everyone of them tells me something new about the picture fr. which it is taken,
and some show what the smaller photo does not, nor the picture as a whole in
the original.
A good example is the detail of the Virgin’s head in the Madonna (no. 565)
by the Citta di Castello Master.110 It takes on a most lovely Russo-Byzantine
tenderness of feeling, that I never perceived in the original painting as a whole.
So bless you for these details, and remember that I can never have enough.

108 See n. 12 above.

109 The International Exhibiton of Chinese Art, organised by the Royal Academy, was held at Burlington
House in 1935–6.
110 See n. 75 above. Some experts had identified the work as by the Master of Città di Castello but the
now accepted view is that it is by Master of the Albertini, an artist whose style is transitional between
Duccio and the Master of Città di Castello.
1933–1939 171

I am alone here with Morra. We work separately and meet for walks and
meals. In the evening he reads aloud Moravia’s last.111 Nicky is at Sorrento. From
Mary the news has been better the last two days.
I hope you are already in Norfolk, and that it is as delicious there as here.
Affectionately
B.B.

[In pencil at top ‘1933/34?’. but must be 1935: see Clark’s letter of 16 July 1935]
Brancaster,
King’s Lynn.
Telgrams, Brancaster
Station, Hunstanton
Parcels, Burnham-Market

Dear BB,
I am so glad that the photos were a success. It comes over me that I never told
you I was sending them – they were intended as a birthday present. That is why
the details of the Virgin & Child by the Citta di Castello master give such a new
idea of the picture in that it has just been cleaned. As you will see it is beautifully
preserved. Did I tell you that we are cleaning the big Foppa Adoration?112 It is
coming out marvellously & will really be a great picture. Some of the heads are
almost certainly over painted, & the whole thing was flattened out by layers of
toned varnish. I have taken photos of every detail & will send you them all when
it is finished.
We have had a heavenly time here – only instead of one peaceful companion,
there are three screaming children.The weather has been perfect, & it is the kind
of country I like. I have worked hard at a difficult job, an introduction to Roger
Fry’s unpublished Slade lectures, & have just managed to complete it.113
I am interested to hear that Moravia’s book is out at last, & wonder what it
is like – you said nothing about it. Europe becomes more idiotic every day, &
the English climate has improved so much that I think you ought to come here
often. I imagine that the Chinese exhibition will be well worth seeing. There is

111 Alberto Moravia’s Le Ambizioni sbagliate was published in 1935.

112 Vincenzo Foppa, Adoration of the Kings, c. 1450? (NG 729).
113 In 1933 Fry was offered the post of Slade Professor at Cambridge and began a series of lectures on
the nature of art history.They were never completed.The text for the lectures was published in 1939,
after his death, as Last Lectures by Roger Fry – Slade Professor of Fine Arts in the University of Cambridge,
1933–1934. Fry died on 9 September 1934 following a fall at his London home. His ashes were placed
in the vault of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, in a casket decorated by Vanessa Bell.
1933–1939 172

no hope of our going to Florence this year so these inducements offer our only
chance of seeing you.We are going to Holland the end of this month,114 but after
that will be in London all through the autumn.
Ever yours affectionately,
K.

Poggio Allo Spino

Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
Aug. 18, 1935

Dear Kenneth
Nicky has returned fr. Sorrento.The Braccis are here and Johnnie115 and Trevy,116
so yr. name is frequently called in the course of conversation. It is most beautiful
here, and crisp, and radiant. I could stay here half the year at least, as one is so
much more integrated in one’s self, and secured fr. intrusion.
I have asked the bookseller to send you Moravia’s ‘Ambizioni Sbagliati’. It is a
remarkably able bit of craftsmanship but horrible as the minor Elizabethans are
horrible.
It is good news that you are cleaning the Fra Filippo Epiphany.117 And I look
forward to enjoying the photos you promise.
I want to come to England to see the Chinese Exhib (altho’ I don’t expect
much from it). But apart from fear of the cold and the damp, my movements will
depend on Mary’s. I fear she may have to stay on for a long time in Vienna. In
that case I should have to go there periodically, and I should be taking in all the
cold and fatigue I could stand.
Affectionate greetings to you both
Yours
B.B.

114 The Clarks went to Holland, Russia and Germany in August and September.
115 John Walker
116 Robert Trevelyan
117 The picture that was being cleaned is Foppa’s Adoration; see n. 112 above.
1933–1939 173

[Typewritten letter]
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417
3rd September 1935

My dear BB,
You once said that you did not mind a typewritten letter and as, for many
reasons, I am rather hard pressed at the moment I hope you will excuse this
one. One reason is that last week I had to let my dentist remove an impacted
wisdom tooth which was giving me a good deal of pain and poison. It was a
painful business and left me rather low for a few days. Another reason is that the
day after tomorrow we are off to Russia. I have always wanted to see what is left
of the Hermitage Collection and by going now I shall also see all the Iranian
treasures. A good many friends are going on the same boat in order to attend the
Persian Conference118 and I believe we are being treated to special ballets and
opera. Apparently there is a considerable probability of our getting catastrophic
stomach aches, but it is worth risking.We shall be there till the 18th, and then fly
home via Berlin, where, as a lover of art with a big nose, I am certain to be taken
for a Jew and beaten with rubber truncheons.
The chief purpose of this letter is to thank you for sending me Moravia’s
book, which certainly looks a tough mouthful, only to be undertaken in the
best of health and spirits. It was very kind of you to order it for me as Italian
books are not easily found over here. I have been reading with immense interest
your article on Andrea.119 What an appallingly difficult problem Michelangelo’s
drawings present not even equalled I suppose by late Raphael which is at any rate
a more restricted [sic]. Incidentally is it true that Steinmann120 died some time
ago? I heard it implied by someone I was talking to recently, but this country is

118 In September 1935 the Third International Congress of Persian Art and Archaeology was held
in Leningrad and Moscow. The concurrent exhibition consisted of 25,000 items displayed in 84
galleries in the Hermitage.
119 Berenson had published ‘Andrea di Michelangiolo e Antonio Mini’, L’Arte, July 1935. Andrea di
Michelangelo was invented by Berenson as the purported author of a number of drawings which
he thought were by the same hand but not that of Michelangelo himself. Antonio Mini, however,
did exist. Berenson’s theoretical speculation was doubted by some at the time and has subsequently
been convincingly shown to be completely misconceived. His article and his methodology were
reviewed by Carmen Bambach, ‘Berenson’s Michelangelo, part 1’, Apollo Magazine, 171, no. 574 (1
March 2010), pp. 100–07, and ‘Berenson’s Michelangelo, part 2’, no. 575 (1 April 2010), pp. 48–53 (see
also Ch. 2 n. 39).
120 See Ch. 2 n. 64.
1933–1939 174

so provincial where our shop is concerned that such an event might take place
without one’s ever hearing of it.
Love from Jane,
Yours ever
KC.

[Postcard from Clark to Berenson postmarked Berlin 22.9.35. It is a black and white
card showing a ‘Carpaccio/ Grablegung Christi (Ausschnitt)/ Gemäldegalerie Nr
23A/ Photographiekarten der staatlichen museen zu berlin’]
Esplanade. 21 Sept. 35

Just arrived from Russia after a marvellous fortnight. The Hermitage is

inexhaustible, & though it has lost a few masterpieces, it has gained a great many
interesting & beautiful things.You would find the gold treasure fascinating & very
imperfectly published.The whole gallery is very well organised – a great contrast
to the kfm121 which has lost whatever charm it had in the new arrangement.
Yours ever,
K.
Love from Jane. [in pencil]

Poggio Allo Spino

Consuma
(Prov. di Firenze)
(Written from Settignano)
Sept. 25, 1935

Dear Kenneth
Thanks for yr. p.c. fr. Berlin. I am impressed by yr. account of the Hermitage,
and it makes me think seriously of ways and means of getting there myself.
I should have to be assured that I could see what I wanted to see, and that

121 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, now called the Bode Museum. When it opened in 1904, painting and
sculpture were presented together equally, which was considered a radical innovation.
1933–1939 175

no Whittemore122 or Upham Pope123 stood in the way, as the former did in

Constantinople. I should not go for the pictures but for what has been found on
‘Russian’ soil. Next summer ??????
I hear that Berlin has sold its Crivelli St. Catherina. Do you know to whom?
And who has got the Hermitage Titians that were exhibited in Venice.124 It was
officially announced here that they left the other day for London.
Mary writes more hopefully and expects to be back in a fortnight. So Nick
and I will spend this time wandering but chiefly in Venice.
I envy all that lies before you, dear Kenneth. It would be wonderful if one
could look forward as you can to forty or even fifty years of activity, instead of
ten.
With love to you both
Cordially B.B.

Tetworth, Ascot
Ascot 677.
30 Jan. ’35125

My dear BB.,
We have for long been buoyed up with the hopes of seeing you here, but I am
beginning to doubt if you will face the horrors of an English winter in order to
enjoy the Chinese Exhibition. To tell the truth the winter has been unusually
horrible & the Exhibition is not very enjoyable.There is a good show of bronzes,
but less easy to see than the one at the Orangerie last year, & there are good
ceramics, well shown. But the painting is very disappointing, as neither the best
American nor the Japanese collectors have lent. I find it very hard to be sure of
my feelings (or lack of feelings) when going round the exhibition. No doubt
Chinese art is particularly ill suited to that kind of display, & if I could look at
some of the pictures at leisure I should enjoy them far more.

122 In 1928 the Berensons and Nicky Mariano had travelled to Constantinople and the Near East. On
the trip Berenson became convinced that they were being denied access to certain monuments and
antiquities in Turkey because Thomas Whittemore had instructed the Superintendent of Fine Arts
in Constantinople to hinder them.
123 Arthur Upham Pope
124 The largest show of paintings by Titian to date was held in Venice in autumn 1935. Berenson spent
three week in the Veneto, getting there by way of Urbino, accompanied by Umberto Morra and
John Walker, arriving in Venice on 10 October.
125 He must mean 30 December 1935: see Berenson’s reply of 3 January 1936.
1933–1939 176

I was waiting to see you in order to give you details about Russia.You must go
there. The journey is long but not uncomfortable, & once arrived the hotels are
perfectly bearable. I suppose they are about the same as the best hotel in Turin –
or, say, less friendly than the Cavour, but almost as comfortable.The food is better
than an English hotel.You might find the odd hours of the meals rather upsetting.
As you probably know any insect is immediately put down by the gpu126 (or its
equivalent) & we certainly never saw one. One has a private bathroom, quite
clean with plenty of hot water & towels. Leningrad is marvellously beautiful &
when we were there an ideal climate. The hotel (Astoria) is about 12 minutes
walk from the Hermitage so one can go there every day without a guide. I think
you will have to allow about 10 days for Leningrad. The Italian pictures in the
Hermitage won’t take very long, but the gold treasure, Coptic objects, Greek
vases etc. not to mention paintings of other schools make it inexhaustible –
almost like the Louvre. Then you will have to see all the surrounding palaces
which are about 15 or 20 miles from Leningrad: they make good afternoon
expeditions, & you can get very good cars from Intourist. Moscow is really a
horrible place with no glimmer of its former romance. I found the Kremlin
disappointing as the old buildings are dwarfed by two enormous 19th-century
blocks of offices like hydropathies. Most of the 16th century Russian architecture
we saw was poor stuff but there are said to be very fine ‘mediaeval’ monasteries
about 20 miles from Moscow so one sh’d leave time for expeditions there, too.
I suppose a week would do. When we go to Russia again (as we hope to do in
1937) I shall try to come home via Kiev, which must be enchanting. One can get
to Nijni Novgorod127 from Leningrad, but it is too long a journey for a day & the
hotel is dubious. The frescos are said to be interesting, but if the famous Ikons in
the Tretiakov are any guide, they will be disappointing. Russian painting is a real
spoof. The only good Ikons were obviously made in the Balkans (Our Lady of
Vladimir is a really beautiful ruin & must have been made in Constantinople128).

126 The Soviet Secret Police’s intelligence service.

127 Nizhny Novgorod is the fifth largest city in Russia, known from 1932 to 1990 as Gorky after Maxim
Gorky,who was born there. It boasts a good art gallery with many Russian and some Western
European works. The 11th-century Cathedral of St Sophia has good early frescoes.
128 Our Lady of Vladimir is one of the most venerated of Russian icons. It depicts the Christ Child
snuggling up to his mother’s cheek. Created in the early 12th century in Constantinople, it was
a gift to Grand Duke Yury Dolgoruky of Kiev. In 1395, during Tamerlane’s invasion, it was taken
to Moscow and was eventually placed in the Cathedral in the Kremlin. Regarded as the holy
protectress of Russia, it is credited with saving Russia on numerous occasions. It is alleged that in
1941, as the Germans approached Moscow, Stalin ordered that the icon be placed in an aeroplane and
flown round the besieged capital: several days later, the German army started to retreat. Currently,
the icon is installed in a church in the grounds of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
1933–1939 177

Apart from ‘those sites’ there is a good deal of shop. They have discovered
some very interesting early Italian pictures which were being used as Ikons. And
then there are some important unpublished drawings. People in the museums are
charming & helpful, but it seems impossible to have any communications with
them – at least I have not had an answer to any of the letters I have written, but
then, as you can imagine, I haven’t written very many.
There: I have written enough to encourage you to go, but before you actually
set out I could give you a good many tips on points of practical detail.
Since our return our life has been rather blighted by Jane having a succession
of attacks of ’flu. I have seemed immune till yesterday when I suddenly
succumbed to a roaring cold. However it has given me the leisure to write this
letter. The Gallery still aborts all my time. We have purchased two romantic
landscapes – a really glorious Constable129 & a magnificent Rubens.130 They are
both masterpieces & I am proud to have landed them – it took some doing. Of
course only a fraction of my work at the Gallery is concerned with purchases,
but a good deal of time is taken up with arrangements & decoration, & one of
the many reasons why I should like you to come to England is to have the fun
of showing you what I’ve done. Of course there have been one or two failures,
but on the whole I think the place looks much better. My trustees have been
most helpful & encouraging – did you notice that Balniel is now one of them.
After all the troubles of my predecessors it is marvellous to have a board made
up of real friends.
I am afraid that this letter is all about myself, but it seemed as if your troubles
wouldn’t be a suitable subject for a letter from England.We often think of you &
sympathise. Why not come to England in the summer?
With best love from us both,
Yours ever,
K.

129 John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, c. 1828–9, now in Tate Britain. It is a full-size oil sketch for the
painting now in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art.
130 Peter Paul Rubens, Peasants with Cattle by a Stream in a Woody Landscape (The Watering Place), c.
1615–22 (NG 4815).
1933–1939 178

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Jan. 3. 1936

My dear Kenneth
Yr. long and interesting letter was worth waiting for, and I am most grateful.
Only I wish the leisure for composing had not been procured by a bad cold.
All you say about Russia is exciting, and I wish I could take yr. advice and go
there soon. I should have to stay much longer. In the first place I take in things
more and more slowly, and then I get tired so easily.
All you say abt Russian art confirms what I know fr. reproductions and what
they have told me. It is scarcely for that I should go to Leningrad or Moscow.
What does attract me is the stuff fr. pre-historic and Sarmatae131 and down thro’
the period of Migrations, that has been dug up in its ample borders. To see what
I already know to exist in the Hermitage alone would take me a month, at least.
I should like to have a glimpse of the Kremlin, and strike out as far north as
Wladimir132 and as far south as Kiev. Pskoff and Novgorod133 one might do fr.
Esthonia or Leningrad.
But I am not getting ygr. And if I don’t get there very soon, I may never get
there.
I am afraid I shall not get to London this winter. As the time approaches I
find I cannot face the idea of the cold, the damp, the mirk. And yr. impression
of the Chinese show confirms what I hear fr. others. After all Chinese art is not
‘news’ to me.
So I shall peg away at the revision of my Flor. Drawings. I am getting on and
may have done before March. I am just approaching Leonardo and look forward
to reading what you have to say ab’t him in connection with the Windsor Coll.
The chapters after Leonardo are ready for print.
I should greatly enjoy seeing what you have done at the N.G. and perhaps I
shall next summer.
Mary is fragile and invalidish I plunge fr. cold to cold. Ma si campa.134

131 In classical antiquity, the Sarmatians (composed of several tribes of Indo-Eurasian origin) were
settled in a territory known as Sarmatia, corresponding in modern times to Ukraine and southern
Russia. Following the ‘barbarian invasions’ (also known as the Migration Period) beginning in the
4th century ad, the Sarmatae were gradually dispersed and absorbed by the various tribes of Goths,
Vandals and Huns. The archaeological evidence found in graves containing armed females suggests
that the Sarmatian culture gave rise to the myth of the Amazons.
132 One of the medieval capitals of Russia, 120 miles east of Moscow.
133 Pskov and Novgorod are on the Estonian–Russian border, south of St Petersburg.
134 Italian for ‘One gets by’.
1933–1939 179

In Dec. I did not receive the Ill. Lond. News,The Times,The New Statesman,
nor even the Burlington. The Jan. Burl. has just arrived, and The Times is coming
again but not the others.
With love to you both
Ever yrs.
B.B.

[Typewritten letter]
National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
25th March, 1936.

Bernhard Berenson, Esq,

I Tatti,
Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB,
I am sending you a few details of photographs which we have taken lately: if I
have sent any of them before, perhaps you might let me have them back. Those
of the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’135 are full-size, and I think they will interest you as
showing the technical methods employed and the unequal workmanship. I am
sure you will enjoy the details of the Ansidei,136 if you have not already seen
them.
I wonder if you have ever seen a photograph of the grisaille drawing on the
back of the long early Botticelli ‘Adoration of the Magi’, number 592?137 If
not, you ought to have it before you send in the final proofs of the Florentine
Drawings.
You will see in the papers that we have been spending a lot of money here,
but none of it on Italian painting. I am very pleased with our purchases, which
were only achieved after great struggles.138

135 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491/2–9 (NG 1093).

136 Raphael, Madonna and Child with the Baptist and St Nicholas of Bari (Ansidei Madonna altarpiece), 1505
(NG 1171).
137 Rough drawings on the reverse of the wood panel are thought to be among Botticelli’s earliest
works.
138 After the purchase of the Sasettas in 1934, the National Gallery acquired Bernardo Cavallino, Christ
driving the Traders from the Temple, c. 1645–50 (NG 4778); Paolo da San Leocadio, The Virgin and Child
with Saints, c. 1495 (NG 4786); Caspar Netscher, Portrait of a Lady, 1683 (NG 4790); Rubens, The
Watering Place (NG 4815; see n. 130); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856 (NG
4821); Joachim Patenir (attrib.), St Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, probably 1515–24 (NG 4826), now
catalogued as Workshop of Patenir.
1933–1939 180

We were glad to hear from Edith that you had a relatively peaceful holiday at
Hyères. We are going down there for a few days at Easter, and are then going to
Vienna.We are both suffering acute nostalgia for Italy, and Florence in particular;
but I do not like to go there until opinion is rather more stable.
Yours ever,
K.
Our love to Mary and Nicky

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 30, 1936

Dear Kenneth
Yours of the 25th has only just reached me. Without waiting for the photos
that you are sending to arrive, for which my thanks, I hasten to ask you for the
photo. that I have never seen of the ‘Grisaille drawing on the back of Botticelli
Adoration of the Magi, number 592’. If I received it at once there would be just
time to get it in.
I wish you and Jane were coming here.We meet so seldom that there is danger
of losing touch. And the political situation need not prevent you. ‘They’ are only
too eager to have tourists, and I believe English in particular. They have already
established a ‘tourist Lira’, and tourist benzina costs almost nothing. None of the
people you are likely to see but would receive you with open arms.
Ever yrs.
B.B.
1933–1939 181

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 31, 1936

Dear Kenneth
The photos came sooner than I expected. Ever so many thanks. As I have none
of them I shall greedily keep all.
How much more Leonardo the details of the Virgin of the Rocks – excepting
the Virgin herself!
Let me congratulate you on the Ingres you have just purchased. How redolent
of Raphael but so absorbed that the Times critic does not observe it altho’ so
manifest.
Far be it for me to think of advising yr. trustees. In their place however I
should get more and more and more French painting fr. David to Cezanne.139
I shall probably go Apr 8 for a fortnight or more to Roma – Hotel de la Ville,
Via Sistina.
Yours
B.B.

[undated]
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417

Dear Mary,
Thank you so much for sending us your book.140 I have read it & enjoyed it
very much.Your convalescent reverie turns out to be an ideal way of recounting
travels, making them vivid and personal. Thank you, too, for your letter about
Lockov. I have long thought of getting him to copy the missing Sasetta, but
the Trustees are not much in favour of it. A copy in a gallery of originals is
always rather disconcerting & the public might have reason to ask ‘Why pay
£7000 apiece for the originals when the copy is almost indistinguishable?’ It’s an
awkward question. I will put it to my Board.

139 In 1937 the Gallery purchased Edgar Degas, Combing the Hair, c. 1896 (NG 4865).
140 Mary Berenson, Across the Mediterranean, Prato: Tipografia Giachetti, Figlio e C, 1935.
1933–1939 182

We have heard that you are feeling rather stronger & how much consoled by
the great-grandchild141 – which must indeed be a most consoling phenomenon.
I hope I live to see mine.
It is abominable how difficult it is for us to meet nowadays. I am longing to
show BB. round the Gallery, but he is right not to attempt an English winter. I
wish you could all come in the summer. I believe it has been possible to improve
the arrangements of the Gallery a good deal, & I have even managed to add to
it – a magnificent Rubens landscape & a gorgeous ferocious Ingres lady like a
sacred goddess decked out by the peasantry.142 You will see them both enlivening
the insupportably gloomy pages of the Burlington.143
Jane & the family are well, & J. sends you & Nicky & BB. her love.
Yours ever,
Kenneth Clark.

[Typewritten letter]
National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
12th May, 1936.

Bernard Berenson, Esq,

I Tatti,
Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB,
The drawing on the back of the early Botticelli144 appears to be in black chalk,
done straight onto the wood, without any priming or preparation. The figure
is 33 c.m. high. The head is full face, but only roughly indicated. As far as I can
see, the right-hand was originally raised and the thing hanging down at the
figure’s right side is part of the sleeve; the left hand is of course, resting on a
shield. There are several other scribbles on the back of the panel, and too vague
to be worth recording, except that one is a caricature of the rather infantile type
which Giovanni Bellini was drawing on the back of his pictures at about the
same period.

141 Mary’s great-grandson, Roger Halpern, Barbara Halpern’s son, born in March 1935, spent his first
three winters in Florence with Mary and brought her much consolation.
142 See n. 138.
143 Martin Davies wrote on Ingres in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 68, no. 399 (June 1936), pp. 256–8,
260–63, 266–8.
144 See n. 137.
1933–1939 183

We are delighted to know that you really expect to come to London in

September.We shall be here for the whole of that month, as we are probably not
sailing for America till about the 10th of October.145 I shall be in the throes of
re-writing our catalogue, so that your presence will be most valuable.
We had a very pleasant time in Vienna and saw a lot of your friend Wilde,146
whom I found much the most interesting person in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum.
Yours ever,
K.
PS. I see that Pudelko in a recent article in the Burlington refers to a picture
in your collection, representing the Flagellation, as being part of the same
series as our small Castagno ‘Crucifixion’.147 I am ashamed to say that I cannot
remember anything at I Tatti which by the remotest stretch of the critical
fancy could be called a Castagno ‘Flagellation’. If it exists, I wonder if Nicky
could send us a photograph, as we need to reference for our catalogue?

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
May 15, 1936

Dear Kenneth
Thanks for the information about the drawing on the back of the early Botticelli.
I am sending you the photo. of the only Flagellation at I Tatti. It is as I have
thought for 30 years and still think, by Francesco Botticini.
Truly German-Jews do make a Nazi of me.
I do not understand by the way how it failed to get into my Lists – except
on the eternal principle that tailors go ragged, and shoemakers out at the heel.

145 See n. 95.

146 Johannes Wilde
147 The National Gallery picture is ascribed to Andrea del Castagno, The Crucifixion (predella from
an altarpiece; NG 1138). See also Georg Pudelko, ‘Two Portraits ascribed to Andrea Castagno’,
Burlington Magazine, vol. 68, no. 398 (May 1936), pp. 235–7, 239–40, 242.
1933–1939 184

I am glad you like Wilde. He is the only decent human there excepting
Planiscig.148 As for the others Bald-ass149 and that ineffable humbug of a
Buschbeck!150
Ever yrs
B.B.

N.A.S.M.
Holland-America Line
R.M.S. Statardam
15 Oct. ’36

My dear BB,
I must write at once, before I am involved in the hospitalities of your country
to say how truly grateful I am for all your letters of introduction. I am appalled
at all the trouble we have given you – also shocked to remember the rather
perfunctory gratitude with which we first received them never guessing how full
& numerous they were. Each one is to a person whom we really want to meet,
& are especially glad to meet through you.
Now that your London visit is over151 I seem to have seen far too little of you.
I wish you had been able to come to the house when fewer people were there –
but there were so many who wanted to meet you. I also much regret that I was
never able to be in the Gallery on a Sunday morning, but Jane would never have
let me abandon the children so soon before going to America.
I had no time before going to make a full selection of x rays for you: I will
do it when we return & at the same time look for any details you haven’t had,
though I think that most of our recent details have been of non-Italians.
We left England in a collapsed state aggravated by a cold in the head; but I
like the sea, & feel perfectly fit by now. Jane likes it a good deal less, & for two
days, I must say it was rather disagreeable. There is really nothing to be said for
this boat, except that we have a sitting room. The Dutch whether passengers or
stewards are ugly & ill mannered. I prefer Dagoes.The food is no better than any
other boat, & of course if it is rough she rolls far more than a boat twice her size.

148 Leo Planiscig

149 Ludwig von Baldass
150 Ernst Buschbeck
151 The Berensons and Nicky Mariano visited London in September–October.
1933–1939 185

Jane hopes that the sea oxygen helped your Channel crossing. I think it saved
her life yesterday. Please give our best love to Edith. We both look forward to
seeing you all in the spring, & saying part of what we forgot to say in England.
Love to Mary & Nicky
Yours, affy
Kenneth.

Oct. 29, 1936

Hotel Plaza-Athenee
23-27 Avenue Montaigne
Paris

My dear Kenneth
I am delighted to hear fr. you and pleased to learn that yr. voyage out has on the
whole gone very well. I hope you will find moments to write again and again
if only p.c.s.
Mary passed thro’ yesterday on the way to I Tatti where we shall join her
Nov 15th. Edith will in every probability come along with us. She by the way
is fairly well, as agile as ever. An alarming symptom is that she has taken to
misunderstanding and misinterpreting à la Logan.
I spend the hours of light at the Louvre wh. is more than ever inexhaustible
now that it is getting more and more accessible. Only the Italian pictures, thanks
to dear, dying Jamot152 I find more absurdly hung and labelled than ever. I also
have been frequenting the Cabinet des Medailles and extracted every object of
interest – and nearly every one is – and turned it over and over and examined it
with a glass. It is a marvellous collection in quality as fine as Mme. de Behague’s153
and of course there is much more of it. And I shall plow away till Nov. 14,
enjoying every minute.

152 Paul Jamot

153 Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague
1933–1939 186

I see my very small crowd, but them constantly. Edith, Philomene,154 Norton,155
Salles,156 Huyghe,157 the Chambruns,158 Marthe Ruspoli,159 the Noailles,160 the
Du Boses,161 etc.
You both were angelic to us in London, and I wish with all my heart we could
meet oftener. Best love to both of you.
Yours
B.B.

[Typewritten letter]
National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
22nd of July, 1937.

Bernhard Berenson, Esq,

i Tatti,
Settignano,
Firenze.

My dear BB,
I am writing to tell you that the Gallery has recently bought some pictures
which I think will interest you if they are not known to you already. They are
four small Giorgionesque pictures painted on two panels which were evidently
part of the case of a musical instrument. The subject is taken from the second
eclogue of the Ferrarese Court poet, Thebaldeo. This poem was written about
1495, and to judge from their style the panels also be from the last years of the
15th century. Personally, I think these little pictures are of supreme beauty, the
purest expression of humanist or pantheist poetry I have ever seen in painting,
and I find it difficult to resist the belief that they are by the painter of the
Tempesta in an earlier phase. In composition, types and feeling generally they are
extraordinarily like the lost Birth of Paris as we know it from the Teniers copy.

154 Philomène de la Forest Divonne

155 Robert Norton
156 Georges Salles
157 René Huyghe
158 Jacques de Chambrun
159 Marthe Ruspoli was a cousin of Jacques de Chambrun.
160 Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles
161 Charles du Bos
1933–1939 187

In fact part of their interest is that they allow one to reconstruct this picture in
the language of Giorgione rather than Teniers. Of course they are not in the
least like Martin Conway’s pictures162 or any of the other small absurdities which
have been attributed to Giorgione lately. Nor are they like the four little pictures
in Padua,163 being quite obviously of an earlier and still strongly Bellinesque
tradition.
I am having a good photograph made and will send to you as soon as possible.
I wanted to write at once in case you should have heard rumours about the
acquisition from friends. Whether or not you think the pictures could be by
Giorgione, I am sure you will like them and feel, as I do, they are the quintessence
of the Giorgionesque spirit.
I saw Edith about a month ago. She was terribly weak, but able to enjoy a very
short conversation, and for a few minutes spoke with quite her old spirit. Since
then I heard from Mrs. Tyler164 that there was a steady improvement, but John
Hugh Smith165 gives a very different report. He seems to think there is very little
hope of her making a real recovery.We are going over to Paris on Monday to see
her again and I will let you know my impressions. It is bad luck that we shall be
in Florence at a time when apparently there is no chance of your being there, but
the beginning of October is the only time we shall have free.
I hear that Benedict Nicolson166 is coming to work at the Tatti. He is very
quiet and at first you may find it difficult to form any estimate of him. But I
think he is a real lover of painting and a patient student; and that you will like
having him there.
With love from us both to you all,
Yours ever,
K.

162 Martin Conway had published a short article, ‘Giorgione’s Birth of Paris’, Burlington Magazine, vol.
51, no. 296 (November 1927), pp. 204, 208–9, 211, discussing a lost Birth of Venus by Giorgione which
had been copied by Teniers; the Teniers copy was then in the possession of Charles Loeser, a friend
of Berenson’s, in Florence.
163 There are two small Giorgionesque paintings in the Museo Civico, Padua: Leda and the Swan and
Country Idyll. Of similar size, and appearing to belong to the same series, are Venus and Cupid,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and Old Man with Hourglass and Violin Player, Phillips
Memorial Gallery, Washington, dc.
164 Royall Tyler
165 John Hugh Smith
166 Benedict Nicolson
1933–1939 188

Orient Line
England – Australia
S.S.Orcades
26 Aug. ’37

My dear BB,
I have been meaning to write to you every day, but preparations for departure
on this boat prevented me. I know how deeply you will feel the loss of Edith,167
& would like you to know how much we both sympathise.You will have heard,
from the Tylers I expect, that she did not suffer at all. We saw her a fortnight
before her death, & she was full of plans for the autumn. I don’t know how
much of this was her indomitable courage & her determination not give pain to
those about her; personally I think she knew, far better than she ever admitted,
that she had come to the end of life. But this makes her last months all the more
magnificent.
Although I knew her so short a time I feel I have lost one of the few friendships
which make life worth living, & I shall not forget that I owe that friendship, with
so much else, to you.
I went to the funeral.168 It was not what I should have liked (the garbled
ritual would have made Eric Maclagan faint, if he hadn’t been at a conference
in Vienna) but many old friends were there united perhaps for the last time by
devotion to Edith & I was grateful for the privilege of being among them.
We are on our way to Athens & Constantinople. I find I can work on board
ship & have several delightful holidays at our ports of call. I hope you are having
a good summer.
Jane & I send love to you all,
Ever yours affectionately
K.

167 Edith Wharton died just before 6 pm on 11 August 1937, at home at the Pavillon Colombe, St Brice,
near Paris.
168 Edith Wharton was buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. A guard of honour had formed
in the courtyard of the Pavillon Colombe composed of war veterans and other friends. As the coffin
left the house, flags were lowered and a bugle sounded. Another guard of honour of veterans met
the coffin at Versailles. She had herself planned her funeral service some years before. Clark attended
along with some 25 other old friends.
1933–1939 189

[Letter undated but must be October 1937]

National Gallery
Trafalgar Square

My dear BB,
At last I am able to send you photographs of our small Venetian pictures. I
would have done so long ago, but first of all the pictures had to be cleaned,
then I went away, then the first photographs were a failure – and now these
ones aren’t much better. For some reason they defy the camera, and you cannot
judge the beauty of the pictures until you see the original. I am sure you will
like them: they are full of poetry. Of course I do not expect you to think or say
that they are by Giorgione. When my Trustees bought them I told them that
they must do so purely because of their beauty and that there would never be
agreement or certainty as to their authorship. They accepted this very well, but
rather unfortunately have insisted on the pictures being published as Giorgione.
It does not greatly matter as they certainly are all that the ordinary educated
man means by that name, and further one can hardly go. My own feelings are set
out in next months Burlington. I have argued the case in favour of Giorgione,
I could equally well put the case against, except that if Giorgione didn’t paint
them I have no idea who did. Perhaps one can say that they have the spirit
of Giorgione without the letter. The only pity is that such truly beautiful and
enjoyable pictures should be the subject of disputes, when they should only be
enjoyed for their own sakes.169
It was hard luck to miss you both in Florence and Venice. We enjoyed our
hasty visit to the full, and left Venice with our heads surging with Tintoretto.170 It
was like hearing all the nine symphonies of Beethoven in three days.
I wish we could meet.We enjoyed your visit to London so much last year and
now there seems to be ever more I should like to talk over with you. But here

169 Clark, ‘Four Giorgionesque Panels’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 71, no. 416 (November 1937), pp.
198–201, 204–7. In the article Clark argued for an attribution to Giorgione, based on the balance
of probabilities. Although now relegated to the basement of the National Gallery, John Walker’s
opinion (Walker p. 295) was:‘They are paintings I find enchanting under any attribution and I would
love to have them for the National Gallery of Art in Washington. . . . given the high opinion I have
of the pictures, and it is my field of study, I feel there is something vindictive in their continued
demotion.’
170 A major exhibition of 74 paintings and 30 drawings by Tintoretto was held at the Ca’ Pesaro,
Venice, 1937.
1933–1939 190

I am tied to my continual round of administration and you bound by your fear

of our insouciant climate.
With heaps of love to Nicky,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Hotel Bristol
Wien
Oct. 21 1937

Dear Kenneth.
Your letter touches me. It is so affectionate in tone, so comforting so cordial. If
there is anything I now crave for it is your affection. You may say I have it, and
far would it be from me to doubt it. I want affection with perfect confidence,
perfect ease. Without timidity or holding back of any sort. What I crave for is
a brotherly comradeship. It is to be had, and others younger, one younger even
than yourself give it to me. What comes in between you and me? It can’t be
wives, for all the others I refer to are married.
I wonder at times whether there is something school-masterly superior or
even censorious in my attitude.You have it is true not taken the path I expected
you to take. But I have long ago concluded that on that score you were right. I
have for as long thought of you as emancipated from apprenticeship, and have in
my own mind held you as a grown up with every right to his own opinion and
judgement. I have felt all the same that you did not trust me with such feelings
toward you and found a certain tone of superiority and perhaps even aggressive
superiority on my part.
Only last autumn, did the ice really seem to melt, and thaw.
I want you, dear Kenneth, to read what I have just written for what it is
intended, as a cry for the goodwill, and cordial confidence that I miss to a
degree that amounts at times to real unhappiness. From your side, and to you
it may seem irrational. Remember however that affection belongs to the realm
of the irrational and that the Christian religion itself is perhaps founded on and
certainly permeated with the idea of Grace – that is to say irrational craving for
love.
1933–1939 191

The foregoing is not at all intended as preface to what is coming. I thank

you for the photos of the four little idylls you have recently purchased for the
N.G. I am ready to believe that the photos give an incomplete idea of their
attractiveness. I fear I see nothing in them that is more than Giorgionesque,
nothing in the drawing and everything else that a photo. renders, which comes
into my definitely circumscribed concept of Giorgione himself.171
I am here to get my teeth into tolerable condition, and in that I expect to
succeed. I am not so sure that I shall profit greatly by the famous Neumann’s
efforts to cure me of a catarrh that has been seriously troubling me for the last
ten months.
I shall have to remain here till Nov. 10 at least.
But for the fact that cures take up all the day, and leave no time for sight-
seeing, I should have little to complain of. We have just enough friends to keep
us company at meals. Above all there is music, real music, not snob or sob music.
Here alone do I feel that people go to concerts or even opera as they go to
their food. Such humble looking people one sees and how one feels them
vibrating! The love of music seems to penetrate and equalize classes as hunting
was supposed to do in the England of my youth.
What keeps me away from England, by the way, is not the climate, but lack of
leisure. I am more and more absorbed by the Near East, not only because, more
than ever, and it has since my school days, does it fascinate me, but also because
there is so much material there for the book I now am writing. Give my love to
Jane and the youngsters,
Ever devotedly
B.B.

171 Berenson commented to Ben Nicolson who was working at I Tatti at the time: ‘how foolish of Clark
to buy those “very pretty, oh yes charming” Giorgiones’; Nicolson’s diary, 29 November 1937. See
Caroline Elam, ‘Benedict Nicolson: Becoming an Art Historian in the 1930s’, Burlington Magazine,
vol. 146, no. 1211 (February 2004), pp. 76–87.
1933–1939 192

1 Jan ’38
Bellevue,172
Lympne, Kent
Hythe 67181

My dear BB,
I must begin the new year by writing to you.Your last letter has been much in
my mind. It touched me deeply, but I find it very hard to answer. I come of an
undemonstrative family and my feelings are as stiff as an unused limb.You must
never doubt that my admiration for you is combined with great affection – more
than my way of writing will allow me to show. But to me our relations must
always be those of master and pupil. It is true that in the field of administration I
have arrived at an independent position; but in things of the mind and particularly
in the history of art, I have advanced very little during the last year, and in those
subjects which I love to discuss with you it would be foolish for me to pretend
to talk as an equal. I hope that when I leave the Gallery I shall once more go
into training as a scholar and critic. Meanwhile you see me so seldom that I am
afraid you must sometimes be put out by false accounts of what I am doing and
saying; but you know how full of malice our particular section of the world is.173
Of course I should write to you oftener, but I hate writing letters more than
anything in the world, and can only do so with an immense effort of will.

172 Philip Sassoon had built a country house near Hythe in Kent, called Port Lympne, with beautiful
views over Romney Marsh. The house was designed by Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946), who was
born and educated in Kent where he had his first practice but became much sought after as an
architect of public buildings, especially in the Empire, in South Africa in particular. His characteristic
style is a pinched and uninspired classicism but at Port Lympne he created a mansion in the South
African Cape Dutch style. In Clark’s view, he had ‘a positive genius for errors of design; in his public
buildings every proportion, every cornice, every piece of fenestration was . . . an object lesson in
how not to do it’ (Clark APW p. 221). Added to this, Sassoon had a penchant for lavish decoration
in white, gold and lapis lazuli. The best feature was the garden with its long herbaceous borders
and staircases of yew hedges. Sassoon entertained lavishly and regally, his guests including, besides
the beau monde, young aviators, the art world, unorthodox Conservative politicians, heiresses and
the aristocracy. The Clarks were regular visitors and he persuaded them to rent his house, Bellevue,
a 19th-century neo-gothic edifice, which stood opposite his main gates. Sassoon also had a life
tenancy on a mansion in Park Lane and owned the historic estate of Trent Park near Enfield, where
the Clarks were also frequent guests. Port Lympne is now a safari park and zoo; Trent Park mansion
is now part of Middlesex University.
173 In March 1938 the Trustees formally asked David Balniel to intervene to try to defuse the bitterly
bad relationship between Clark and the Keeper, Isherwood Kay, and the Assistant Keeper, Martin
Davies. They were interviewed by Balniel and, after expressing their personal dislike of Clark and
objecting to his policy of popularising the Gallery and its pictures, they backed down.
1933–1939 193

Fortunately I think that all being well we shall be in Italy in the late spring,
and will stop in Florence on our way to Rome.We must not miss you again, and
will let our dates be controlled by yours.
I have finished turning my Yale lectures into a short book on Leonardo174
which I hope will serve as a reasonable up to date introduction to his work.
When the proofs are done I shall take a rest from writing for a time and do some
reading instead. Are you writing down the fruits of your near eastern studies?.
All our family is well, and go tomorrow for a holiday in Switzerland, Jane and I
remaining behind. We are looking forward to the peace, but will miss them, all
the same. I have Edith’s library175 here which has been installed as well as could
be managed. Best love from Jane, and your affectionate
K

19 March ’38
Ashby St. Ledgers Rugby176

My dear BB,
Having a little unexpected and enforced leisure, I remember how long it is since
I last wrote to you: in fact I believe I never thanked you for the kind postcard
of three cheers on my k.c.b.177 You can imagine that I had my fill of letter
writing after that episode. I have got used to my title by now. At first I was much
ashamed, but there was no avoiding it in the Civil Service.

174 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist, Cambridge University
Press, 1939. See also n. 95.
175 In her will Edith Wharton left her library to her godson Colin Clark, who later wrote: ‘she left me
her entire library, a portrait of herself as a young girl, and her silver christening cup, but I was not told
about it until I was eighteen years old, and I was not allowed to take possession of my inheritance
until my father died’ (Colin Clark p. 167).
176 The Manor House at Ashby St Ledgers is near Daventry in Northamptonshire, although the postal
address is Rugby, Warwickshire. The house dates from the early 16th century and the estate for
a long time belonged to the Catesby family. It was in a room above the gatehouse that much of
the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was planned. In 1903, Viscount Wimborne bought the manor and
he employed Edwin Lutyens to work on the manor and in the village. Ivor Churchill Guest, 1st
Viscount Wimborne (1873–1939) was a first cousin of Winston Churchill. He was a politician and
one of the late Lords Lieutenant of Ireland, serving in that position at the time of the Easter Rising
in 1916. His son, Ivor Grosvenor Guest (1903–1967), also a politician, was the same age as Clark. His
wife, Alice, from whom he separated amicably in the 1930s, was a close friend of William Walton,
22 years her junior who spent much time at Ashby St Ledgers with Alice, from 1941 until her death
in 1948.
177 On Friday 25 February 1938, Clark was invested with the Insignia of a Knight Commander of the
Order of the Bath (Civil Division).
1933–1939 194

You may have seen that we have been in Paris arranging a show of English
pictures.178 I enjoyed the work – less so the social accompaniment. My colleagues
have all made such unfortunate marriages (except M. Julian Cain179) and I can
never adapt myself to the classic banality of French women. No doubt it is
the foundation of Racine and Malesherbes, just as the silliness of Mrs Aspinall
Oglander180 is the foundation of Shakespeare and Shelley, and my inability to
converse with Madame Metman181 is a proof that I shall never really understand
French poetry. By way of contrast we saw something of Marie Laure,182 much
involved with Massine and the new ballet.183
How are you? We want to come to Florence in June, if you will be there: I am
not going to risk missing you all again.
With love to you all from us both
Yours ever K

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 24, 1938

Dear Kenneth
It is our intention to be here in June, and we should be glad to see you, and if
we had room, to put you up. I fear we shall be full up with American and other

178 A major exhibition of British 18th- and 19th-century pictures, and modern works by e.g. Wilson
Steer and Tonks, opened in the Salle La Caze at the Louvre on 4 March 1937. Clark supervised the
hanging of the pictures.
179 Julien Cain. He and Clark had been in Russia in 1935.
180 Florence Oglander (1884–1961), from an ancient Isle of Wight family, was divorced in 1920 after
16 years of marriage. She married again in 1927, to a widower, Brigadier General Cecil Aspinall
(1878–1959), who wrote the official History of the Gallipoli Campaign. In 1930 he changed his name
to Aspinall-Oglander.
181 The wife of the good-looking, amusing and worldly wise Louis Metman, who was the head of the
Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
182 Marie-Laure de Noailles
183 A new ballet, based on the hallucinations of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was to have been
performed by the Ballets Russes, to the music of Richard Wagner, choreographed by Leonid Massine
with stage décor, costumes and libretto by Salvador Dalí and costumes made by Coco Chanel. The
ballet had been a year in the planning and was intended for the 1938–9 season but the prospect of
war delayed the performance and the ballet finally opened two years later in November 1939 at the
Metropolitan Opera, New York, when it was entitled Bacchanale.
1933–1939 195

visitors already ‘pre-noted’. But even if we can’t lodge you, we shall hope to
enjoy yr. every moment of leisure.
Nick and I expect to go in about a month to Smyrna,184 and remain away till
June. We shall see what can be done when we get there. If it is possible to see
the ruins of the Ionian towns we shall linger there. If not we shall think of Sivas,
[illeg] and Diyarbakir.185 And always we can return to Constantinople, where the
mosques, apart from one Hagia Sophia, fascinate me and the museums attract me.
Yes, the French squaws are a problem. I am devoted to Metman but on
account of his wife who expects to be invited with him, I almost never see him.
All good wishes and love to you both
Yours
B.B.

2 October 1938
Bellevue,
Lympne,
Kent
Hythe 67181

Dear BB,
I have been meaning to write for some months to sympathise with you on the
present political situation, which you must have been feeling intensely. The last
few weeks have not made things any better. For a few days it looked as if we might
get the gangsters on the run, but now we’ve knuckled under again. Evidently
Ribbentrop was right in his estimation of the English governing classes.186 In all

184 Berenson and Nicky Mariano visited Asia Minor (in modern Turkey) for the last time in May–June
1938. They were joined by an old friend, the former British diplomat Sir Robert Greg, who had
been Britain’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Romania, 1926–9. Through
him they were provided with a car and driver, tents, field beds, cook and two Turkish boys to do the
rough work.
185 Sivas in central Turkey was inhabited as early as 2600 bc but came into prominence in Roman times
when Pompey, in the 1st century bc, founded a city on the site called Megalopolis. Diyarbakır is the
second largest city in Turkey’s south-eastern Anatolia region and is the unofficial capital of a Greater
Kurdistan: it has been continually inhabited since the Stone Age.
186 Joachim von Ribbentrop was the German ambassador in London in 1937–8.At his trial at Nuremberg
he said in evidence (29 March 1946): ‘It has often been asserted that I reported to the Fuehrer from
England that England was degenerate and would perhaps not fight. I may and must establish the fact
here, that from the beginning I reported exactly the opposite to the Fuehrer. I informed the Fuehrer
that in my opinion the English ruling class and the English people had a definitely heroic attitude
and that this nation was ready at any time to fight to the utmost for the existence of its empire.’
1933–1939 196

this welter of fear and humiliation I have been fairly lucky as I had a definite
job to do – the evacuation of the pictures in the Gallery. We were going to send
every one away to safety. Fortunately we had not got very far when peace with
dishonour was announced, and they have all come back. They were beautifully
packed and are really not the worse. It has been a good dress rehearsal for the
next time, which I suppose will come next April – or do you think he will not
be able to wait so long before adding fresh laurels to his overburdened brow. Of
course the simplest thing would be to pack up the pictures and send them to
Berlin: it would save a lot of trouble in the long run. The actual arrangements
for packing and dispatching 2000 pictures with a tolerable degree of speed and
safety were rather interesting. I now feel confident that I could move an army
corps.
My little show of classical antiquity in Renaissance painting was exquisitely
inappropriate to the times. Of course you shall have Saxl’s booklet.187 It isn’t bad
value for 6d. But I find his introduction disappointing. It is lacking in movement,
and too generalized. I have been doing a popular book for the Gallery – a
hundred of our details, arranged so that the comparison of the plates in each
opening makes some point of interest, historical, aesthetic or anecdotal. To each
I have given a short note of explanation. I think it will be a nice looking book,
and the notes will at least show the number of different ways in which a civilized
person can look at pictures.188 My lectures on Leonardo have been much delayed
from various causes but will be out in the spring.189
I heard from Eric Maclagan that you had been suffering a good deal from
indigestion. The times alone (or The Times alone, for that matter) are (or is)
enough to give any one stomach ache. I hope it was only a passing seizure.
Jane has been far from well all summer; at one time she was threatened with
appendicitis but the doctors finally decided not to operate. She is better, but still
very thin and easily tired. I have entered the better state and flourish like an old
sinner.
All being well we shall come to Italy next year. You will be in Syria, North
Africa or Seville. It is really very unfortunate that we can’t meet, as I am now in
a better position to amuse you than I was before.
Please give our love to Nicky, and Mary if she is with you.
Yours ever K

187 The National Gallery held an exhibition of 24 paintings entitled Classical Antiquity in Renaissance
Painting. An illustrated booklet with an introduction by Fritz Saxl was published in 1938.
188 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery with an Introduction and Notes by Kenneth Clark, London:
National Gallery, 1938.
189 See n. 95.
1933–1939 197

20 November 1938
Bellevue,
Lympne,
Kent
Hythe 67181

My Dear BB,
Throughout this dreary autumn we have been cheered by the prospect of a
visit to I Tatti, but now I fear that even this must be given up. As you know the
Keeper190 of the Gallery died last August, and there has been so much delay in
appointing his successor that he will not take office till January. Meanwhile I am
short handed, and in any case don’t like to leave the Gallery to my junior staff,
who are only too glad of the chance to do something in a way I don’t approve
of. So I suppose I must stay at work, with, at best, a flying visit to Paris. I am just
recovering from a mild attack of influenza, or feverish cold I suppose, which is
not clearing; but it is so beautiful down here that one can momentarily forget
the state of the world.
This country is in a curious state. Every intelligent person foresees a violent
change in our social and economic structure – except our governors who are
trying to pretend that everything will be all right if we only go on as usual.
Chamberlain is an honourable man with a good, active brain, but a dyed-in-
the-wool materialist of the old Manchester School. His very virtues prevent him
from understanding the present situation. So he has let slip the opportunity of
performing (or pre-empting) a voluntary revolution and we are now waiting for
a revolution to be forced on us.The average man is quite powerless owing to the
collapse of the party system – and the party system hasn’t existed in this country
since the end of the liberal party. But I mustn’t bore you with politics. I hear a
good deal of political talk from both sides, and as I haven’t the knowledge or
aptitude to join in, there is a good deal of unabsorbed politics churning about
in my mind.
We were very much distressed by your account of Mary.191 I knew she was
more or less bed ridden, but had no idea that she was in such constant pain.What
a dreadful ordeal for you.You will have read Logan’s book.192 I like it more than
I anticipated. There are a few trivial facetiae, and some rather laboured jokes like

190 The Keeper’s function was to administer the Gallery’s affairs and keep control of its finances. Harold
Isherwood Kay died in post in 1938. Clark appointed William Pettigrew Gibson to succeed Kay as
from January 1939.
191 Letter missing.
192 Logan Pearsall Smith, Reperusals & Re-collections, 1937; Unforgotten Years, 1938.
1933–1939 198

arriving at Oxford by the lms, but on the whole I thought it a very pleasant
memorial to a vanished way of life and attitude of mind.
I wonder if you have seen Connolly’s book Enemies of Promise; most people
like the account of his schooldays, but I was rather bored by the sequence of
adolescent intrigues, and sufferings, too vividly remembered. I am never very fond
of self revelation in literature, and I know Connolly so well that the revelations
were no surprise. On the other hand I thought some of the critical chapters
lively, amusing and in places very true. His gift is for parody and mockery of all
sorts.193
You will have seen that we have added a Rembrandt to the Gallery.194 It is
a rich romantic affair, painted with real love – as if Rembrandt felt he must
honour Saskia by squeezing out every colour on to his palette. I find it more
interesting pictorially than the usual boring old men, but it will not be popular,
as people expect any portrait of a woman to be either a beauty or a grandmother.
Now we have used up all our money and are in what you once told me is the
ideal state for the National Gallery – unable to make any acquisitions.
I suppose you will leave Florence in the spring. If we don’t go to America to
look after the British Pavillion,195 we shall certainly go to Italy, and would like to
arrange our visit so as to see you.
Meanwhile our love to you all,
Ever your affectionate
K

3 Dec. ’38
30, Portland Place,w.1.
Langham 2417

My dear BB,
It is with a real pang of emotion that I have just unpacked and opened the
volumes of the Florentine Drawings. They are intimately connected with the

193 Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, 1938, was a critical and autobiographical work.The first section
is dedicated to observations about literature and the literary world, the second is a critical assessment
of what it takes to be a good writer and the third is an account of Connolly’s own early life. Overall
the book is a cri de coeur as to why he was not capable of producing a major work of literature.
194 Rembrandt’s Saskia van Ulenborch, c. 1635 (NG 4930), is a three-quarter-length portrait of his wife,
the daughter of a wealthy burgomaster of Leeuwarden. They had married in 1634.
195 The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair was the second largest American world’s fair of all time,
exceeded only by St Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. With more than 44 million
visitors, its theme was ‘The Future’, its opening slogan ‘Dawn of a New Day’ and an invitation to
1933–1939 199

whole of my life: with my early ambitions and my first apprenticeship, and

also with a good many regrets at the later course of my career. For all these
reasons I needn’t tell you how touched I am by your reference to me in the
introduction;196 and I am almost equally delighted by what you say about my
Windsor catalogue in your second volume. The work I did on the Leonardos
was the direct fulfillment of my apprentice work for you, and so is really my best
contribution to your great book. I wish I could have done more. I am longing
to read your book all through again. I have always thought it your masterpiece,
especially the Michaelangelo chapter, and now that I am a little wiser I hope
for a fuller appreciation. It will be a splendid holiday task for me this Christmas.
I hope that things are going better with you, and leaving you some peace of
mind for writing. We are all well (for a miracle, all at once), and things at the
Gallery fairly calm.
With love to you all,
Yours ever,
K

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec. 6th 1938

My dear Kenneth,
I am touched, as I seldom have been, by your words abt the book, on wh. we
were to have worked together. Dear Kenneth, I shall never cease regretting what

look at ‘the world of tomorrow’. The British Pavilion displayed Lincoln Cathedral’s copy of the
Magna Carta. After the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 it was deemed safer to leave it in the usa and
it was deposited in Fort Knox. The British Pavilion also displayed the London Midland and Scottish
(lms) Coronation Scot railway locomotive.
196 Berenson’s short introduction to vol. i of Drawings of the Florentine Painters opens thus: ‘It was more
than ten years ago that I began to think seriously of bringing out a new edition of this book. The
first was exhausted long before, but I had no time to give to a task that I knew would take several
years to accomplish. I hoped that at last I should have the leisure, and I went so far as to induce
Mr Kenneth Clark to come to assist me. He came and spent two winters learning all a youthful,
eager, and keen mind can learn in that time. He went through the drawings in the Uffizi and made
not only corrections but observations which have been most serviceable. Unfortunately it turned
out that tasks still to be completed left me no leisure for a new undertaking. Mr Clark could not
wait, and I thereby lost a partner who would have given shape and finish to this work that I fear it
sorely lacks. But my loss was the public gain for on leaving me he started on a career which led him
swiftly to the directorship of the National Gallery. He is not only the youngest director this noble
1933–1939 200

might have been, but I can assure you the regret is of the most affectionate and
nostalgic kind.
Pity you could not come out, for it would have done me a world of good
to have some heart to heart talks. Not about my own situation here, altho’ it is
precarious enough, but about our common spiritual interests. In London you are
busy, and I more so – if possible. Here, while I am still here, we might have had
some heartening and perhaps useful talks.
As yet I have no plans for the spring. With good will on both sides, a meeting
could be arranged. Even if I return to the Near East, as I should like to, you could
manage to come before or after, that is in Apr. or in June.
Thanks for all the N.G. news in your recent letter.
Mary has been very ill but is a trifle better now – had not been out of her
room these last two months.
Our best to you all
With devoted affection
B.B.

Bellevue
Lympne
Kent
Monday Febr. 13 1939

Dear BB,
Thank you very much for our lovely visit. We enjoyed every minute of it and
especially our time with you and are already longing to come back. I wish we
could all meet oftener. Apart from anything else there are many times when we
would like to come to you for help and advice in problems.
We had an uneventful journey after an enchanting few hours in Pisa in lovely
sunshine. The Museum was shut to celebrate the death of the Pope197 so we
could enjoy the Battistero and Campo Santo and the rest in that magic green
square, with a clear conscience.
We only wished you and Nicky and Umberto and ‘Clothilde’ could still have
been with us.

institution has ever had, but is proving himself one of the ablest.’ The introduction was written at
I Tatti in September 1937. John Walker and Nicky Mariano, who in fact did more of the spadework
and hard grind, receive polite and adequate but nowhere near such fulsome thanks.
197 Pope Pius xi died on 10 February 1939. On 2 March his Secretary of State was elected as his
successor, taking the name Pius xii.
1933–1939 201

Tomorrow we dine with Anthony E and Beatrice so will try again to find out
why at present he is doing nothing!198 The papers here are all full of our new
ally in Spain.
The books we promised you will soon I hope come drifting in to you –
reminders of our deep affection. I do hope Mary is better and you no longer so
worried. I will write to her tomorrow, also Nicky.The children are very well and
gay and making great claims on our return!
Best love and much gratitude for the enchanting time you gave us.
Yours ever affect
Jane

19. ii. 39
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417

My dear BB,
I am ashamed to find that it is a week since I got home, and yet I haven’t written
to thank you for the enchanting week we had at I Tatti. You can hardly believe
the constant pressure I have undergone all that week – committees, overdue
articles and letters, importunate visitors; and even now I am not in a fit state
to thank you for that period of tranquillity and rational discourse. Much as I
enjoyed the landscape and the library, it was your company, dear BB, which was
the real joy of our visit; and that is what makes it so difficult for me to write this
letter. There was a flow of reason and learning combined with a genial warmth
which made me feel I was living in a golden age of culture, a sunset of culture no
doubt, but none the less beautiful for that. I loved every minute of it.
Since our return we have seen a good deal of our rulers, and on the whole
the prospect seems a good deal brighter. The Government is a good deal more
resolute. Halifax, who has always been ¾ Eden, is gaining ascendancy and is now
generally spoken of as the next p.m. with Eden back as leader of the House199 –
tho’ personally I doubt if the country would stand such an aristocratic government.
To my mind the most serious news is the appointment of Horace Wilson200 to

198 Anthony Eden and his wife. Eden had resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938 because of
dissatisfaction with Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement with Nazi Germany and was succeeded
by Lord Halifax.
199 Eden was Leader of the House of Commons, 1942–5. It was Winston Churchill who succeeded
Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940.
200 Sir Horace Wilson (1882–1972) was a career civil servant, seconded for special service with
Neville Chamberlain in 1937 and his Emissary to Hitler in September 1938 – prior to the Munich
1933–1939 202

succeed Warren Fisher201 as head of the Civil Service. He is a pure politician and
a passionate Chamberlain man; and I don’t at all like the idea of a politicized
civil service.
All your details are being finished and will follow this letter. I believe Jane
is sending various books and articles, not all of which are to be taken seriously.
Some of my own were written simply because I’m no good at refusing, and find
myself landed by a skillful editor. Even next week I have to write about the new
Picassos.202 However I suppose that as long as one is conscious of sin there is
always the hope of grace.
I do hope Mary has taken a turn for the better, and is at least in no discomfort.
Please give my love to Nicky. It was heavenly to see so many old friends again.
Ever your affectionate
K

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 19, 1939

Dear Jane
Thank you for a letter that required no answer. I write all the same to tell you
per iscritto how grateful I am for yr. visit and how much happiness it brought me.
At last we are contemporaries, we are equals and friends. I have been longing
for this condition between us, and now it has come about. It means a great deal
to me.

Agreement – charged with informing Hitler that an annexation of the German Sudetenland region
of Czechoslovakia by Germany would lead to war with France and Britain, a message which, though
delivered, was soon abandoned. In 1939 Wilson was appointed Secretary to the Treasury and head of
the Home Civil Service.
201 Sir Warren Fisher (1879–1948) was perhaps the most influential civil servant of his generation and
the first head of the Home Civil Service (in 1919). He undertook major reforms in the Civil Service,
increasing the importance of the Treasury, advancing the interests of women and above all promoting
the virtues of team-work, inter-departmental co-operation and high professional standards. He was
an effective organiser and committee chairman, with a forceful, if unruly, personality, and was much
involved in preparations for war, notably civil defence, in the period leading up to his replacement
by Horace Wilson.
202 See n. 217.
1933–1939 203

Write as often as you can, and tell me what you are doing, you and Kenneth.
I don’t like yr. falling back to the pit where swarm friends who pale into mere
names, because one is unable to feed their entities with events that bring them
really to life.
Here the weather is halcyonic, and almonds are veiling the hill sides, and new
green the fields.
Addie Kahn203 has been and gone. She begs you to let her know your exact
dates for New York, and hopes to see you often. Mary is very fragile, poor dear,
and I am not too mighty. Nick looks tired, Morra, d’Entrèves204 and the Mason
Hammonds205 of the Amer. Acad. in Rome are week-ending.
Love to you both
Yrs
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 2, 1939

My dear Kenneth.
Yr. letter of Febr. 19 made me happy.
If there was one thing beyond the narrow world of one’s own home and its
work a day interests that I most yearned for – and this is no exaggeration – it was
to come to the relations with you and Jane that your visit has brought about.
It makes me as happy as the difficulties of our condition at the moment will
permit. I am so grateful to you both for coming and devoting yourselves so
entirely to us.

203 Addie Kahn

204 See Appendix 1.
205 Mason Hammond (1903–2002) was a Harvard scholar and professor, specialising in Latin language
and literature, from 1928 to 1970. He was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and in charge of classical
studies at the American Academy in Rome, 1937–9, 1951–2 and 1955–7.
1933–1939 204

You must try to come soon again.

Let me thank you for the books. Isherwood,206 Runyan,207 Spender,208
Conolly209 wh. I shall read, and for the two nos. of the Listener wh. I have read
already. I liked both the articles, but the one on Constable is a little masterpiece,
and I hope you will incorporate it in a book some day.210 It would be a pity to
have such truly constructive appreciation and interpretation lost.
I dare say you know that I am trying to arrange the giving over of I Tatti and
its contents to Harvard as soon as possible, retaining of course the full right to
its use in my life-time. Should this come off, and should it include as part of the
settlement that there should be a body of trustees, would you mind being one
of them?
There would be only Paul Sachs,211 Nicky, Johnnie Walker, one or at most two
others and yrself. I want you not only because you are you, but because you are
English. The idea is that one Engl. scholar at least should be connected with I
Tatti when it becomes a working institution.
I all but forgot to thank you for the marvelous details of N.G. pictures. They
are a treasure. The details of the Ortolano212 stumped me.
Mary remains about the same, sends greetings as does Nicky also. Do write
when you can.
With devoted affection
B.B.

11 March ’39
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417

My dear BB,
Thank you very much for your letter. I needn’t tell you how much honoured
and delighted I shall be to be a Trustee of your institute. I think I have some

206 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939.

207 Damon Runyon (1880–1946) was an American writer noted for his short stories about the demi-
monde of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Furthermore and Take it Easy were published in 1938. His 1932
collection of short stories, Guys and Dolls, became commercially successful, from which Frank
Loesser and Abe Burrows made the eponymous Broadway musical in 1950.
208 Stephen Spender’s book of poems, The Still Centre, was published in early 1939.
209 See n. 193.
210 Clark, ‘Constable, Prophet of Impressionism’, The Listener, 7 April 1937, repr. in R. S. Lambert, ed.,
Art in England, Harmondsworth, 1938, pp. 22–3.
211 Paul Sachs
212 L’Ortolano, Three Saints, c. 1520, now called Saints Sebasitan, Roch and Demetrius (NG 669).
1933–1939 205

idea of your instructions – I mean of how you would like the Institute to be
used – and I shall have great pleasure in defending it from the attacks of pedantry,
catalogism, examination fever and all the other ills to which art-institutes are
prone. However this will not be necessary for many years, for I assume that
during your life time you will have full control of policy, and the Trustees will
only be necessary as a formality.
It is good of you to write so kindly of the fragments of journalism which Jane
sends you. Fortunately a good many of my contributions to the Listener seem to
be lost. I usually take a good deal of trouble over the ephemera, but sometimes
they have to be done in a hurry with other more pressing, and then they are
shameful. I cannot extemporize.
Giglioli’s213 sudden death must have been a great shock to you all, and is
deeply ironic. I hope it has not distressed Mary too much.
We go on our round at a good pace, enjoying this interval of irrational optimism.
As a rule I have no time to think of anything except the next engagement, but
a light attack of influenza has allowed me 48 hours of reflection; and sobriety
cannot fail to be depressing.
With our best love to you all
Yours ever
K

[Written up left edge of paper]

You have only had about ⅓ of the N.G. details. Heaps more to come.

30 Portland Place
London W1
Saturday 11th Febr 1939 [she must mean March]

Dear BB,
I shall always treasure your letter. K and I wish Florence were nearer and we
could come oftener but we hope to see you in the summer when we go to
Venice to see the Paolos.214

213 Yule Giglioli had been Berenson’s personal doctor since the early years of the century. He is personally
recommended by Sir Francis Vane, Walks and People in Tuscany, 1910, as an English-speaking doctor,
resident at 2 via del Campidoglio, Florence.
214 See n. 234.
1933–1939 206

And we do hope that some time this year you will come to London again.We
would love you to come before we give up Portland Place. Not that anyone is
trying to buy it at present!
I meant to start this letter by giving you our most affectionate sympathy over
the death of Giglioli. I am afraid it must have been a great shock to you all as he
was a darling friend as well as being an excellent doctor. I hope the news has not
upset poor Mary too much and that you are having no more periods of acute
anxiety about her at present.
Here everyone has ’flu. The poor twins have it slightly in the country and K
has developed it this morning and is in bed feeling boiled.
Thursday last week was a beano for the Clark family as the King and Queen
came to lunch. He is very difficult to rouse but she is charming and K at his end
of the table had great fun. They came informally, no people in waiting or even
morning coats for the men and we just had the Balneils Anthony and Beatrice
Eden and Freddy and Mary Ogilvie.215 They liked the magpie mixture in the
house and the Queen enjoyed the pictures especially oddly enough, the late blue
Cezannes in my room. She had never seen a Cezanne before, and thought them
v.g. Incidentally did K tell you he took Valery216 and family round the Nat. Gall.
the other day and Valery approved the Piero’s of whom he had never heard ‘Il
est bien’.
The King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything.
He would not be interesting unless he were king.
The children came up from the country, Alan from school and we all enjoyed
the excitement.
The following day lunch at No 10 with the p.m. seemed a great come down!.
He remains very pleasant in private however one may presume to disagree with
much of his policy. We drank very good hock sent him by a German vineyard
owner and there is a new table in the drawing room filled with mysterious
objects that make the presents to the Pope seem magnificent. A teaspoon ‘from
the citizens of Amsterdam’, a Woolworth medal ‘from England’ a charm ‘from a
lady who preferred to remain anonymous’ etc etc all with these enormous labels.
Sen[t] you the current Listener with an article by K on Picasso.217 It was
written in an hour at the Travellers Club and he did not want you to be bothered
with it but I think it is funny.

215 Sir Frederick (Freddie) Ogilvie (born in Chile, 1893–1949), was a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford,
and a lecturer in economics with a special interest in tourism. He was the Vice-Chancellor of
Queen’s University, Belfast, 1935–8, and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1942–9.
216 Probably the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry (1871–1945).
217 Clark wrote a complimentary review of recent paintings by Picasso, then on exhibition in London
at Rosenberg and Helft, commenting on their beauty, passion and dictatorial authority; The Listener,
9 March 1939.
1933–1939 207

The Nicholsons lunched – as nice as ever. Hope this letter isn’t too long.
Much love Jane
PS Please tell Nicky Miss Arnold is working for the Windsors temporarily
and writes such funny letters!

Settignano
Florence
March 23, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for yr. essay in the Listener on Picasso. It is very tactful, very malicieux and
altogether to the point. To me he is an Academic draughtsman of genius, who,
realizing at an early stage of his career that there was no public for his kind of
gift deliberately took to the woods.
There he acquired one thing in common with all dictators of the Hollywood–
radio–loudspeaker dispensation, the imperative need of keeping his public
guessing – what next.
I would like to see parallel-lives of the Catalan and of yr. nearest equivalent,
i.e. Augustus John. As I should like parallel lives of Cellini and Haydon.218
It is good of you to accept zestfully a trusteeship in this ‘Institooschen’ –
should it come off.
Should it not – I have had my fun out of it. That nobody can take away from
me, even should they exile me, scatter my library to the winds and pull up the
garden.
Meanwhile I go on adding and perfecting as if my hopes were to be realized.
So glad – more of details are coming to the – already bestowed on us.
Nicky and I are going to Rome on the 25th to stay till Apr. 6 or so – Hotel de
la Villa,Via Sistina. I want to see the odds and ends at the ‘[illeg]’ show.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

218 Although separated by more than two centuries, and seemingly with little in common artisitcally,
both Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) and Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) wrote memoirs.
The writer Mary Russell Mitford (1789–1855) said: ‘If you had known Haydon personally, his great
power of conversation and constant life of mind would have carried you away. He was a sort of
Benvenuto Cellini’; The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends
(1870), vol. iii, London: Forgotten Books, 2013, pp. 248–9.
1933–1939 208

P.S. Love to Jane, and tell her I enjoyed her letter immensely, and beg her to
write as often as she can. I shall write her soon. B.B.

[Typewritten letter apart from greeting]

30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417
28th March, 1939

Bernard Berenson, Esq.,

I Tatti
Settignano
Firenze

Dear BB,
I am sending you three photographs which you may be glad to have.
The two from Liverpool I had specially taken. You will remember that the
old photograph of the Bellini was very bad,219 and I thought it would be useful
to have the profile portrait from the signed Catena220 as we have so very little
evidence for reconstructing him. The S. Bernardino belongs to Mrs. Lionel de
Rothschild and is really a very beautiful thing, as you can see in the photograph
from the modelling of the hair, ear and temple. Unfortunately the far side of the
face has come out badly and there is a splash of light over the crucifix which, in
the original, is almost worthy of Pisanello.221
[Handwritten] We are in pretty bad mess politically, and I don’t see much hope
of escaping war.
In haste, with love from us both,
K.

219 Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, 1932, listed as Portrait of a Man.
220 Ibid., Madonna with Three Saints and Donor and Madonna.
221 Now ascribed to Jacopo Bellini, S. Bernardino, private collection, New York.
1933–1939 209

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Apr. 18, 1939

Dear Kenneth
I got back fr. Roma two days ago. There I had three weeks of despration [sic]
and frivolity. ‘Eat and drink for tomorrow we die’ is the only command we can
obey just now.To this pass have Chambrella222 and Bonnet223 de Nuit brought us.
Ma parliamo delle cose allegre. I thank you for the photos of Liverpool, as well as
for the one after a S. Bernardino. What can it be but Mantegna himself!
I enclose a postcard of the Palestrina Michaelangelo.224 In situ it looked carved
out of the living rock against which the Barberini family chapel leans. I used to
suppose it was lime stone and a late work.
In the full glare of its present (temporary) position, it is obviously marble, and
an early work. In the original it looks as if it must have been done at the same
time and possibly in connection with the first project for the Tomb of Julius. It
would seem (to me at least) as if it remained somewhere in the precinct of the
Vatican and that Pope Barb[e]rini had the huge block upon which it was carved

222 Neville Chamberlain was nicknamed ‘Umbrella Man’ because he frequently carried one in public;
he took one with him to his notorious meeting with Hitler in Munich in late September 1938. In
a cartoon by David Low in the Evening Standard he was depicted as an umbrella. On 15 March 1939
Germany invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague.
223 Georges Bonnet (1889–1973) was a French politician and Radical Socialist. A financial expert,
between the wars he participated at international conferences on reparations and other economic
questions. In 1937, though speaking not a word of English, he was appointed Ambassador to the
United States. He also held office as the Finance Minister on several occasions, notably in 1937–
8, and opposed re-armament on the grounds that it was unaffordable; his stringent fiscal policy
was partly responsible for the fall of the government in 1938. As Foreign Minister in Édouard
Daladier’s cabinet in 1938–9, Bonnet helped to draft the Munich Pact which ceded Czechoslovakia
to Germany. He was a member of the Vichy National Council (1941) which supported collaboration
with Germany. After the war he entered the French National Assembly in 1956 as a dissident radical,
serving until May 1968. Bonnet de Nuit is French slang for ‘killjoy’.
224 The Palestrina Pietà was a well-known sculpture attributed by some (including Clark) to
Michelangelo but such an attribution was doubted by others (including Berenson). Supposedly
dating to c. 1555, one of its puzzles is that there is no document attesting to its existence prior to
1736, when it is recorded as being in the funerary chapel of Cardinal Antonio Barberini in Santa
Rosalia in Palestrina. It was acquired by the Italian state in 1939 and placed in the Accademia in
Florence.
1933–1939 210

carted to Palestrina. I send it to you for the light it throws on the contemporary
N.G. Entombment.225
Affectionate greetings for all of you.
Devotedly and nostalgically
B.B.
P.S. When do you go to N.Y.?

Bellevue,
Lympne,
Kent
Sunday Apr. 30, 1939

My Dear BB,
We are off on the Queen Mary on Wed. next with Rob Hudson and hope to
return on 31st on the Normandie. War seems unlikely for a few weeks anyway.
Did K tell you he has got Ben Nicholson [sic] made Deputy Surveyor of the
King’s pictures. K hopes to resign altogether in a year’s time. Everyone is pleased
and Ben very much so.
I enclose a 6” book K has just published in the N.G. His Leonardo book
should reach you in the end of May if there are no more delays.
Much love from us all to you and Mary and Nicky
Yours ever Jane

Settignano
Florence
May 29, 1939

Dearest Jane,
You either are back already or just returning. I am eager to learn how it has
fared with you in New York and its coast and whom and what you have seen,
what you have heard, and concluded. When you have the leisure, either of you,
do write to me.

225 Michelangelo, The Entombment, c. 1500–01 (NG 790).

1933–1939 211

Here we have no news. I have been trying to write, but this month I Tatti has
been more like a Salzburg or Bayreuth inn during festival time than a private
house. Work has been difficult. Then my negotiations with Harvard are in full
swing and are pre-occupying.
Did you hear anything about them while you were on the other side?
Mary is better, comes out three times a day, and expects to leave for England
June 25th. I expect to spend the summer here at I Tatti and the[n] at Vallombrosa.
I wish you could join us at Casa al Dono.226
Love to you both
B.B.

[Typewritten letter]
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417
27th June 1939

Bernard Berenson
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My dear BB,
I despair of ever finding time to write to you an adequate letter with my own
hand, so please forgive me for sending you a dictated one, as I believe you would
rather have our news in this form than not at all.
We got back from America about a fortnight ago, and I must confess we were
thoroughly glad to be home. You know how much we enjoyed our first visit
and how many real friends we had in America, so I do not think it was insular
prejudice which made us rather less enthusiastic this time. In order to enjoy
America one has to abandon oneself to the general intoxication, and this time,
either because the weather was so hot or because I have grown more critical,
I found the immense display of undistributed energy exhausting rather than
stimulating. I was also much more aware of the menace of mass-production,
which is creating a situation in America not so far removed from that of Central

226 Casa al Dono was a replacement for Poggio al Spino, which the Berensons rented and which had
been sold earlier in the year. Also near Vallombrosa, the Casa was a simple and austere house but
comfortable, set among woods and fields, with an apple orchard and good views. Nicky bought the
house in her own name in 1941, with money given to her by Berenson.
1933–1939 212

Europe. All that matters to the chief powers is that public opinion should be
dirigible, and every sort of device is used to degrade public taste and destroy all
power of choice or discrimination. I think this is being very scientifically done,
and I was even given a philosophical justification for it, which was a sort of
mixture of Rosenberg227 and behaviourism.
In the material sphere it means that one can practically never get a decent
meal. Even cigars are now abolished so far as possible, because the choice of
cigars involves an act of discrimination, and the ideal public must walk into the
tobacconist and say ‘Camels’ or ‘Chesterfields’ as in a stupour.
As for matters of taste, among many conversations I had with writers, etc., one
editor of a literary magazine with a circulation of 3½ million said to me: ‘My
business is to know the tastes of the most imbecile section of my readers, and I
have to give them nothing which they have not thought of already’. I suggested
that even the poor imbecile might occasionally like a change, but he said: ‘That
would never do. If we once put in something that was first rate, we might create
a taste which we could not always satisfy or control’.
[Unsigned; see letter of 12 August 1939]

Settignano
Florence
July 11, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
Let me thank you for the detail photos that I discovered on returning fr. the
South a few days ago. They are a treasure. The Romaninos – so Giorgionesque
in landscape with small figures,228 the Crivellis,229 the ‘Ercole Grandi’230 – what a

227 Probably a reference to Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), one of the main authors of key Nazi
ideological creeds. In January 1934, Hitler had given Rosenberg responsibility for the spiritual and
philosophical education of the Party and all related organisations.
228 Ascribed to Romanino, Pegasus and the Muses, c. 1540 (NG 3093).
229 Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation with St Emedius, 1486, altarpiece (NG 739).
230 Costa and (?) Manieri, The Virgin and Child with St William of Aquitaine (?) and St John the Baptist,
c. 1498–1500 (NG 1119). The authorship of the picture was much debated. Berenson, Italian Pictures
of the Renaissance, 1932, ascribed the picture to Ercole Grandi (1491–1531), a Ferrarese painter and
pupil of Lorenzo Costa (1459/60–1535). In 1937, Philip Pouncey, in an article titled ‘Ercole Grandi’s
Masterpiece’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 70, no. 409 (April 1937), pp. 160–63, 166–9, demonstrated, with
evidence from recent x-ray photographs, that the authorship was complex but could be ascribed to
the hands of Costa and Gian Francesco Manieri (c 1460–1504). Grandi, Costa and Manieri were all
pupils of Ercole Roberti (c. 1450–96).
1933–1939 213

paste and scissors affair, and how good of its kind, and the Raphael ‘Crucifixion’.231
The last justifies Renan’s ejaculation when Ravaisson showed him a very early
Raphael: ‘Qu’il a bien fait de quitter cette manniere.’232
And the Sebastianos!
I wish there were more and more details of yr. great Signorelli.233
I wrote to Jane some days before you were supposed to return fr. N.Y. My
letter may have been buried under all the burden of correspondence awaiting
her. It was to ask for news of yr. sojourn over there.
A rumour has reached me that you were flying to Geneva and thence to
Brescia and Venice. I hear fr. everybody that the Veronese Exhib. is scarcely worth
seeing.234 Most of the pictures have to be seen by artificial light, and there is little
new. Brescia on the other hand is praised by all who have seen it.235 Contrawise
all and sundry who have seen the Leonardo show at Milan scream with derision
and disgust.236
I was three weeks in Naples and Pompei, etc., trying to memorise the shapes
of late antiquity as in the mist of time I did those of the Renaissance. Visual
memory serves me as ever but I can take in no new names nor recall the old
ones. It is a curious and most inconvenient disease as bad as aphasia.
Owing to a relapse Mary has not yet left for England, but hopes to go the
20th. Nick and I will probably go to Geneva (Hotel de la Paix) for a week.
My best to you both,
Devotedly B.B.

231 Raphael, The Crucified Christ with the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels (The Mond Crucifixion), 1502–3,
altarpiece (NG 3943).
232 Joseph Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was a French expert on Middle Eastern languages and civilisations.
He wrote about early Christianity and on nationalism and national identity. Jean Gaspard Félix
Ravaisson-Mollien (1813–1900) was a philosopher and archaeologist.
233 Luca Signorelli, The Circumcision, 1490–91, altarpiece (NG 1128).
234 There was a Veronese exhibition at the Ca’ Giustiniani in Venice, April–November 1939, catalogue
by Rodolfo Pallucchini.
235 La Pittura bresciana dei rinascimento, Palazzo della Pinacoteca comunale Tosio-Martinengo, Brescia,
March–September 1939.
236 The exhibition Mostra di Leonardo da Vinci e delle Invenzioni Italiane, May–October 1939, at the
Palazzo dell’Arte, now considered legendary, was the largest showing of paintings by Leonardo until
the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, 2011–12.
1933–1939 214

[Undated but must be after 10 July 1939]

Bellevue
Lympne
Kent
Saturday.

My Dearest BB,
How K and I wish we could have been in Geneva with you and Nicky next week!
We were there a fortnight ago as K had to broadcast on them last Monday.237
It was such fun, the pictures in such good light and so lovely, the sunshine, the
geraniums and the Orchestre Symphonique de Geneve playing ‘You should see
me dance the polka’ out of doors by the lake. We envy you it all very much.
I have meant to write to you so often, but we have never been so busy as since
we have got back from America.We are definitely moving the furniture etc. from
Portland Place before Sept. to avoid rates and taxes and hope to sell it in the
autumn if there isn’t a war. If there is we have a gas and bomb proof shelter to
which the public are welcome.
We have got a flat in Grays Inn and are looking for a house in the country as
this place has been spoilt by the aeroplanes. Also with poor Philip dead it is no
longer the same. It would make it easier to choose a house if we knew whether
there would be a war or not.
Winston238 dined with us a short time ago with Walter Lippman239 and we had
great fun proving the b.e. was not yet decadent. The next week Walter L. flew
from Paris to lunch with us to meet the p.m. which was a change. We also saw a
lot of Frankfurter240 when he was over to get his hon. degree at Oxford. We got
him to meet the p.m. too, also Anthony.241 I wish you could have been there to
hear various stories about the Russian agreement.
Tomorrow we dine at Buck Palace to meet Prince Paul. He has been very
careful. I wish you were here as alas we can’t get to Italy till about 20th Sept. K
is chairman of two a.r.p. committees which will have to go on meeting alas. We
shall be half in London, working, moving etc. and half in the country.
K’s book on Leonardo may just miss you. It was sent to I Tatti 2 days ago. We
do hope you will like it.
Much love to you and Nicky from us all, Jane

237 Clark spoke about the Geneva exhibition (see n. 243) on bbc Radio on Monday 10 July 1939.
238 Winston Churchill
239 Walter Lippmann
240 Felix Frankfurter. He received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University on 21 June 1939.
241 Anthony Eden.
1933–1939 215

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
Aug. 12, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
I have this month finished yr. ‘Leonardo’ and I take real pleasure in telling you
how much it has impressed, stirred, and delighted me.
It is informing, illuminating and serene, and beautifully written. Not over-
written. No purple patches, but where the subject demanded, imposed it. What
you say about the ‘Last Supper’, what you write about the ‘Monna Lisa’, about
the Leda. I revel in the description of the Nymph (your plate 57). Such mots justes
through out, such close-fitting epithets.242
The book as the biography of an artist is at once the plainest tale and the most
rational yet sensitive interpretation of a great genius that I have come across in
a very long time. What a blessed contrast to the Talmudic Hegelian writings on
Michaelangelo, on the Breughels, on Durer, on Leonardo himself turned out by
the Germano. phonies of Central Europe, and now – alas! – their Anglophone
and even French imitators.
Dear Kenneth, I send you my congratulations, and can scarcely dare to add
that I now can say Nunc dimittis for fear that I may be thought presumptuous –
Nicky and I got to this idyllic cottage a few days ago, and hope to remain till
toward the end of Sept. Previously we spent three weeks in Switzerland, going
and coming. I went to the Prado show at least a dozen times, and despite the
crowd, enjoyed it more and more.243 Velasquez is – by me at least – inexhaustible.

242 Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 160, described the drawing of a standing Nymph from Windsor (RCIN
912581): ‘The most magical of all these costume pieces is the figure of a woman standing in front of
a little waterfall, pointing into the distance with a glance and a gesture which only Pater could have
described. This should be Leonardo’s last drawing, just as the Tempest should be Shakespeare’s last
play. In it he returns to the inspiration of his youth, the tradition of Fra Filippo and Botticelli, and
presents it with the depth and mastery of age. It is the figure which had haunted him all his life, his
angel, his familiar, transfixed at last. Unlike the St John in the Louvre, where a similar creature of his
imagination is almost smothered in the labour of painting, this drawing is built of touches as broken
and evasive as the latest Titian. We cannot imagine it being done part by part. A puff of wind has
blown away the mist, and revealed this goddess, as stately as an elm, as subtle as a Gothic Virgin.’
243 In summer 1939, the Spanish Republic publicised its plight through an exhibition of masterpieces
from the Prado at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. The paintings were sent by train and
returned to Spain in September.
1933–1939 216

In the Galleria of the Cambridge Univ. Press is reproduced a portr. of yrself

wh. is both accurate and magnificent. I should greatly appreciate a copy of the
photo. after which it was reproduced. Also a photo of the Wilton House ‘Leda’
(yr. plate 41).244
Let me hear where you all are, and take my congratulations to heart.
Love to you all
B.B.

12th August 1939

Bellevue
Lympne
Kent

My dear BB,
I enclose one of several fruitless attempts to write to you. The letter seemed to
have got into the wrong key, and I had to abandon it. We have had a miserably
wet summer, with some minor misfortunes (twins with whooping cough etc)
but on the whole I have been extremely happy. Gallery work has been good
fun – no rows – and I have handed over some royal collections work to Ben
Nicholson who does it very well.
At present we are absorbed in moving house. Portland Place was too big, the
children never went there, and in any case I was living beyond my means, which
is agreeable for a time, but might end badly. I am immensely relieved as I was
sick of the social obligations imposed on us by Portland Place.The Grays Inn flat
(no. 5) is most sympathetic and should encourage good talk, reading and all the
other civilized activities which are inhibited by a larger architectural scale. We
shall move in in September, and are at present camping out in Portland Place,
amidst mountains of packing cases, which should be picturesque, but actually are
very depressing. We are having to give up this house owing to the aeroplanes.
I have sent a p.c. to Nicky saying that we shall probably come to Italy at
the end of September in order to see the Brescia show – which must be most
interesting. I imagine that Leonardo at Milan is appalling, but I suppose I ought
to go there in case I learn something about the pupils. I have written a little
piece about our Virgin of the Rocks and two angels which you will see in the
Warburg journal. I read it at the Congress and people seemed to be persuaded.
Incidentally the Congress was quite good fun. Eric and Leigh Ashton handled it

244 Cesare da Sesto after Leonardo, Leda, 1507–10.

1933–1939 217

very well and all our foreign colleagues felt they had had their guineas worth.245
I am glad you liked the details. I have taken a few more (v. good ones) of the
Tura Madonna246 and am producing another book of them. The first one was
well received.This one will be a failure like all sequels, but a few people will like
to have the reproductions.247
You will find my Leonardo lectures awaiting you at I Tatti. I think the book
is clearly written and relatively free from the usual clap trap, but it is lacking in
depth owing partly to the circumstances under which it was produced.
You know I am longing to see you again and recommence our walks and
talks – I hope Prince Paul gave you our many messages
With love from us both
Yours ever,
K

22 Aug ’39
30, Portland Place, w.1.
Langham 2417

My dear BB,
The day after I had written to you your letter about the book arrived. I cannot
tell you what it means to me. I am touched and glad beyond words to know that
you liked the book, and feel that I am, in one way at least, carrying on your work.
Of course I know that my book has been much over praised by my English
friends because they are so little used to books on painting being readable at
all. It is a light-weight book, the product of a few holidays: still I suppose it is
a sample of the kind of work I can do and hope I shall do with greater depth
later on.
Besides giving me great joy, your letter has had a decisive influence on me.
You know, I have always believed in myself as a writer, but so many of my friends
have tried to push me into the world of action that I feared this might be a
kind way of indicating that I should never be a man of letters. Now after your

245 The 15th International Congress on the History of Art was held in London in July 1939. More
than 700 delgates from 25 countries attended lectures at University College, London. There was a
reception at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the presence of Queen Mary. Leigh Ashton was
the Secretary to the Congress and Eric MacLagan was the President of the British Committee.
246 Cosimo Tura, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, mid-1470s (NG 772).
247 Clark, More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, London: National Gallery, 1941 (without
commentary).
1933–1939 218

letter I feel that my old ambition of bringing the criticism of painting within
measurable distance (as a form of literature, I mean) of the criticism of poetry is
worth pursuing. There will always be some tiresome technicalities to overcome
in the translation of one medium of expression into another, but not nearly as
many as people think. I am so much encouraged by your letter that I am longing
to set out on a new subject. But as long as I am at the Gallery I must restrain
myself, for I could never undertake any serious research, and must only write
enough to keep my pen sharp. I do enjoy the Gallery work very much – there
is something intoxicating about administration, and then it is so easy compared
with creative work.
However by the look of the news this morning both writing and administration
will soon end. Our pleasant life is nearly over, and I can truly say that your letter
is one of the things which have made my life worth living.
If we can ever return to normal pursuits there are many things I should like
to talk over with you, more than I could get into a letter. It comes over me how
much time I wasted on things and people who bored me in the days when it was
still possible to see one’s friends.
Our love to you all
Ever your affectionate
K
P.S. I shall send the Wilton Leda. As for my own mug, my family always
thought that photo rather comic. I like the romantic effect, and in any case
would love you to have it.

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
Aug. 25, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for the letter of the 22nd. It consoles me to read that you think seriously
of returning to writing.
I am confident that you can digest and assimilate all that students like myself
and others, perhaps less serious, yet suggestive and stimulating, have done in the
last fifty years and that you can write as none of us since Ruskin and Pater have
written.
1933–1939 219

You can expound. You can convince, and when really needed, you can soar,
but soar without distortion.
Now I must beg a great favour of you. It is this:–
There is just a chance that if war breaks out Mary will not be able to rejoin
me, but have to remain in England. I am writing to Baring Bros. to pay her out
£100 a month from Nov.1. What I have there on deposit should hold out a year
from that date. Should the war (if it breaks out) last longer, I may find it difficult
to get money to her. In that case I would ask you to provide for her at the rate of
£100 a month, and I, if alive, or my estate would of course pay you back.
It looks pretty bleak, and my own situation is aggravated by the fact that a
person without whom I can not carry on at all may be an enemy subject in
countries like France or England. As for Switzerland there is a rumor that it will
not allow Engl. or Americ. to reside if war comes.248
With love to both of you, and best wishes
Devotedly
B.B.

248 See Introduction to Ch. 6.

220
Six

War and Separations

1939–1945

The completeness of the separation that war brought is witnessed by the cessation
of all postal services between Britain and Italy towards the end of 1939. Between
then and the spring of 1945 no letters passed and for more than five years neither
Berenson nor Clark had any first-hand news of the other, nor could be sure
whether the other were alive or dead.
Even before Chamberlain’s broadcast on 3 September 1939 to announce
that the British nation was now at war with Germany, Clark had organised
the removal of all the pictures from the National Gallery to places of safety.
The exercise took a mere twelve days to complete, helped by a ‘rehearsal’ in
September 1938 in the belief that war was imminent then, only for the pictures
to come back to the gallery when Chamberlain returned claiming ‘peace with
honour’ from his meeting with Hitler in Munich.
All the paintings from the National Gallery and some from the Royal
Collection at Hampton Court and Buckingham Palace were removed to Penrhyn
Castle, the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, the University of Wales at
Bangor and to Arthur Lee’s house in Gloucestershire. However, it was soon
realised that these locations were not out of the range of German bombers and
therefore not as safe as they could be. There were suggestions that the paintings
should be removed to North America but Churchill vetoed the suggestion,
declaring: ‘bury them in the bowels of the earth, but not a picture shall leave
this island’ (Clark OH p. 5). After a search, the paintings were removed to a
disused slate quarry at Manod near Blaenau Ffestiniog, in remotest Snowdonia
in North Wales, and there they remained for the rest of the war. The Manod
Caves required considerable preparation: a road suitable for transport vehicles
had to be built, the entrance tunnel enlarged and protective air-conditioned huts
built inside the caves themselves.
The National Gallery did not, however, remain empty or unused. The much
admired concert pianist Myra Hess suggested to Clark that the central rotunda
could be used for lunchtime concerts. Clark embraced her suggestion, rejecting

221
1939–1945 222

her proposal for a weekly concert in favour of a daily performance. From the very
first concert in October 1939, they proved to be immensely popular and have
become part of the historic folklore of the doughty spirit of the British determined
to carry on in the face of adversity. Clark was active in their organisation, selling
the modestly priced tickets and welcoming visitors, including on one occasion
the Queen. To fill the spaces on the empty walls, he first organised exhibitions
of contemporary art and later, every month, one painting was brought back
from Wales for exhibition as a symbolic reminder of the values for which the
National Gallery and great art stood and that they were worth fighting for. The
first picture to be shown, in January 1942, was Rembrandt’s Portrait of Margaretha
de Geer, which was acquired in 1941 through the nacf. David Balniel who had
become 28th Earl of Crawford in 1940, sold the picture to raise money to pay
death duties. Thousands attended the concerts – there were more than 1700 –
and the exhibitions of a single picture. Popular exhibitions organised by Clark
included those on Paul Klee, nineteenth-century French painting and designs
for Diaghilev’s ballets. Wartime work by contemporary British artists was also
shown. The only interruption to these activities occurred in 1940 and 1944
because of bomb damage and the threat of bombing.
In Wales the pictures were looked after by the scholarly Martin Davies, who
had been one of the chief critics of Clark’s directorship of the gallery before
the war. He devoted his time to carrying out a meticulous examination of the
works and to a precise and painstaking cataloguing of them. For him it was a
heaven-sent opportunity to do what he did best, undisturbed by the priorities
of a director whom he considered was too inclined to showmanship and the
need to accommodate popular public demand. There was also a studio for the
gallery’s elderly restorer, William Holder, who carried out, also undisturbed, a
thorough cleaning and restoration of the collection. Clark visited the Manod
Caves regularly but the paintings which he knew well, when separated from
their frames and from his loving arrangement of them on the gallery walls, had
lost their appeal. As he explained in his autobiography: ‘for some reason I did not
enjoy looking at them. Out of their frames, crammed close together, in no order
except that imposed by the necessities of size they seemed to be dishonoured . . .
I could learn nothing, and realised that I am an incurable aesthete. Unless I enjoy
a thing I cannot understand it’ (Clark OH p. 8).
In 1939 Clark was thirty-six years old and thus eligible for war service in the
field but, partly because of his technical status as a civil servant and partly because
of his standing as the head of a prestigious national institution, accustomed to
administrative and committee work and well connected, he was soon asked to
contribute to the many committees which were established to organise the
‘Home Front’. He joined the Ministry of Information as the head of films and
1939–1945 223

when Sir John Reith, the formidable and evangelical pre-war Director of the
bbc, became Minister of Information, Clark was asked to become head of home
publicity, which included responsibility for motion pictures. Thus he came
into contact with such luminaries as Alexander Korda, Michael Balcon, Leslie
Howard, Danielle Darrieux, René Clair and Graham Greene. The variety of
films produced was considerable and included two-minute shorts, documentaries
and thrillers. These activities were not inimical to Clark and kept him busy.
Through them he gained skills and experience that would play a significant
part in shaping his life after the war. He began to take part in documentaries;
was regularly asked to broadcast on the radio, including taking part in the well-
known discussion programme the ‘Brains Trust’; gave many lectures and was
instrumental in the organisation of exhibitions. Reith was soon sacked from the
Ministry of Information but Clark stayed on and, after the Dunkirk debacle in
the early summer of 1940, was asked to set up the ‘Home Morale Emergency
Committee’. It achieved neither focus nor distinction. Clark remained busy at
the Ministry of Information until Brendan Bracken, the magazine magnate, a
larger than life, red-haired Irishman, took over in July 1941, when Clark was
politely and quietly asked to move on.
How did Clark fill his days? In his own words,‘chiefly by sitting on Committees’
(Clark OH p. 55), as the entries in his engagement diary indicate. Occasionally
there were more adventurous tasks, such as a widely reported three-week
morale-boosting visit to Sweden in the spring of 1942, where he gave sixteen
lectures and twenty speeches, at the same time reassuring the Swedes that the
British were not done for – the King of Sweden was thought to be pro-German.
Reporting the visit at length, The Times noted that he saw pictures of Winston
Churchill in offices, galleries and libraries everywhere in Sweden, and never
one of Hitler. Shortly after returning home Clark was elected an Honorary
Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sweden. (He made a further
visit with lectures in March 1945.) Some of his committee work was spasmodic
and not particularly onerous, such as the Royal Mint Advisory Committee (coin
design), the Stamp Advisory Committee (stamp design) and the nacf (saving art
for the nation). Some appointments came towards the end the war, such as his
nomination in 1944 as a founder member of the Council of Industrial Design
(‘to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products
of British industry’).
The project that most actively involved Clark’s interest and time was the
establishment of the War Artists Scheme administered by the War Artists Advisory
Committee, part of the Ministry of Information. This project was of Clark’s
devising: he chaired it and was the driving force, building on the example of
a similar scheme during the First World War. His vision was to support and
1939–1945 224

encourage the creation and purchase of paintings and sculpture by the young,
as well as the leading, artists of the day to record and reflect the war effort. He
needed all his political and personal skills and influence to get the project off
the ground, and shrewdly brought onto his committee a variety of potentially
antagonistic interests from the London art schools, the Royal Academy, the
Armed Forces, the Imperial War Museum and various government ministries.
The central aim was to express through art the liberal, civilised values for which
Britain stood; he also had a separate agenda, to give artists a legitimate role that
would save them from action on the battlefield, for which they were not best
suited. Exhibitions were organised at home and overseas and, at the end of the
war, the accumulated works were distributed to public galleries in Britain and
the Empire and Commonwealth. More than four hundred artists were employed
or commissioned under the scheme and some six thousand works of art were
acquired. The visual record of a nation at war was impressive and covered
every aspect and every activity at home and overseas: among the lasting artistic
achievements were Stanley Spencer’s paintings of work in the shipyards, Graham
Sutherland’s of bombed London, Henry Moore’s shelter drawings, Paul Nash’s
depiction of the Battle of Britain and Edward Ardizonne’s homely renderings
of daily life. One artist described the scheme as ‘a governmental magic carpet’
which carried some of them off to places as far away as North Africa, Greece,
Italy and the Far East, there presenting them with artistic and social challenges
and personal dangers, which stretched their resourcefulness and inspiration to
the limit. The success of this remarkable and enlightened act of state patronage
was Clark’s most significant and lasting contribution to the war effort.
His other principal involvement – which extended for two decades – was
with the organisation that eventually became the Arts Council. Initially, Clark
was a founder member of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the
Arts (cema), which was established in 1939 with private funds from the Pilgrim
Trust and from the Carnegie Foundation. Its chairman was the aristocratic ‘Buck’
(Lord) De La Warr, who had the distinction of having been the first hereditary
peer to join the Labour Party in 1923 at the age of twenty-four (he closed
his political career by serving as Postmaster General in the last Conservative
administration of Winston Churchill appointing Clark to be the first chairman
of the Independent Television Authority in 1954). The purpose of cema was to
employ artists from all disciplines and to organise morale-boosting tours of the
performing and visual arts. Regional offices were established and by the end of
the war some 600,000 people had attended cema concerts and exhibitions and
more than 1.5 million had been to its plays. In 1942 the chairmanship was taken
over by John Maynard Keynes who, with public money, drove it forward until his
sudden death at Easter 1946, just a few months before the establishment of the
1939–1945 225

Arts Council of Great Britain by royal charter. Clark was Chairman of the Arts
Council from 1953 to 1960.
On a personal level, the glamorous and lavish pre-war lifestyle which the
Clarks had enjoyed together in their house in Portland Place and over weekends
with Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne came abruptly to an end; for five years
they were constantly on the move.They relinquished the house in Portland Place
well before September 1939 and replaced it with a spacious, rented top-floor flat
at 5 Gray’s Inn Square, a short walk north of Fleet Street, in the quiet collegiate
atmosphere of one of the Inns of Court which is the habitat of lawyers and the
judiciary.Their elegant, panelled, eighteenth-century apartment, overlooking the
gardens, was furnished in some style by Jane. Sassoon had died unexpectedly in
June 1939 while they were returning from a tour of the usa and in any event
they knew that if war came the Kent coast would be a principal danger zone.
The Romney Marshes, which Bellevue overlooked, was a likely landing-point
for an invading army – indeed, it was the place that Napoleon had selected for
his dreamed-of landing. Like many families with young children, the Clarks
sought a safe retreat in the West Country and, at the end of August 1939, Jane
and the children moved to Upton House, a rented, rambling, grand, Vanburgh-
style establishment in poor repair near Tetbury in Gloucestershire. It had ample
space for their family and for a succession of friends: Henry Moore, Graham
Sutherland and his wife Kathleen (who stayed for two years), the musician
and writer Eddy Sackville West, the composer and conductor William Walton
with his family, and lengthy stays from Clark’s mother, who otherwise lived in
a hotel in Cheltenham. They made space on the walls for their own collection,
for Emerald Cunard’s Manets, Bogey Harris’s Sienese ‘primitives’ and works by
Duncan Grant, Moore and Sutherland.
Until the start of the Blitz, which did not begin in earnest until September
1940, the Clarks’ routine was to spend their weeks in London and their weekends
in Gloucestershire. However, one of the early raids half-destroyed their flat in
Gray’s Inn Square, rendering it uninhabitable, and from then on they were
separated for long periods of time. Clark spent most of his week in London
staying in hotels and clubs, although in 1941 they purchased a terraced house on
the summit of Hampstead Heath, called Capo di Monte (it had once been lived
in by the great eighteenth-century actress and tragedienne, Sarah Siddons).
The responsibility for bringing up their three children, aged eleven and seven
at the beginning of the war, fell wholly on Jane. As the Clarks’ lives became
increasingly separated, the stresses and strains of this and of wartime austerity and
anxiety all took their toll on Jane’s never robust health and emotional wellbeing.
Clark admitted to Jane at the time that the affection and companionship that
he had reserved for her exclusively before the war, and on which she depended,
1939–1945 226

was now shared with others. Jane’s solace in times of trouble was not through
an emotional relationship with another – although she is said to have had an
affair with William Walton and that they had contemplated running off together
– rather, she involved herself in two well-meaning projects in London: one was
cheering up the otherwise drab venues of ‘British Restaurants’ (a government
scheme to provide basic square meals for a minimal sum) with murals by
contemporary artists. For this venture she recruited old friends, Duncan Grant,
Vanessa Bell and John Piper. The second venture was the organising of cultural
events such as lectures and concerts at the Churchill Club, which she helped
to establish, for the benefit of us forces. Here, too, she used her wide network
of social contacts to recruit prominent figures. But the shared excitement and
glamour of their pre-war life had gone, and the fact that her husband was
finding roles that he could fulfil, and be fulfilled by, without her heightened her
unhappiness. When things got really bad she took refuge in the escapes from
reality that were temptingly offered by medical treatments and alcohol.
Berenson had long realised that a European conflict was inevitable and that
eventually Italy would be drawn in alongside Germany, with the usa alongside
France and Britain. He had no intention of leaving Italy but he knew that he had,
at least, to explore other options, all of which presented problems. He himself
was an American citizen, as was Mary. For as long as the usa remained neutral,
theoretically this status allowed them complete freedom of movement. But he
was not prepared to be separated from Nicky Mariano on any account and, as
she had joint German and Italian nationality from her parents, this ruled out any
prospective move to the United Kingdom, for example.
In early September 1939, Berenson and Nicky were at Vallombrosa and Mary,
whose health continued to decline, was with her family in England. On the
declaration of war with Germany, Berenson and Nicky immediately returned to
I Tatti and Mary joined them there in October.At the end of September, Berenson
and Nicky made a visit to Venice and Prince Paul in Yugoslavia. However, the
pattern and rhythm of their lives was inevitably changing. Petrol and provisions
began to be in short supply. Visitors became fewer and then stopped coming.
Although Italy had not yet declared war, foreigners were packing up and leaving
Florence, and even their Italian friends, who had been frequent and welcome
visitors, were reluctant to come up to I Tatti for fear of being seen as anti-fascist.
Berenson’s views were well known to the authorities and he and his visitors were
closely monitored.
Despite war’s privations and frustrations, the Berenson entourage was
still able to travel round Italy. Mary spent the early summer months of 1940
near Viareggio, while Berenson and Nicky visited Rome, and then they all
reunited at Vallombrosa. However, the shortage of visitors deprived Berenson
1939–1945 227

of his favourite occupation, conversation. His immediate remedy was to write

letters to his correspondents all over the world. But as the conflict deepened
the international postal services ceased to operate and all mail was liable to
censorship. He therefore turned from correspondence to books and started work
on a project that he had long promised himself to undertake but had constantly
put aside: it eventually saw the light of day in 1948 as Aesthetics and History in the
Visual Arts. He also wrote, in 1941, Sketch for a Self-portrait, which was eventually
published in 1949. Written at a time when the fortunes of the free West hung in
the balance, and the humanist values which Berenson stood for looked as though
they might be extinguished, it was a short, self-reflective, rambling soliloquy that
surveyed his aspirations and failures as he saw them. Complementing this, he
started to keep a diary in January 1941, in which he noted down his thoughts and
observations. The diary was maintained continuously to the end of his days, the
last entry being in April 1958. Extracts were published as Rumour and Reflection
in 1952 and Sunset and Twilight posthumously in 1963
Italy had maintained a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards those of Jewish
birth but, under pressure from the Germans, in early 1939 restrictions on Italian
Jews, their persons and their property, began to be promulgated.As a consequence,
Berenson became concerned not so much for his own safety as for the future
of I Tatti and his desire that it be transferred, eventually, to Harvard. There were
two questions: first, would Harvard want to take on I Tatti in the current political
climate; second, would the Italian authorities allow a transfer to Harvard? On the
latter question, he received personal assurances from Mussolini’s foreign minister
and son-in-law, Count Ciano, who said that there would be no problem about
such a transfer. Reassuring as this might have been, by August 1941 Berenson was
afraid that the general economic and political circumstances might force them all
to leave, and effectively abandon, I Tatti.
Mussolini, having watched the success of the German armies, the fall of
Finland, Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 and the ignominious
retreat from Dunkirk in June, finally declared war on France and Britain in
June. As a consequence, the Berensons’ loyal Welsh chauffeur, Parry, returned
home, as did Elizabeth Percival, Mary’s maid. Nicky’s attempts to get a visa to
Switzerland were denied because of her Italian nationality. The usa entered the
war in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Italy
declared war on the us shortly afterwards. Until then the Berensons had enjoyed
the protection afforded citizens of a neutral country. In June 1942 Berenson
resisted pressure from the us Chargé d’Affaires in Rome to leave Italy with him
and the remaining us embassy staff. It was not a difficult decision to make: it
would be impossible for Nicky and Mary’s nurse to accompany them because of
their nationalities, so such a move could not even be considered. Realistically, he
1939–1945 228

had no option other than to sit tight, see how events played out and hope for the
best. Nonetheless, their situation was extremely difficult. Congress had passed a
law to say that any alien-born citizen who had been out of the us for more than
five years would lose their citizenship. This included Berenson himself, who had
been born in Lithuania. Representations were made on his behalf in Washington.
In the event, Roosevelt extended the effective date of the law to 1944 and as a
result the validity of the Berensons’ passports was extended.
Complications and restrictions steadily increased. Just up the road from I
Tatti there was a prisoner of war camp for British officers at the Castello di
Vincigliata and the local and relatively lowly placed Fascisti were determined to
harass Berenson and make his life as difficult as possible, regarding his residence
at I Tatti as totally undesirable. In March 1942, on instructions from Rome, all
enemy alien property was sequestered, which included I Tatti and its contents.
However, although life was difficult at a local level, in high places in Rome and
Florence there was a desire to protect Berenson and leave him as undisturbed
as possible. The law on sequestrations could not be changed but action behind
the scenes succeeded in alleviating its worst consequences.The sequestrator who
was officially appointed was a well-to-do Italian lawyer and keen art collector,
the Marchese Serluppi, who was both anti-fascist and had diplomatic rights,
being the ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See. Under his supervision,
all the Berenson possessions were not seized but inventoried in detail, not just
the works of art but all 34,000 volumes in his library and 95,000 items in the
photographic archive.
This relatively benign environment changed in 1943. In July of that year
the Allies landed in Sicily and on 24 July, when Mussolini was removed from
power, the Badoglio government came into existence. This government sought
an armistice with the Allies but the euphoria was short-lived. The response
of the Germans was to occupy northern and central Italy in September 1943,
and from then on the danger to Berenson became real and apparent. As an
American and ethnically a Jew, and as a self-declared anti-fascist, he was, for the
Germans, a prime target. Nicky sought advice from the Marchese Serluppi, who
immediately offered Berenson and Nicky refuge in his Villa La Fontanelle at
Careggi, just north of the Arno, not far from Fiesole.The thinking was that there,
under the protection that his ambassadorial and diplomatic status was supposed
to provide, they would have a safe refuge until hostilities ceased.
There were fears that the works of art and books at I Tatti would be seized
by the Germans, who were always on the lookout for treasures to confiscate
and take to Germany. The most valuable pictures and sculptures were taken to
La Fontanelle; others were hidden in Nicky’s sister Alda’s house in the Borgo
San Jacopo near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The most important books were
taken to Quarto, the Marchese Serluppi’s mother’s house above La Fontanelle,
1939–1945 229

where she also hid Jewish refugees. Other books were secreted with Giannino
Marchig, the painter and restorer, who was a close friend of the Berensons. At I
Tatti the remaining books and works of art were re-arranged so as to disguise the
departures and the deception was taken even further by removing photographs of
the hidden works from local archives, and by retyping the sequestrator’s inventory.
In all this they were assisted by the Marchese Serluppi, his wife and other well-
placed friends such as the German consul in Florence, Gerhard Wolff, and the
director of the German Institute in Florence, Friedrich Kriegbaum. Between
them they also spread carefully crafted rumours to put the German authorities
off the scent, such as that he had fled to Portugal via the Vatican or was of Aryan
descent being the illegitimate son of a Russian Grand Duke (Samuels ML p. 479).
The deceptions held good and it seems that the rumours were either swallowed
or sufficiently believed to cause the German authorities to go looking in the
wrong places. I Tatti was occupied by German troops (including Field Marshal
Kesselring), Mary remaining in residence, bedridden, alongside them, holed up
in Nicky’s apartment.
In the event, Berenson and Nicky were to spend more than twelve months
at the Villa La Fontanelle, much longer than intended, for no one had supposed
that the German resistance would be so fierce and so prolonged. Although
letters passed backwards and forwards between Berenson and Mary, she never
knew where her husband was hiding or how close his secret location really
was. Everyone was afraid that if she did know she would let the information
slip out, with disastrous consequences. The go-betweens who carried letters
from La Fontanelle to I Tatti and back were Alda (who remained in charge
of I Tatti) and her husband: being German and Italian, they could move freely.
Berenson, although separated from many of his own works of art and his books,
had the use of the fine library at La Fontanelle and was able to take walks in the
surrounding hills. The terrace of the Villa overlooked Florence and from there,
as he recorded in detail in his diary in August 1944, ‘like [in] the dress circle of
a theatre’ (Samuels ML p. 485), they watched the bombardment of Florence, by
day and by night, including such tragedies as the destruction of the Ponte Santa
Trinità. As the front line moved gradually north, it passed through the Villa and
its gardens and they were shelled by both sides. They survived but at times they
were literally within inches of death.
1939–1945 230

Casa Al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. Di Firenze)
Sept. 11 1939

Dear Kenneth.
It is good of you to wire and re-assure me about Mary.
I wish indeed Nicky and I were with all of you in England. But N. is a subject
of this government, and for such the frontiers are already closed. Further – in
England she would be an ‘enemy alien’ should this government get into war
with England.
I shall make an effort to get Nick permission to leave with me. But could she
go to and remain in England without too many complications? Let me know if
there still is time.
If she cannot I shall have to remain in Switzerland if I can get out. I cannot
really live without her (altho’ I might of course manage to exist) nor can I on my
part leave her in the lurch. I need say no more, I am sure. I am deeply touched
by your concern.
We go down to I Tatti to await events.
Love to you all
B.B.

[Typewritten letter on National Gallery headed paper]

The National Gallery
14th September 1939
Bernard Berenson Esq

Dear BB,
Please forgive a typewritten letter, but you can imagine that I have a good deal
to do at the moment.
There is no reason at all why you should not both come to England. We have
an old Italian friend, Bianca Weiss,1 living with us at the moment with her Italian
maid, and apart from having to report once to the local police she has not been
put to any inconvenience and, as far as I can see, can go on living here as long as

1 By 1933, Bianca Weiss was living in London and giving Italian lessons (unpaid) to Virginia Woolf,
according to whom she was the mistress of Frank Stoop, a distant relation of Clark; see Ch. 2 n. 17.
1939–1945 231

she likes. If Italy becomes an enemy country it only means that an Italian resident
in England would have to report to the police before making a journey of more
than five miles; but even this would present no difficulties if the ‘enemy alien’
were vouched for by a person like myself.You can well imagine that there are a
great many German refugees for whom I am partly responsible and so far none
of them seem to have suffered the least inconvenience. It is very hard to make
them believe that we are not in the hands of a Gestapo, but they are gradually
settling down and regaining confidence. So if you can get permission for Nicky
to leave I think I can promise to find you a small house where you would be
comfortable, and I can guarantee that you will not be put to any inconveniences
other than those inseparable from our climate. It would be best of all if we could
find a house for you somewhere near our own so you could use our Library,
such as it is, and Edith’s.
My own part in the war is still uncertain. I managed to move all our pictures
out of London before the declaration, and since then have been struggling with
problems of administration and innumerable committees. Jane is in the country
with the children, very bored, but otherwise well.
I still brood on the things you said about my book, which are an armour
against any depression.
With love to you both,
Yours ever,
K

[Letter on crested paper]

Berdo
Kranj2
Oct. 4 1939

Dear Kenneth
Your last letter touched me deeply. I should love to live near you enjoy yr. company,
yr library, and your ‘protection’. For the present there seems no likelihood that
Italy will go in with Germany. It is true that we are subject to privations petrol
for instance, coffee, foreign medicines and restrictions. Nevertheless I Tatti is a

2 Brdo near Kranj is an estate north-west of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The mansion house was built in 1510
by a Carniolan nobleman who was the administrator of the Hapsburg estates in the region. It passed
through various ownerships and several transformations from its original Renaissance style. In 1935
it was bought by Prince Paul, who turned it into a sophisticated summer royal residence. Much used
by President Tito (he had his fatal seizure there in 1980), it now hosts conferences and diplomatic
meetings.
1939–1945 232

paradise compared with anything we could hope to get in England. Besides, yr.
winter climate does not like me. It hates me in fact.
Of course if Italy should go with Germany we should be entirely cut off fr. our
world and I doubt whether we could stand it. But leaving would be complicated
by the problem of Nicky–
– Now I must ask you, hard worked as you are, to offer yr. services to my
Mary. She wants to return to me, but apparently there is no one near her to
help her get the permit to leave. The transit visas over France and Switzerland,
and the visa for Italy. (Thus far I believe Americans do not need one.) Also to
arrange to make her journey as comfortable as possible under present conditions.
Furthermore to let her have any reasonable amount of money, wh. I should repay
you at once.
– I am here with our friend for a few days.3 We mention you often, and he
talks of you with real affection. He has read yr. Leonardo and enjoyed it and
values it as much as I do.
I have just been to Venice for a week, and spent all available hours at the
Veronese show.4 You know how greatly I have always ranked him, and this time
I could soak and soak, and I have come out not only tonicized by his art but
prizing it more than ever.
Try not to overwork. Drop me a line when you find the leisure and give my
love to Jane
Ever affectionately
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Oct. 23, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
I enclose a cheque for £100 wh. Mary tells me she owes you. It was good of you
to let her have it.
She got back last night and seemed no worse for the journey.

3 Prince Paul of Yugoslavia

4 See Ch. 5 n. 234.
1939–1945 233

In the Lit. Sup. of the New York Times I read that you are publishing a corpus
of Leonardo’s drawings with over 100 reproductions.5 Do send me a copy as
soon as it is out, and I should be grateful as well for the vol. of Fry’s memoirs6
prefaced by you also announced.
I suppose your thoughts and occupations are already far from your ordinary
ones. Even I in this ivory tower cannot get away from alarms and rumours so as
to concentrate on my own work.
I should be grateful for a word from either of you.
I hope you all keep well,
Ever affectionately
B.B.

[Typewritten letter from the National Gallery]

1st November 1939
B. Berenson, Esq.
Tatti,
Settignano, Italy

After trying for several weeks to write you a letter in my own hand, I am as usual
driven to mechanical aid. I have been exceedingly busy since the war began, as I
have taken on the interesting but rather heartbreaking job of trying to find work
for the thousands of artists who have been left practically penniless by the war.
I have been doing this chiefly under the patronage of the Ministry of Labour,
and really had to turn into a miniature labour exchange and Shadow Ministry of
Fine Arts. In addition to this I have a good deal of administrative work connected
with the Gallery, and we have taken on a series of daily lunch time concerts here,
which are being a great success. Of course all the pictures have been sent away to
the country, but we have made some of the Galleries habitable by hanging them
with the original watercolours done for the Arundel Society,7 many of which are

5 Kenneth Clark, Leonard da Vinci: An Account of his Development as Artist, Cambridge University Press,
1939, with 68 pp. of plates.
6 Kenneth Clark, Last Lectures by Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge University
Press and Macmillan, New York, 1939.
7 The Arundel Society was founded in London in 1849 to promote an interest in Italian, Flemish and
other paintings. Charles Eastlake, then Director of the National Gallery, hosted the meetings. The
Society was named after the 17th-century Earl of Arundel who was one of England’s early patrons
and connoisseurs. It published chromolithographs of Italian works of art to raise public awareness of
them.The society was dissolved in 1897 and was succeeded in 1904 by the Arundel Club, which also
issued reproductions of old masters in public and private collections.
1939–1945 234

most decorative and of great archaeological [‘architectural’ crossed out] interest,

as they show things before they were restored.
The concerts have given me, and I think everyone else, great pleasure. We get
audiences of up to 1,000 almost every day – people of all sorts who are prepared
to give up their lunch in order to escape for a short time out of the ugliness and
disorder of the present moment.
To my great grief Jane has had to be in the country practically all the time.
Just before the war began we had taken a house on the Gloucestershire [and]
Wiltshire borders, not far from Malmesbury, but it was being entirely done up
inside and when the war came was uninhabitable. Owing to the shortage of men
and materials it has taken two months before we can even sleep there, and I don’t
suppose it will be in decent order before Christmas. Poor Jane has had to spend
her time chivvying workmen and imagining that I was having a very eventful,
exciting life at the centre of things in London. Actually I am kept so busy that I
see practically no one and hear no news.
I am so glad to hear that Mary arrived safely, and thank you very much for
the cheque.
I wonder what Europe looks like from your part of the world. There can
never have been a time when it was more impossible to see even a week ahead.
I of course have had to give up any thought of writing, or preparing to write,
and feel doubtful if the opportunity to do so will ever come again. It is rather
disappointing when I had just been encouraged to think that I might yet do
quite well in this line. We were so glad to think you had had a peaceful holiday
in Jugoslavia.
Yours ever,
K

Hotel de la Ville8
Roma
Nov 30, 1939

My dear Kenneth,
If I do not write oftener it is because I know you to be too busy to read me,
and besides I might burden yr. conscience with the uneasy feeling that you
must answer.Yr. last letter sounded forlorn and homesick. No wonder if you are

8 Now the Hotel de la Ville Intercontinental. Situated at the top of the Spanish Steps, it retains a
penthouse suite with the view described in this letter.
1939–1945 235

separated fr. wife and children! As for me I am watching the dawn rising.The sun
has not appeared yet. Half an hour ago the moon almost full was lighting up the
sky over the overlit town, with the Antonina column like a flame, and the Victor
Em. Monument dazzling enough to make you blink.
Nick and I have been here just a fortnight and we return to I Tatti in a couple
of days. Fr. there Mary writes that she was getting better and better, and been out
on longish drives. I fervently pray that my return may not bring about a collapse.
Here I have spent forenoons in the sculpture galleries, in the Vatican chiefly,
sniffling out decay so as to report it and study it for the book that I am planning
but not writing. When I read reviews of all that is appearing on art in the
abstract, and art in particular a nausea overtakes me as if I had overeaten myself.
I would not mind fiddling while Rome was burning, but to add noise to noise
is scarcely an old man’s job. He should be softly and silently vanishing away like
the Boojum.9
Roma is more fascinating to the eye than ever, and at the same time offers
a bain de multitude10 of just the right temperature. When I was a very little boy
I used to wonder how it was that talk did not fill a room the way potatoes
fill a sack. Now I know that it does not do anything, but I enjoy it. I enjoy
conversatione more than ever, and as great cities are out of the way or out of
bounds, I find (happily) all I want for my present needs, here.
There is an attractive contemporary of yours at yr. embassy named Dixon,11
who seems to have been ganymeded from archeology to diplomacy by the
present Brit. Ambassador12 when in the Near East. The other embassies offer
interlocutors so does the Villa Medici.13 Then there are wonderful scholars like
Tucci14

9 The Boojum was a type of Snark, a fictional animal invented by Lewis Carroll for his nonsense
poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. A Snark is difficult to capture and various subterfuges are needed,
as well as courage. In the eighth stanza of the poem the Baker goes after a Snark, only to disappear,
never to be found again and leaving not a trace behind: ‘He had softly and suddenly vanished away
. . ./ For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’
10 In Le Spleen de Paris Baudelaire wrote: ‘Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude:
jouir de la foule est un art; et celui-là seul peut faire, aux dépens du genre humain, une ribote de
vitalité, à qui une fée a insufflé dans son berceau le goût du travestissement et du masque, la haine du
domicile et la passion du voyage’ (It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying
a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species,
on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home,
and the passion for roaming); Selected Poems by Charles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Carol Clark, London:
Penguin, 1996.
11 John Pierson Dixon
12 Sir Percy Loraine (1880–1961). He had been at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, as had Berenson.
13 The French Academy in Rome is located in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill in Rome, by the
Villa Borghese.
14 Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984) was an Italian scholar specialising in Tibet and the history of Buddhism.
He spent nearly a decade in India before settling in Rome in 1931, where he taught at the University
1939–1945 236

Rome is politically getting to be more and more Tyrani, and if it could but
replace, while forgetting Carthage, all would be well. And that seems to be the
present course.
I have seen no chers collegues except Toesca.15 Like the rest of us he is more
so as his age increases. His daughter of 11 is most gifted artistically. It will be
interesting to watch how much of her talent remains after puberty.
Ever so much love to Jane and yourself,
Devotedly
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec. 18, 1939

Dear Kenneth.
I have not the heart to wish you a Merry Xmas, but most sincerely a Happy
New Year. The war is a horror, and victory (of wh. I am sure) will be but the
beginning of re-educating and re-conditioning the Germans.
It is a positive liberation tho’ to be freed fr. the incubus of stupidity, hesitancy,
pro. Hitlerism wh. seems to breed in ever widening circles over the West. The
issue is clear for most of us, and we should devote all the energies left over by
the fighting to thinking out a peace that will teach all continental people that
force and fraud do not in the long run pay people more than they do individuals.
There should be moral comfort in the hope that such a peace can be
established and the moral re-education of the Germans – and not of them only
– well started.
I have wandered far from the very simple wish to send you our heartfelt
wishes for a satisfactory 1940.
When you enjoy a quarter of an hour of leisure write, or get Jane to tell us
how you are, all of you, and what yr. occupations are. We are interested.
As for us we can boast that we have no history. Mary happily is better than I
could have hoped for. Life goes on pretty smoothly. The restrictions we feared

of Rome La Sapienza until his death. In 1933, with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, he founded
the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente),
based in Rome. He was a supporter of Mussolini.
15 Pietro Toesca
1939–1945 237

in Sept. have proved innocent enough. Opinion is on the whole more and more
in accord with our own, except am’g the few anti-Brit. anti-Semitic offspring
of Americ heiresses.
The only complaint I have to make is of my own lack of will power to resist
– giving far too much time to reading about the war and discussing it.
In Rome recently I met one of yr. embassy yg. men – Dixon by name. He is
called back to the F.O. If he comes yr. way, cherish him. He delighted me.
Ever affectionately
B.B.
238
Seven

Picking up the Threads

1945–1947

When the bombardment of Florence and the shelling of the Villa La Fontanelle
finally ceased in August 1944, there were many threads for Berenson to pick
up. As the Allies entered Florence and the Germans retreated northwards, the
prospect of returning to I Tatti became a reality. On 1 September several visitors
came up from Florence and brought news both of the outside world and of
the destruction within Florence itself. A Major Samson, who was the head of
the Allied Office for Displaced Persons, brought news that I Tatti had been
left unharmed by its German occupants, as did the composer and conductor
Igor Markevitch, who had been living with his family in the Villino; they also
brought encouraging news of Mary’s health. The following day, 2 September
1944, Berenson was driven up to I Tatti for a brief visit. The house was relatively
undamaged although most of the glass in the windows had been broken. The
garden and the neighbouring farmland were in a terrible state. On 23 September,
with much apprehension, he returned to take up permanent residence again,
dreading the confusion and squalor in which he might have to live. His fears were
unfounded. He was met at the front door by the Anreps and other servants who,
‘in a most unexpected magical fashion’, showed his study and bedroom looking
as he had left them on 10 September 1943. There was no electricity and most of
the necessities of life including food were in short supply or unobtainable, but
he was back home.
Over the coming weeks the books and works of art which had been hidden
began to be reassembled. The principal loss was among those hidden in the
Anreps’ house in the Borgo San Jacopo near the Ponte Vecchio, Florence. It was
one of the houses which bordered the River Arno that had been dynamited
by the Germans. As a result, many pictures were severely damaged or required
repairs and some were lost entirely.
In some respects Berenson had enjoyed his enforced isolation at La Fontanelle
since it had removed all the social distractions which habitually interrupted

239
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his reading and writing. Out of that enforced seclusion, both at I Tatti and La
Fontanelle, eventually came several books, including One Year’s Reading for Fun
(published posthumously in 1960), which was a record in diary form of the
books that Berenson, Mary and Nicky read, and read to each other, and of the
ensuing discussions and conversations.
One principal thread which had been warp, weft and embellishment in the
tapestry of his life soon, however, snapped. On 23 March 1945, Mary Berenson
died. Their marriage had never been the easiest of relationships but they had
stuck together through thick and thin. Mary’s death did not, of course, leave him
alone: rather, now that the ménage à trois had become a ménage à deux, and
Mary’s constant criticisms and ability to enrage him became a thing of memory,
Berenson found, as he approached his eightieth birthday, a new energy and a
determination to write the books that he had for long half-planned but never
got round to writing.
Life at I Tatti soon resumed its traditional routine. The resumption of
international postal services in 1945 enabled the voluminous personal and business
correspondence to start again. Visitors became increasingly frequent. Berenson
and Nicky made plans for expeditions. Travel restrictions were gradually eased
and the faithful Welsh chauffeur, Parry, returned to the fold.The first tour was to
Siena in July 1945. Rome was revisited in spring 1947, the last stay there having
been in 1942. The annual summer exodus to the pine woods and cool seclusion
of Vallombrosa was resumed. Nonetheless, post-war I Tatti was a different place.
Clark recalled a noticeable change of atmosphere:
if the building had not changed, and the servants had not changed, the
atmosphere had. Vituperation had become very rare, explosions practically
unknown. This may have been partly due to the disappearance of Mrs B who
had a positive genius for enraging her husband whereas Miss Mariano had an
equal genius for mollifying him. But . . . it was due . . . more to a change in Mr
Berenson . . . he had regained in solitude the unclouded love of beauty which
shines out of his early letters; and he had ‘come to himself ’ quite literally . . .
(Clark OH p. 104).
Word soon got around among Allied troops of the existence of a remarkable old
man, of great but indeterminate age, of indefinable powers and cultural expertise,
a known anti-fascist who was both an American citizen and a Jew, yet who had
remained in Italy throughout the war and survived. Berenson had become a
legend and he was more than happy to play the part of a Living Legend – the
‘Sage of Settignano’. Many whom he had never met before – journalists in
particular – made their way up to I Tatti simply to have a look and to be able to
go home and say that they had met him. The visitors who were more welcome
were the friends, and relations of friends, from the us and Britain who were
serving in the Armed Forces in Italy, who brought news and gossip, as well as
1945–1947 241

English and American publications which had been banned from distribution in
Italy during the war. An early visitor was Robert Berenson, a second cousin who
was serving as aide-de-camp to General Clark. Lively, young and attractive, he
was married to a daughter of the couturier Schiaparelli. Berenson followed his
career with interest as he flourished in the world of international finance in Paris
and became a partner of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Under Nicky’s management, life at I Tatti settled into a strict and courtly
routine. Berenson worked in his study in the morning; came down for lunch at
1 pm precisely, spruce, alert, immaculately dressed, ‘his delicate blue veined hands
looking as fragile and translucent as porcelain’ (Alan Moorhead, A Late Education,
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, p. 154), when he would courteously talk to his
guests in precise and beautifully modulated phrases, but eat very little and drink
nothing; he took a rest in the afternoon; descended again for tea at 5.30; after tea
there was a walk in the garden; in the evening, dinner in black tie took place at
8 pm precisely, after which Nicky read aloud to him.
Berenson’s relationship with Italian friends and the Italian authorities was
established on a new footing. The old opponent of the Fascist order was now
regarded as a hero. In April 1945 he was asked to become the president of a special
commission for the restoration of Florence. The Italian intelligentsia discovered
an appetite for his writings and his publications were re-issued in Italian editions
and sometimes an Italian translation of a new work appeared before the English
version. In June 1945 he was asked to write the introduction to an exhibition
of French art in Florence which had been organised by the French Consul and
which was a survey from the early Renaissance to Modigliani. This increasing
private adulation finally found formal public expression in the early summer of
1948 when, first, he was granted the Freedom of the City of Florence by the
Mayor of Florence, thus becoming an Honorary Citizen; and then, just before
his eighty-third birthday, he was honoured by the Italian government for services
to Italian art at a ceremony at the Palazzo Strozzi, attended by a gathering of
international art historians and critics.To commemorate the event, a new bronze
medal was struck bearing his image in profile, and he was also presented with
a historic bronze medal by the early fifteenth-century sculptor and medallist
Matteo di Andrea de’ Pasti, which had come to light, buried in a wall of the
Tempio Malatestiana at Rimini, as a consequence of the Allied bombardment
there. (See Chapter Eight.)
Finance could have been a worry but by 1945 Berenson had discreetly come
to an arrangement with Georges Wildenstein, the gallery owner, whom he
knew well. He acted as Wildenstein’s expert on Italian Renaissance paintings,
in return for a substantial fixed retainer of some $50,000 per annum (something
like $2 million in today’s money), at a time when living in Europe was cheap
for anyone holding us dollars. The arrangement continued until Berenson’s last
days.Wildenstein’s gallery had been founded in Paris in 1910 by Georges’s father,
1945–1947 242

Nathan, who came from a family of Jewish cattle-dealers in Alsace Lorraine.

The family had flourished in art dealing and in horse racing and had established
galleries in London and New York as well as Paris. In 1940 they fled from Paris
to New York. Georges Wildenstein was not just a shrewd and successful art
dealer: he was a genuine scholar, the proprietor of the Gazette des beaux-arts, and
possessed one of the world’s superlative art reference libraries. Berenson also, in
all likelihood, earned additional fees from the less scholarly Italian dealer Count
Contini-Bonacossi who, before and after the war, sold several hundred paintings
to Samuel Kress and the Kress Foundation, Berenson supplying attributions for
a considerable number of them.
Whereas Berenson’s survival had made him something of a hero in post-war
Italy, some fellow Americans could not comprehend how he could have survived
unless he had been a collaborator. He had not, of course. Indeed, the contempt
which he had previously focused on the Fascists was now turned on the Soviet
Communists, whom he regarded as even more contemptible. Forever fascinated
by politics and international affairs in both contemporary and historical contexts,
his abiding target was totalitarianism in whatever form it raised its ugly head. A
more pressing worry was the us legislation which required the repatriation of
foreign-born us citizens living overseas.The future of I Tatti was also unresolved.
Fortunately, when in difficulty with any sort of legal or financial matter, he had
family help through another second cousin, Lawrence Berenson, who was an
able New York lawyer. During their last visit to the us in 1920–21, Berenson
and Mary had met three relations who had founded a law firm in Boston.
Lawrence was the youngest of them and he became Berenson’s loyal attorney
and investment counsellor, gaining in authority and stature over the years and
never asking for any payment for all the considerable help that he provided.
In 1946, Lawrence was able to report that, as a result of lobbying, the State
Department was willing to grant Berenson exemption from the requirement of
repatriation because of his advanced age and declining health.
Lawrence diligently worked on trying to resolve the question of the future
of I Tatti and acted as intermediary in discussions with Harvard. Berenson’s
will specifically left I Tatti and its contents to his alma mater but he wanted
a definitive commitment from them; they forever blew hot and cold as to
whether or not they would take it on. Their concern was the inadequate size
of the endowment that would come with it, for they did not wish to take on
a permanent liability and, knowing that Berenson was not fabulously wealthy
(appearances notwithstanding), that he had made significant legacies and that
the longer he lived the less any endowment was likely to be, they were cautious
about making an irrevocable commitment. For his part, Berenson had fixed ideas
about what he wanted for the future of I Tatti as a scholarly institution, ideas
that were rooted in nineteenth-century aestheticism and philosophy, rather than
contemporary ideas of academic art history deriving from Germany, and he was
1945–1947 243

anxious lest Harvard should accept his bequest and then, when they had control
of it, completely ignore the free-ranging humanist values that he held most dear.
If, for the eighty-year-old Berenson, the immediate post-war years consisted
mostly of picking up old threads, or of weaving old and new together, for Clark,
then nearly forty-five years old, there were just as many threads to cut or unravel
as there were to pick up.
A few days after war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, the National Gallery
reopened with an exhibition of selected masterpieces in two undamaged rooms.
Clark had, however, already decided that he did not wish to take on the task
of re-assembling the pictures that he had carefully dis-assembled in 1939. He
fully realised that post-war England was going to be a different place and that,
although not opposed to the changes, he would need to find a new role and
lifestyle within it. The announcement of his retirement as the director was made
in The Times in September and his last day of duty was 31 December 1945. The
post-war trustees made no attempt to persuade him to stay and appointed as
his successor the headmaster-ish, austere, bespectacled, ambitious Philip Hendy,
who was a different animal. Whereas the pre-war trustees had tended to be
drawn from the ranks of the ‘great’, in the sense of the aristocracy, the plutocracy,
royalty, the Cabinet and the socially significant, the post-war tendency was
to draw them from the ‘good’, in the sense of the meritocracy, academe, civil
service mandarins, industrial and establishment administrators and the socially
egalitarian. The one person who remained as a link between the old and the
new was Clark’s close friend David Balniel, who served as a trustee from 1935
to 1960 and was the chairman in 1938–9 and 1946–9. Simultaneously, Clark
also relinquished his duties as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, handing on that
mantle to Anthony Blunt, who held the post for twenty-seven years and is now
remembered more for being a Soviet spy than a highly distinguished pillar of the
post-war art establishment.
Clark’s time-consuming wartime committee work also came to an end,
although his experience and expertise were still sought. He was a founder
member of the new Arts Council which emerged, under Keynes’s chairmanship,
from the wartime cema (see Chapter Six’s introduction); was a member of the
Royal Commission on Fine Art which advised the government on architecture
and the built environment; and was appointed to the board of the Covent
Garden Opera Trust. Before the war, opera at Covent Garden had been in the
hands of impresarios who rented the opera house for productions which they
bought in from the Continent. In between these events, the house was used for
films, lectures, cabarets and dancing. During the war, Covent Garden had been
leased to Mecca Ballrooms as a dance hall and, when the ending of the war
became a certainty, there were various competing interests who wished to have
control. In order to prevent Mecca from automatically continuing their lease
when it expired, a committee was set up to explore the possibility of establishing
1945–1947 244

a genuinely national opera company: in 1945 the Covent Garden Opera Trust
was established to make it a reality, also chaired by Keynes. Samuel Courtauld,
William Walton and Kenneth Clark were among the nine trustees. The idea was
that there should be a national lyric theatre presenting both opera and ballet,
and open all the year round. Making it happen was a large task requiring great
faith, much persuasion of vested interests, and support from the public purse.
However, the trustees succeeded and the reborn Royal Opera House opened on
20 February 1946 with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty in
a sumptuous production designed by Oliver Messel; then, on 11 January 1947,
Carmen was performed with an English cast and sets designed by Edward Burra.
If the National Gallery was one thread which Clark deliberately cut, and his
committee work was in some respects a continuation, an entirely new thread,
and one which was well timed and fortuitous, was Clark’s appointment, in July
1946, as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. It was a thread which proved
to have many long and varied strands stretching far into the future. The Slade
Professorship had been established in 1869 by the collector and philanthropist
Felix Slade, who also created studentships at the University of London which
developed into the Slade School of Art. Although the Oxford professorship was
associated with All Souls College, its duties were not onerous, being the delivery
of eight lectures a year to the public at large, and no one kept a strict count of
the number delivered. In the early days, appointees held the post for several
years rather than one, as is now the rule. Clark held the post for five years; his
immediate predecessor was Philip Hendy, his successor at the National Gallery,
who had held the post for ten years. John Ruskin had been the first, from 1870
to 1878. In his heyday Ruskin had been an unimpeachable authority on art and
social matters, but by the mid-twentieth century his tastes and style were at their
nadir. In art, he had championed the Pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic Revival
and in later life he had embraced theories of advanced, anti-capitalist, social
economics. His prose style was thick with moralising judgements and carefully
crafted purple passages. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Clark had become
interested in Ruskin and the chapter which he wrote on Ruskin in his Gothic
Revival was one of the early attempts to restore his reputation. Thus, to follow in
Ruskin’s footsteps, as Slade Professor, was a fulfilment as well as a challenge, and
Clark’s inaugural lecture was ‘Ruskin at Oxford’.
In his lectures over the next four years, Clark explored three separate themes,
all of which had been in his mind for some time and each of which saw eventual
publication.The Slade Professorship was, therefore, the point of departure for his
future role as writer, lecturer and broadcaster. Word of his skill as a lecturer soon
spread round Oxford and the handful that had attended his inaugural lecture soon
became an audience of several hundred. Indeed, by the time he was invited again
1945–1947 245

to be Slade Professor in 1961, so great was his reputation that the University had
to hire a theatre in Oxford in order to accommodate the anticipated audience.
The first theme that he explored was the response to landscape, a subject
which had interested him since the late 1920s and on which he had already
written a number of essays, including an introduction on Hogarth, Constable
and Turner for the government-sponsored exhibition Masterpieces of English
Painting, shown in Chicago and New York in 1946–7, which Clark attended
as a cultural ambassador for Britain. The ‘Landscape’ lectures were adapted for
publication, in 1949 as Landscape into Art.
His next topic was Rembrandt, Clark recalling that the artist had been one of
his first interests as a boy when he had come across C. J. Holmes’s book on the
artist (Holmes having been the director of the National Gallery and lectured on
Rembrandt in Oxford), and how he had made copies of Rembrandt etchings.
His third series of lectures was on classicism and romanticism, topics which he
had begun to explore in the early days of his friendship with Berenson.
In his lectures Clark’s personal aesthetic engagement with works of art was
always evident. He saw his subjects and individual artists as vital and living parts
of the history of ideas, and as standard-bearers for the march of civilisation. His
conversational style, his ability to connect the particular and the general, to put
across complex ideas in a way that was vivid and readily understood together
with his instinct for the harmonious sound and rhythm of the spoken word
made him a deservedly popular speaker. The Slade Professorship gave him the
opportunity to polish and perfect his instinctive skills.
The first post-war contact between Berenson and Clark came in March
1945 with Clark seeking to get in touch via the Italian Embassy in London.
Clark would have heard rumours during the war that the Berensons had left
Italy, although in February 1943, and again in April 1944, he heard from the
Crown Prince of Sweden that Berenson was alive and in good health, and still
in Italy. Berenson would have had no first-hand news about Clark. As soon as
international postal services were resumed, Berenson again took up his long-
established correspondences, including Clark, the judge and jurist Learned Hand,
the journalist and philosopher Walter Lippmann, Billy Ivins, who was the curator
of prints at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Alfred Frankfurter, the
art critic and editor of Art News.
Berenson had an insatiable desire for friendship. Sometimes he seized on
people who came his way by chance, such as the young art historian Fred Hartt,
and Ernest Hemingway. At other times he actively sought people out, such as
Rosamond Lehmann, simply because he had been impressed by one of her novels.
Clark and Berenson had a large number of mutual friends whose company they
enjoyed individually and jointly, and about whom they could exchange news
1945–1947 246

and gossip. They continued to introduce new friends to each other: sometimes
the encounter was fruitful; at other times it came to nothing, Henry Moore
being a case in point. However, Clark pursued two acquaintanceships of which
Berenson did not approve, and which were perhaps built more on opportunism
than genuine intimacy: with Somerset Maugham and Calouste Gulbenkian.
The novelist Somerset Maugham lived in considerable luxury in the South of
France, where in 1928 he had purchased an exotic Moorish villa at Cap Ferrat.
Although he had had to move back to England in 1940, he returned there in
1946. The Clarks were happy to accept his invitations to stay, even though the
atmosphere at the Villa was notoriously prickly, Clark later observing, ‘he said
he asked us to stay because we were the only people who put the lights out
when they went to bed. . . . although I am almost incapable of reading a novel,
some of my closest friends in the past have been novelists; perhaps they welcome
the company of someone who does not talk to them about their books’ (Clark
OH p. 114–17). Maugham was a keen collector with a particular sensitivity
towards modern and contemporary art, and Clark advised him on his purchases,
which included works by Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec. They also both enjoyed
the companionship of Graham Sutherland and his wife who lived nearby, the
Sutherlands having moved to Menton in 1947.
Clark had first met Gulbenkian in 1934 when he was the Director of the
National Gallery and when Gulbenkian had an idea to give his vast art collection
to the British nation (see Chapter Five’s introduction). Although it came to
nothing, he kept in touch with Clark, even in wartime. In 1942 he moved to neutral
Portugal, to Lisbon, and lived with his wife in a suite at the luxurious Aviz Hotel.
The future of his collection and his ever increasing fortune constantly exercised
his mind and he toyed with the idea of giving it to the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, dc. In the end he set up and endowed the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation in Lisbon for educational, artistic and scientific purposes and, after
his death in 1955, the Foundation established the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
to display his art collection. Clark’s first trip abroad after the war was not to Italy
and I Tatti but to Portugal. Subsequently, the Clarks were invited several times, en
famille, to Portugal by Gulbenkian and it crossed Clark’s mind that he might be
invited to be head of the Foundation. However, their friendship faltered when
Gulbenkian, wrongly, suspected Clark of siding with his son Nubar, who had
launched a law suit against his father.
For the Clarks there was one thread which, with Jane’s ill health and Clark’s
pursuit of his work and romantic amours, frayed but never broke: family life.
When the war ended, the Clarks moved from their Hampstead house, Capo di
Monte, which Clark remembered as small and damp, to a grand house opposite,
Upper Terrace House, with seven bedrooms, a walled garden and all ‘mod
1945–1947 247

cons’. It was a comfortable environment, with servants on hand, surrounded by

fresh open spaces and a village-like atmosphere; they remained there until they
purchased Saltwood Castle in 1953. Alan was seventeen by the end of the war
and in his last year at Eton, where he joined the territorial training regiment
of the Household Cavalry based at Windsor, but rather than pursue a military
career he immediately went up to Christ Church College, Oxford, to study
history under Hugh Trevor-Roper. Colin and Colette were thirteen and still at
boarding school. When Clark’s mother died in October 1946, his last parental
thread was finally broken.
Chronology

1944

August Allies enter Florence

1 September Friends from Florence come up to Fontanelle to visit
Berenson
2 September Berenson visits I Tatti
23 September Berenson and Nicky Mariano return to reside at I Tatti

1945

23 March Mary Berenson dies

Clark lectures in Sweden
April Berenson appointed President of Special Commission
for Restoration of Florence
Germans in general retreat from Italy
May War in Europe ends
National Gallery re-opens
June Exhibition of French Art in Florence
26 June Berenson’s 80th birthday
July Berenson visits Siena for four days
August Clark goes to Lisbon to see Gulbenkian
September Berenson and Nicky at Vallombrosa
Berenson and Nicky visit Venice for exhibition Five
Centuries of Venetian Painting
Clark’s retirement as Director of National Gallery
announced
December Berenson comes to an arrangement with Wildenstein
31 December Clark’s last day as Director of National Gallery

248
1946

8 July Berenson granted exemption from us repatriation law

Summer Clarks go to usa
July Clark appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford
August Clark family holiday in Portugal
Clarks go to Switzerland
Autumn Berenson and Nicky visit Siena, Pisa, Milan,Venice
October Clark goes to Washington and Chicago for exhibition
Masterpieces of English Painting
Clark’s mother dies

1947

March Clarks visit I Tatti and Paris

Spring Berenson and Nicky visit Rome
April Clark and children visit Portugal
Autumn Berenson and Nicky visit Rimini, Como, Milan, Genoa,
Viareggio, Lucca, Arezzo and Assisi
Clark and children visit Paris and Portugal without Jane
November Clarks visit I Tatti
Berenson visits Rome

249
1945–1947 250

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 21, 1945

Dear Kenneth
Yrs entrusted to the Ital. Embassy had not reached me yet,1 but Walker2 read me
what you wrote to him Feb. 19. I was glad to learn all was well with you despite
the loss of two houses, and that yr eldest son is so much child of the Time Spirit
as to be interested only in the act of war – I heard of your work in a great while
during these past five years, and now that the ordinary post is already working
better can I hope to hear fr. you directly and oftener.3 And send me (when
printed matter can go by post) everything you have published in these years of
occupation. I have heard yr. activities, & of Jane’s as well, but heard vaguely with
overtones & echoes. I shall be glad to receive clear accounts.
As for us I fear that I am within nine months of my 80th year.4 But my poor
Mary is I fear dying. It will be hard to support the loss, altho’ she has scarcely
been alive for the last year & more and that bit of life all aches & pains. – Nicky5
keeps fairly well & less bombed – her family having lost everything in Borgo S.
Jacopo have been living here with us, each helping to run the place – the house
has suffered little beyond broken glass, but the grounds and their walls a very
great deal. The best pictures are safe. But 32 that were taken to safety to Borgo S.
Jacopo were buried under the rubble.6 Excepting one that must have been near
the top and stolen. The rest have been recovered in various conditions. Some
are scarcely damaged, while others like the panels with Francesco di Gentile’s
Annunciaton will require painstaking repairs. (Luckily we have a restorer who is a
scholar as well as artist,7 and a dear friend to whom I am indebted for the transfer
of the best pictures and most irreplaceable books to a place of ‘imagined’, & what
turned out to be actual safety.) The picture that disappeared is the Flagellation
that I ascribed to Botticini and may be a complete restoration of a Castagno.8 As

1 Letter missing.
2 John Walker
3 Postal services between Italy and the uk were completely cut off during the war years. Following the
Allied victories in Italy during 1944, some mail was able to be delivered through diplomatic channels
but the regular post only began to function again from the spring of 1945.
4 Berenson was born on 26 June 1865.
5 Nicky Mariano
6 The house suffered a direct hit in August 1944. The Anrep family moved, during the summer of
1945, to an I Tatti estate house in San Martino a Mensola.
7 Giannino Marchig
8 For an illustration of this Flagellation see Mario Salmi, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico
Veneziano, Milan, 1938, pl. 177b, noted as ‘Bottega di Andrea del Castagno (?)’.
1945–1947 251

each gets restored it is brought here and placed where it was before. You speak
of coming here in the summer. Que Dieu nous exauce!9 By that time many if not
all will go back on their walls.
The books are all here. The library unheated is too cold to frequent.10 When
I come to look over shelf by shelf I may find books missing. The photos seem
complete. –
I was happy to learn that the N.G. has acquired the P. Morgan Giovanni
Di Paolos. They are charming as most is except those with the same subject
at Chicago.11 Other acquisition? Prince of Sweden12 sent new photo of a
Coronation which I had already listed as a Maso.13 & still believe to be by that
Nearest-to-Giotto painter.
With regard to Ital. works of art on the spot it seems difficult to understand
why they are not being brought back from their various hiding places – wh.
by the way hid them but doubtfully. The reason seems to be lack of transport.
However much is being done by natives as well as foreigners among them
conspicuously Croft-Murray14 and Pinsent15 (our architect) under the lead of
Fred. Hartt of Yale.16
Has much in our field been published in these dark years? Any news of Max
Friedlander17?
Affectionate great hugs to all of you.
Ever yrs
B.B.

9 ‘May God grant us our wishes!’

10 But not for long: the American army gave him heating oil which enabled the principal rooms of I
Tatti to be warmed.
11 The National Gallery bought, with a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund (nacf,
now called the Art Fund), in 1944, four predella panels in tempera on wood, by Givanni di Paolo,
which had previously belonged to Pierpont Morgan. They show scenes from the life of Saint John
the Baptist: The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, The Baptism of Christ, The Head of John the Baptist brought
to Herod and Saint John the Baptist retiring to the Desert (NG 5451–4). The panels have been associated
with an altarpiece dated 1454 of The Virgin and Child with Saints (New York, Metropolitan Museum
of Art) which includes Saint John the Baptist. They have no connection with the panels showing
episodes from the life of John the Baptist in the Institute of Fine Art, Chicago, which were acquired
in 1933 (Ryerson Collection).
12 Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf
13 Maso di Bianco, a pupil of Giotto; perhaps The Coronation of the Virgin now in the Museum of Fine
Art, Budapest.
14 Edward Croft-Murray
15 Cecil Ross Pinsent
16 Frederick Hartt
17 Max Friedländer
1945–1947 252

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 28, 1945

Dear Kenneth
You may have heard fr. Logan18 that Mary died on the 23d. Life was a burden &
death could be a release only & for her. For me it is breaking habits of over fifty
years in the making & not easy to get over habits of constant companionship. It
seems strange forlorn and incredible that Mary can no longer be my constant
pre-occupation reference & audience.
Please send word with my respectful compliments to the Crown Prince of
Sweden about Mary’s death and ask him to communicate it (if convenient) to
Naim Lofroth19 & to Countess Sigrid Schwerin.20
I feel dissipated because I have been doing no research, no writing since my
return to I Tatti.
You no doubt have heard of an interesting exhibition of local painting at
Siena.21 A French one is preparing here22 & a Cinquecento one.
Affectionate great hugs to you.
Ever yours
B.B.

18 Logan Pearsall Smith

19 Naima Lofroth, with a ‘fine figure and pug dog face’ (Mariano p. 10), was Berenson’s fierce and
humourless Swedish masseuse whose arrival at I Tatti, in about 1914, pre-dated that of Nicky
Mariano, who arrived in 1919. Lofroth always considered Nicky to be a rival. She was arrested and
expelled from Italy after getting into a dispute with a militiaman in 1940.
20 Countess Sigrid Ebba Mariana von Schwerin (1890–1971) was the third wife of the five-times
married Baron Ulf Nils Nilsson Trolle (1890–1948), whom she married in Copenhagen in 1932.
21 Soon after the liberation of Siena, the Pinacoteca reopened with an exhibition of paintings and
sculpture drawn from its collections and from churches in Siena and the provinces.
22 Following the restoration of relations between Italy and France, the French Consul in Florence,
Count Reynald de Simony, proposed an exhibition of French art from Florentine collections. The
exhibition, which opened at the Palazzo Pitti in June 1945, was a broad survey of French art and
featured 10 paintings by Cézanne from the private collectons of Loeser, Fabbri and Storni. Berenson
was asked to write the preface to the catalogue.
1945–1947 253

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
July 8 1945

Dear Kenneth
I was glad to receive yrs. of June 2223 forwarded by Elena Carandini. No I have
received no long letters and various items you entrusted to Nicolo Carandini to
be sent to me.24 I did receive a shortish letter25 in which you mentioned having
sent aforesaid.
Second class is not allowed yet but first class, e.g. private letters now come
regularly taking on the average about four weeks. I shall be glad to hear at length
all about yourselves. Your own intentions and news of the N.G.’s activities and
acquisitions in the last five years. Vague rumours have reached me of concerts.
Of ‘a picture of the week’ and just now of the re-opening of the NG with 50
pictures.26 Purchases too. Huge paintings of 17th and 18th century for instance27
– and Mary’s death has made me aware of my own condition. Si jeunesse savait &
si vieillesse pouvait. There is so much for me to do, and that I want to do, but time
will’o-the-whisps away from me and leaves me staring. There is on here a very
modest exhibition of French painting of the last five centuries. In eight days I
wrote a sort of preface to the catalogue. I am reserving a copy for the day when
I can send it to you. We expect to go to Vallombrosa in about a fortnight.
Love to all of you from Nicky and myself.
Yours B.B.

23 Letter missing.
24 Nicolo Carandini
25 Letter missing.
26 The National Gallery formally reopened on 17 May with a two-room exhibition of 50 canonical
works from the collection. The opening ceremony was attended by the King and Queen and the
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
27 Between 1940 and 1945 the National Gallery acquired more than 30 works by gift or purchase,
including Rembrandt’s Margaretha de Geer which was presented by the nacf in 1941 and had
featured as Clark’s first single-picture wartime exhibition. Two large-scale works were Giovanni
Paolo Panini’s Rome:The Interior of St Peter’s, before 1742 (NG 5362), purchased in 1942, and Nicolas
Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–4 (NG 5597), purchased in 1945.
1945–1947 254

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 29 1945

My Dear Kenneth
Thanks for the paper on L. Battista Alberti on Painting.28 I read the well-written,
informing suggestive pages with delight. You have a great gift for expository
writing of the real essay type. Do let me have a copy of the finished product and
indeed as soon as you can of anything else you have written during the last six
years. Also any N.G. photos, shadowgraphs and publications of interest to me –
and the library.
I hear the critics are already shouldering and elbowing for yr. post. The gods
forbid that the man gets it who was for some years Keeper of Paintings in the
Boston mfa – I can’t recall his name.29 Nor would Giov. di Paolennessy [sic]30
rejoice my heart.
I look forward to your papers on Piero della Francesca and L. B. Alberti.31
It is a subject wh. excites me and when we meet again, there might be some
discussions of the subject.
Affectionate greetings to you both. What about Jane and the boys? Nicky
sends saluti. Johnnie32 will tell you how we live here.

28 Clark had delivered a lecture, ‘Leon Battista Alberti on Painting’, to the British Academy in
November 1944. It was published in 1945 by Cumberlege, London, and is printed in essay form in
Clark’s The Age of Humanism, London: John Murray, and New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
29 Philip Hendy
30 Francis Russell has suggested that this must be a cryptic reference to John Pope-Hennessy, who
would then have been in his early thirties.
31 In 1953 Clark wrote to Cecil Grayson (1920–98), the Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford and
an authority on Alberti, ‘I have done no work on the subject for about fifteen years and so have
forgotten anything I ever knew, and I suppose it is too late for me to take up the subject again
although I have a large number of notes and unpublished articles’ (letter of 22 December 1953,
Clark Archive, Tate). Clark’s aspiration to write further articles and a book on Alberti remained
unaccomplished. Thanks are owed to Martin McLaughlin, the current Serena Professor of Italian at
Oxford, for information on Clark and Alberti.
32 Walker visited Europe in a semi-official capacity in summer 1945 and called on Berenson at I Tatti.
1945–1947 255

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 31 1945

Dear Kenneth
I dispatched a couple of days ago by post a letter in which I told you how much
I enjoyed reading your paper on Leo Battista Alberti on Painting. It refreshed my
mind on the subject and suggested many things I would like to discuss with you.
And I do look forward to the essay on Alberti and Piero della Francesca.
When I wrote that letter I had not discovered yr. lecture on the Engl. romantic
Poets and Landscape Painting.33 It is a charming causerie on a favourite theme.
I found two suggestions that are penetrating and far-reaching. The first is
that Romanticism was rooted in the Sublime. The second is that light thro’
its continuous changefulness ‘Brings into the Visual Arts that element of Time’.
And the further suggestion that perhaps that is why arts that exist only spatially
decayed in the 19th century. That is subject for a book, a book after my own
heart, which I hope you will find the leisure to write.
Make an effort to send me all you print. Give me news of Jane and of yr. boys
and take my affectionate greetings to both of you, mine and Nicky’s
Ever Yrs
B.B.

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
August 30th 1945

Dear Kenneth
Rumours reach me that you already have resigned the N.G. I congratulate you.
You will now be able to devote yourself to tasks more worthy of your gifts and
I look forward to the results.
In this note I want to ask you to find out and let me know where Wing
Commander raf Cooper34 can be reached. He is member (important I am told)

33 Kenneth Clark, ‘English Romantic Poets and Landscape Painting’, Memoirs and Proceedings of the
Manchester Literary Philosophical Society, vol. 85 (Session 1941–3), pp. 103–20.
34 Douglas Cooper
1945–1947 256

of the Allied-Art-Commission in Germany. I have never heard of him. Some

little time ago, he was in Milan and saw my dear friend Heydenreich,35 head of
the Art Institute in Florence. H. is eager to get work anywhere, best of all with
yours or our commission in Germany. Said Cooper spoke him fair, but has not
been heard of since and H. does not know how to reach him. You would be
doing a real kindness if you could let Heydenreich get in touch with Cooper,
either by writing to me or to him directly Via S. Andrea, 6, milan.
We are Nicky and I in her cottage buried in the forest, enjoying marvellous
views and delightful climate. Lots of books, some people and even leisure for
work. I am revising products of the last five years.
Tell me about yr. activities, Jane’s, yours and Allans [sic].
Affectionately B.B.

Dec. 1945
Capo di Monte,
Three Judges Walk,
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
I was so delighted to get your letters and most grateful for your kind words
about my opuscules.36 I have written a great deal more, decrying the war, but
most of it ephemeral.There was no time to settle down to solid work, and under
the circumstances one couldn’t have given one’s mind to it. Few people yet
realize what a ‘total war’ we are waging – far more so than our enemies. I will
send you a specimen of such ephemera, an article on art and democracy37 which
I shouldn’t have published unless forced to do so. It may amuse you.
However, I now hope for more leisure to write. I leave the Gallery at the end
of the year, and although I shall still have to do a certain amount of committee
work I shall be more or less free. Of course everybody supposes that I have left
the Gallery in hopes of – or on the promise of – a better job. It seems incredible
that anyone can exist except in service of the state – like Tang China, or business
in America. This makes it all the more necessary to fight a rearguard action on
behalf of the individual.

35 Ludwig Heydenreich
36 Diminutive of ‘opus’.
37 ‘Art and Democracy’, Cornhill Magazine, July 1945. Clark argued that market research and the
methods used to measure and quantify mass desires were instruments in the destruction of civilisation
‘as potent as the flying bomb and the tank’.
1945–1947 257

You can imagine that my last months of clearing up at the Gallery are very
exacting. You will probably have heard by now that my successor is to be the
gent of whom you formed such a low opinion when he was at Boston. He is
not ideal, but far the best in the field. The scholarly Waterhouse38 has a hatred
of the public which disqualifies him.You would not, I think, urge the claims of
Borenius39 and you have probably never heard of another candidate, Dr. Bodkin,40
a stage historian and bluffer with no pretensions to scholarship.
I had intended a long letter, but Ben Nicolson41 has just told me that he is
going to Italy tomorrow, so I will bring it to an end. I am giving him a few
photographs of recent acquisitions and some details, which may amuse you.
All love to Nicky, from us both.
Yours ever,
K

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
December 11th 1945

Dear Kenneth
Ben appeared yesterday bringing a batch of photos, yr. paper on Alberti with a
dear dedication and yr. letter, wh. I wish had been longer. Now that you may
dispose of more leisure you may feel like writing oftener, and at greater length.
I am delighted to learn that you are withdrawing fr. active life for a while. The
Brahmins42 divide life into nine parts. Till twenty one was being fitted to live.
From twenty to forty one wed oneself to the community. After forty one should
devote oneself to finding God, in modern speak one’s self.
I shall be keenly participating in all you become and do. I only wish I could
live to see you ten years hence.

38 Ellis Waterhouse
39 Tancred Borenius
40 Thomas Bodkin
41 Benedict Nicolson
42 Brahmin is the class of educators, law-makers, scholars and preachers in Hinduism. It is said to
occupy the first position among the four-caste system of Hinduism. Brahmins are also fundamental
in the Nine-God cult, called the Nine Divinities.
1945–1947 258

I am sending off to N.Y. the mss of an Introduction to a Diary, Rumour and

Reflection (1940–1944).43 Presumably they will appear in a few months, and
copies of each will go to you. Now I am going to revise my last word (so feeble)
on Art wh. I blocked out four or five years ago. All of these are less impersonal
than my previous publications, and the Lord knows how they will be received.
Best wishes to all of you for 1946.
Affectionately
B.B.

28 Dec 46
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB,
How very kind of you to send me the new edition of your beautiful Sassetta.44
I reread it recently and found it as fresh as the day it was written. May I also
take this opportunity of saying how very much we both enjoyed the article on
Placci.45 It was marvellously true and vivid, and we wait greedily for further
instalments of your memories.
It was a joy to have your news from Morra.46 He will doubtless describe to
you our house, children and way of life. He seemed chiefly impressed by my
corpulence, which is the mysterious result of our restricted nourishment. He
may also have told you that I had been in America. The Washington Gallery is
really very impressive (even if, on entering, a trifle oppressive), and I thoroughly
enjoyed my short visit there. I think you would enjoy Washington, but do not
recommend a tour in America: transport is too difficult and the spirit of liberty
manifests itself too violently.
We are always planning a visit to Italy and having to cancel it. The fact is that
during the terms I have to be lecturing at Oxford, and during the holidays we
cannot leave the children. However we are hoping to escape for a few days at

43 The book was first published in Italian in 1950 and in English in 1952. Bernard Berenson, Rumour
and Reflection, 1941–1944, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
44 Bernard Berenson, Sassetta: Un pittore senese della leggenda francescana, Milan: Electa, 1946. It was a
limited edition de luxe of the essay he first published in English in 1910 (London: Dent).
45 Berenson published a portrait sketch of his friend Carlo Placci (in Italian translation) which was
candid to the point of being considered defamatory, in Il Mondo, May and June issues, 1946; English
version, Horizon, June 1946. Placci had died in January 1941.
46 Umberto Morra
1945–1947 259

the end of March. You are so often in our thoughts that it is incredible that we
haven’t been able to get to i Tatti yet – but we haven’t even been to Paris. Please
give our fondest love to Nicky.
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth

Dec. 1946
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB,
We are longing to come to see you and were very sad that we couldn’t come in
the summer. But we shall come in March.
Umberto will give you our news – also a small token of love and gratitude
and admiration; a symbol of the overthrow of tyrants.
Yours ever
K

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec 28 ’46

Dear Kenneth
Thanks for the note brought by Morra, and the gifts.The Pollaiuolo medal.47 And
yr. essays on Constable’s Wain,48 and on him Hogarth and Turner.49 Admirable, as
thought, as appreciation and as pleasing. I could envy you.

47 There is no record of such a medal, or anything close to it, at I Tatti.Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists,
attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo a medal commemorating the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478
when Lorenzo Il Magnifico and his brother Giuliano de’ Medici were attacked in the Duomo in
Florence. Giuliano was killed but Lorenzo managed to escape and successfully exiled his enemies,
gaining popular support from the citizens of Florence.The medal was, in fact, modelled by Bertoldo
di Giovanni and four casts were made by another medalist, Andrea Guacialoti, in Prato. The double-
sided bronze medal depicts Lorenzo on one side and Giuliano on the other.
48 Kenneth Clark, John Constable: The Haywain with an introduction by Sir Kenneth Clark, Gallery Books
No. 5, London: National Gallery, 1944.
49 Clark wrote the introductory essay for the exhibition of 66 paintings by Hogarth, Constable and
1945–1947 260

I have had emphatic praise of yr. lectures in America.

We shall be glad to see you. Let us know as soon as may be when you expect
to come. I Tatti has become something like Mrs Kahns50 in New York, and I’d
rather see you both without too many other guests.
All good wishes for 1947.
Yours
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
January 14, 1947

Dear Kenneth
Umberto brought back glowing accounts of you, your children and your
beautiful house. He made me eager to see it, but more still you.
Do yr. best to come back not later than early April.
I heard of yr visit to the States fr. Johnnie, fr. David,51 fr. Adie [sic] all so happy
to see you. We too promised ourselves to go over in the autumn but every day
makes me feel more doubtful that when it comes to the act I shall be able to
do it. I fear discomfort & even more fatigue. I am afraid of myself. Once there I
should want to see everybody and everything.
The next five months will leave me no leisure for more new writing. They
will be wasted on revising translations seeing one’s prose thro’ the press and
quarrelling with publishers.
Nicky joins me in loving greetings.
Affectionately
B.B.

Turner, Masterpieces of English Painting, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1946
and at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in January 1947. The paintings came principally from
the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the
Royal Collection. It had required an Act of Parliament to permit the sending of works from national
collections overseas. The Clarks were present in an official capacity at the opening in Chicago ‘to
represent the London Museums’ (Art Institute of Chicago, press release, 23 September 1946).
50 Addie Kahn
51 David Finley
1945–1947 261

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Febr. 17 1947

Dear Kenneth
Eric Zahle52 of the Copenhagen Museums writes as follows: – ‘I have suggested
to the English Danish Society to make an exhib. of Engl. Painting fr. the 18th
and first part of the 19th cent. It should of course be as good as possible now
the London Museums are enabled to lend Engl art for exhib. abroad. I think it
important not to submit completely to the kind assistance of the Brit. Council.
When going to London about March 10, I would like to approach some
personalities over there who could give time knowledge and authority to the
undertaking. Who would also understand that quality is the best propaganda.’
It seems they have had an exhib of recent Engl. Painting.53 I should be grateful
if you could do something for Zahle. I am writing to him to address himself to
you. His address is Haelegaardsvei 47 Hellerup.
I hope nothing will prevent yr. coming. I look forward to yr. visit.
Ever yrs
B.B.

5 April ’47
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
Our visit to I Tatti was one of the great experiences of my life and I cannot
tell you how moving it was to find you so well and so calm in the midst of
that hortus conclusus of civilization.54 We shall never forget the kindness and

52 Eric Zahle (1898–1969), the Danish art historian, specialised in Italian Renaissance art and
contemporary Danish art. He was the Inspector of the National Gallery of Art (1931–49) and then
the Director of the Museum of Industrial Art (1949–66), both in Copenhagen.
53 An exhibition, Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery, organised by the British Council, toured
9 European capitals between January 1946 and February 1947 and was shown at the Raadhushallen,
Copenhagen, April–May 1946.
54 The image of the enclosed garden is found in Western Christian art from the early 15th century
onwards. Symbolically it refers to Mary’s virginity and her conception of Christ by the Holy Spirit,
1945–1947 262

affection with which you received us.55 It was particularly good of you to give
up a morning to taking us in to the doors,56 and to pour out your wisdom to us
in such abundance.
You can hardly imagine what an impression Italy makes after eight years
in this island – and especially after the squalor and misery of the last winter.
The eye has become so starved, and there seems to be no possibility of new
life. Everything is either filthy and crumbling, or bleak and thread bare to the
last degree.57 The sight of the olive trees and blossom in the country, and of
the vigorous, confident architecture of the town was more impressive, at this
moment, than any individual works of art.
We have returned to find it still raining and very cold. Every one is naturally
cross and exhausted, and the prosperity of Florence seems very remote. We are
longing to come back, and if god is good we shall do so in September: but I shall
not be surprised if by that time we are all forbidden to leave England.
Spurred on by Jane I am arranging to send you various photos; also my note
on Miss Sitwell’s war time poetry.58 I have already spoken to my publisher about
your autobiographical glimpses – it seems too ridiculous that they are not being
printed.
I am off with the twins to Portugal on Tuesday. Poor Jane cannot come as the
doctor wants to keep her under observation. We shall be very lost without her,
but it will be good for the children to escape from this climate for a time.

free from sin – the enclosed garden being closed off from the outside world.The term hortus conclusus
is derived from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse;
a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.’ King Solomon’s nuptial song to his bride was seen as an
allegory of the loving union of Christ and the Church.
55 In January Nicky had written to Jane: ‘Dearest Jane, your letter has just come and delights us with
the good news of your definite decision to come. We expect you on the 16th (I suppose at 10 in the
evening?) and Parry will meet you at the station. It is a very short visit if you have to leave on the
21st but anyway better than nothing! We can get coffee here now and also tea though neither of very
superior quality’ (card to Lady Clark, Tate Archive).
56 No doubt Lorenzo Ghiberti’s ‘Paradise’ Doors of the Baptistery, Florence. (See Ch. 8, n. 13).
57 The winter weather of 1946–7 was harsh all over Europe and the effects in Britain were especially
demoralising. Heavy snow from January onwards severely disrupted roads and railways. Power
stations closed for lack of fuel and the domestic and industrial electricity supply was sometimes
cut off completely. Radio broadcasts were limited, television services suspended, magazines stopped
publishing and newspapers were cut in size. In February there were fears of a food shortage. The
subsequent thaw caused widespread flooding with more than 100,000 properties damaged. Industrial
and agricultural production was severely affected. A currency crisis and tight currency controls
followed in the latter part of the year.
58 Kenneth Clark, ‘On the Development of Miss Sitwell’s Later Style’, Horizon (July 1947), pp. 7–17. In
the 1940s Clark had developed a close friendship with Edith Sitwell, for whom he had a tender and
deep admiration, and they corresponded at length, including handwritten copies of her new poems.
1945–1947 263

Once more, my deepest gratitude for that inspiring and inspiriting week at i
Tatti which has given us back hope and the possibility of a good life.
With much love to Nick,
Ever yours affectionately
K
Paris was beautiful but dead – & full of swindles. But the Louvre is going to be
most beautiful and the changes are all intelligently and tastefully done.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
April 23, 1947

Dear Kenneth
A few days ago I received from you a parcel containing various things.
First an essay on the developments of Sitwell’s later style. It interested me all
the more as the subject was new to me.Your quotations justify yr. contribution.
Your references and quotations to & of Yeats remind me that in that dawn of
history you promised to make for me a selection of Yeats that I should (& could)
read.59
Then there was the photo of the Cook earlyish Benozzo. Did you not tell me
it has gone to the NG?60 Or is it still yours? The small Byzantanising early Bellini
is the one that had belonged to old Mond, did it not?61 And tell me about the
latish Bellini heads of an elderly man and a youth. Seine Heimat seine Sipschaft!62
The illuminated fragments look like Lippo Vanni – except the Ascension &
probably the Nativity.63

59 See Ch. 5 n. 23 and letter from BB to Jane of 16 January 1934.

60 Probably Benozzo Gozzoli, The Virgin and Child with Angels, c. 1447–50 (NG 5581), which had been
acquired by Sir Francis Cook in 1881 and purchased by the National Gallery in 1945 as by a follower
of Fra Angelico.
61 See n. 72.
62 A reference to the poem by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), ‘Der Asra’ which has the line ‘Deine
Heimat, deine Sippschaft’ (Your origin, your lineage).
63 Lippo Vanni, Christ taking leave of the Apostles and Christ and the Apostles, Barnaba da Modena, Nativity,
All three belonged to Clark.
1945–1947 264

We have had a visit from Freya Stark who showed me the beginning of a
kind of spiritual autobiography, pure poetry.64 The Alan Moorheads too.65 I had
read his Eclipse and now he has left me his Montgomery which narrates like the
Arabian Nights and yet has touches of deep reflection and psychology.
I am finishing Trevor-Roper’s ‘Death of Hitler’. It is the first book in English
on the events of the last ten years with an historical perspective & dares to
stigmatise and judge in the grand manner.66 Nicky has read me aloud Iris Origo’s
‘War in Val d’Orcia’67 a most convincingly vivid account of happenings around
her home. I admire it greatly and welcome it altho’ it probably will prevent the
publication of my diary.68
Love to you both
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Till May 20, address Hotel de la Ville,Via Sistina, Rome.
Apr. 30. 1947

Dear Jane
Thanks for yr. note & the photos. I fervently hope yr. health will be completely
restored & that you will not have to bother about it for years to come – I had
an enchanted account fr. Philomene Divonne69 of Kenneth’s visit with the twins.
Ever so many thanks for photos. Yr. primitive is by Pietro Lorenzetti in
every probability. Possibly if I examine the original I might suspect the hand of
‘Ugolino Lorenzetti’ but I doubt it.70
The details of N.G. paintings are invaluable. If you come across others do send
them.

64 Probably a reference to Freya Stark’s Traveller’s Prelude, London: John Murray, 1950, an account of
her childhood in Devon and Italy, in her words ‘a bare jumble written with no arrangement of words
or style or matter’ (p. 335).
65 Alan Moorhead
66 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Macmillan, 1947.
67 Iris Origo
68 See n. 43.
69 Philomène de la Forest Divonne
70 Pietro Lorenzetti (c.1280–1348), Madonna and Child.
1945–1947 265

We are leaving the 3rd of May for Rome via Siena. It is the final plunge I am
preparing to take into a social world, & ‘the Lord only knows how I dread it.’ If
only I could go to Rome as unknown as I was when I went there 60 years ago,
how eagerly I should look forward to it!
Incline yr. hearts toward Casa al Dono end of Sept. It would such fun to see
Pisa and Siena together.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

3 May 47
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

Dear BB,
We were delighted to get your letters. I came back from Portugal about a week
ago, after an enchanting holiday with the children to find Jane feeling rather
miserable. The impact of our returning was rather exhausting but now that the
children are all back at school and peace is restored she is resting, and I believe
will pick up in a few weeks.
I am so sorry that my secretary sent you the photos without writing – or
rather let me write – on the back. The Benozzo is, alas, not ours but the N.G.71
The small Bellini is ours, and belonged to the Monds.72 The double portrait is ex
Kinnaird, and belongs to a dealer named Leger.73 It is better than it looks in the
photo, and I had a fancy that the older man was intended to be a posthumous
or ideal portrait of Mantegna. I can’t remember which of our very numerous
illuminated fragments you were sent. The ones from a Sienese book do seem
to be Lippo Vanni, there is a St. John Baptist by Giovanni di Paolo, and a whole
book by Nic. da Bologna.74 They all belonged to Dennistoun who bought them
as material for a history of Christian art which he afterwards made over to Lord
Lindsay and wrote the Dukes of Urbino instead – rather unfortunately as he was

71 See n. 60.
72 Possibly Giovanni Bellini, Pagan Rite, c.1500 See Ch. 9 n. 180.
73 The picture which belonged to Lord Kinnaird was sold at Christie’s, London, on 21 June 1946.
Catalogued as by Niccolo Rodinelli, it was described in The Times saleroom report as ‘another small
panel showing a middle-aged man in black with a younger man, similarly attired by his side’. It sold
for £1995, presumably to the Leger Gallery.
74 See Clark Sale at Sotheby’s, London, June 1984. Clark sold 18 miniatures by Niccolò da Bologna, on
18 June 1962 at Sotheby’s, Lot 125. They were bought for £3000 by a dealer from Milan.
1945–1947 266

the better scholar.75 We are overjoyed that you think well of our Lorenzetti-ish
Madonna – I had thought of Ugolino-L., but could not see enough Duccioesque
elements. In any case it really is a most beautiful work, and I was glad to rescue it
from Bond St. – I swapped it for a Bonnard for which I had paid £250.76
We are thinking of you in Rome and envying you your walks and drives, if
not your social occasions. We are longing to return to Italy at the first possible
opportunity. One pleasant result of Jane’s illness is an excuse to escape from
almost all social commitments. She is perfectly happy in the garden and with
the visits of a few old friends, and I have time for writing and sorting, which I
haven’t been able to undertake since the war. The Fine Arts Commission77 and,
Covent Garden78 give me my peck of [illegible].
I have asked the Director of the Lisbon Gallery to send you photos of the
Piero St. Augustine which completes the saints of the St. Agostino Altarpiece. It
now remains to find the Madonna.79
Much love to Nicky. Jane says she will write soon
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth

Hotel de la Ville
Roma80
May 12, 1947

Dear Kenneth
I found yr. letter here & should have been delighted with it but for what you
write about Jane’s health. It concerns me deeply & I hope she will take every
measure to improve. She must find energy enough to join us at Casa al Dono late

75 See Ch. 5 n. 13.

76 Clark acquired the Bonnard from Wildenstein’s, Bond Street, London, in 1947.
77 The Royal Fine Art Commission was established in 1924 to advise the government on architecture,
urban design and public space in England, in order to influence and champion the creation of well-
designed buildings, spaces and places. It was succeeded in 1999 by the Commission for Architecture
and the Built Environment (CABE).
78 Covent Garden Opera House Trust; see Introduction above.
79 Kenneth Clark, ‘Piero della Francesca’s St. Augustine Altarpiece’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 89,
no. 533 (August 1947), pp. 204–9, identified the panel in Lisbon as belonging to the altarpiece.
Commissioned in 1454 for the High Altar of S. Agostino in Borgo Sansepolcro, it was to consist of
several panels with ‘images, figures, pictures, and ornaments’. The central portion of the altarpiece
is lost but four lateral panels with standing saints survive: St Michael the Archangel (National Gallery,
London), St Augustine (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), St Nicholas of Tolentino (Museo
Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan) and St John the Evangelist (Frick Collection, New York).
80 See Ch. 6 n. 8.
1945–1947 267

Sept. & with you we shall go a-Roming via Pisa and Siena, & end up here. We
have never been in Rome together. Try to keep Oct. free. We have an apartment
here at the top of the hotel, wh. itself is on top of Rome. A huge terrace extends
fr. my bedroom where I behold the Kingdom of the Earth. After sunrise Rome
looks a rosy flower bed & the cupola of St. Peter’s like a pearl.
I have seen few people thus far. I get tired quickly, & have to lie up to rest
hours together. I have already been to the Borghese and enjoyed its great
paintings of the Cinquecento – except that I was greatly disappointed in the
Caravaggios.81 A large number are now temporarily there forced, brutal, hard
without being plastic, but startling that such things should have been done while
Titian,Tintoretto and Paul Veronese were still painting.82 I have done my best for
greater part of my life to like or at least to do justice to Caravaggio, the Carraccis
etc. etc. & now I have to confess failure. Only less distasteful but more infantile
and more boring are the average Trecento product & provincial Quattrocentish.
Give me what is called the Classical & the great Florentines. By Classical I do
not mean things that look Graeco-Roman but everything done in the great
tradition fr. Early Dynasty Egyptian down to Degas, Renoir & Cezanne. I will
even admit the freaks whose freakishisness is but a comment on the great.
Nic. da Bologna interests me to an unusual degree & I should be grateful for
photos of yours. We expect to stay here till 26.You can write here till 20th.
Love from Nick and myself to you both.
Yours
B.B.
The two finest Goyas in existence, King & Queen of Spain previously at
Capo di Monte are temporarily shown at Villa Borghese.83

81 The Borghese Gallery (in the former Villa Borghese) displays the fine collection of paintings,
sculpture and antiquities begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), the nephew of Pope
Paul v (1605–21). Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Bernini and a keen collector of works by
Caravaggio.The Borghese also has major works by Raphael,Titian, Correggio, Domenichino, Lotto.
82 Caravaggio was born c. 1571. Titian died in 1576;Veronese in 1588; Tintoretto in 1594.
83 There are, in the collections of the Musei Nazionali de Capodimonte, Naples, a full-length portrait
of Charles IV as Colonel of the Life-Guards and another of Queen Maria-Luisa in Court Dress. The
versions of these portraits which are indisputably by Goya are in the Prado, Madrid, painted in 1799.
Those in the Capodimonte are among the six copies made by Augustin Estève, in 1800, and which
have sometimes been inventoried as originals by Goya. They were, it seems, intended as gifts for
Napoleon but they were never despatched to France. Estève (1753–1830) grew up and studied in
Valencia. He became a portraitist to the royal family in Madrid and was much influenced by Goya,
making numerous copies of Goya’s portraits. In June 1800, the King named Estève ‘Painter to the
Court’.
1945–1947 268

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
May 31, 1947

Dear Kenneth
The pile of letters & parcels accumulated here during absence contained photos
of the Fitzwilliams Laocoon.84 Ever so many thanks.
But a photo. of the Lisbon Piero is still lacking.85
This forwards to a show of paintings & sculptures from the provinces wh.
were here for repairs.86 It is a fascinating collection & I wish you were here to
enjoy it with me. Not yet had time to go to the Flemish show at the Strozzi
Palace.87 Said to be fine.
Yesterday – our first after returning – head of B.M Print department to lunch.
As dull as good & doubtless very good at his job.88 No one would guess it fr. his
appearance or speech. He has not yet phot’d the Benozzos you told me about.
Is Jane better?
Affectionately B.B.

[Typewritten postcard from Alda von Anrep to: Sir Kenneth Clark/
Upper Terrace House/ Hampstead NW8 [sic]/ Inghilterra]
Biblioteca Berenson
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
June 3rd 1947

Dear Kenneth
This is to ask you what we are supposed to do with your vol. on the Giotto
Exhibition which you left here without instructions about it. We want to know

84 The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has two Laocoön subjects in their collection, one a small
bronze sculpture dated c. 1600 and the other a 16th-century Italian woodcut, Caricature of the Laocoön
Group, attributed to Niccolo Boldrini after a design by Titian.The reference is probably to the latter,
which is also known as Monkey Laocoön (it depicts 3 apes instead of the male figures).
85 See n. 79.
86 An exhibition of recently restored works of art was held at the Accademia, Florence, in 1947,
organised by the Soprintendente, Ugo Procacci.
87 See Catalogo della mostra d’arte fiamminga e olandese dei secoli XV e XVI: Palazzo Strozzi, March–
October 1947.
88 Arthur (‘Hugh’) Popham (1889–1970) had succeeded A. M. Hind in 1945.
1945–1947 269

if we are to send it or if it is supposed to go on sitting here quietly waiting for

your return. The latter will not do it any harm. Regarding your eventual stay
here in the neighbourhood, with the children next spring, I did speak about it to
the Haslips89 and they thought the plan might work out very well and that they
were going to write to their sister in London to get into touch with you. I do
not know if anything of the kind did happen. Anyhow the ville is charming in a
beautiful position and with an enchanting garden and very near here.You know
that the most beautiful thing one can now see around here is the completely
burned out Villa Gamberaia at Settignano90 which you of course know very well.
But you could never even distantly imagine what it is now because the garden,
amazingly enough, was not destroyed. So the ruin of the house is standing
amongst those marvellous trees. It is like a romantic vision from another world
with higher vibrations than ours are.You will see it when you come, it is worth
while a journey through Europe/ I hope you are well particularly Jane. Give her
my love and keep the other part of it for Yourself.
Devotedly
Alda

89 Joan Haslip (1912–1994) grew up in Florence and for many years lived at Bellosguardo, on a hill
south of Florence in a property which she rented. Her father was Irish, her mother Austrian and
Joan established herself as a prolific biographer of European notables such as Catherine the Great,
Elizabeth of Austria and Hester Stanhope.
90 The Villa Gamberaia, close to I Tatti, is situated on a much favoured and strategic south-facing site
with remarkable views over Florence, and with a copious water supply. Celebrated for its garden in
the Tuscan Renaissance style, where water features prominently, the Villa has a long and romantic
history. Originally a farmhouse, owned by Matteo Gamberelli, a stonemason, the house was rebuilt
in the late 16th century by a wealthy Florentine aristocrat who eventually went bankrupt. In 1717
the villa and grounds were acquired by the Marchese Capponi who gave the gardens much of
their present form and character. In the 1800s the villa, together with the much smaller Villa di
Doccia, formed part of an estate inherited by Lord Westbury, a compulsive gambler. La Gamberaia
was purchased in 1898 by Princess Giovanna Ghyka, the widow of a Romanian nobleman and the
sister of Queen Natalie of Serbia. She lived there as a recluse with a companion called Miss Blood.
Obsessed by ageing, she allowed no one to see her and she walked in the gardens, for which she
had a passion, wearing a veil and usually at dusk. Among the few people whom she visited were the
Berensons. Edith Wharton, Janet Ross and Iris Origo were among the occasional visitors and
Nicky Mariano was taken to see her on several occasions as a child. On the death of Princess Ghyka
in 1924, the American-born Baroness Mathilda von Ketteler purchased La Gamberaia and continued
to maintain and develop the gardens, possibly aided by Cecil Pinsent. In 1944 the retreating German
soldiers burned the villa to ensure that Allied officers could not use it as a headquarters. In 1952
Baroness von Ketteler gave the property to the Holy See, who in 1954 sold it to Marcello Marchi,
who carried out a complete restoration of the gardens, and in whose family ownership the property
continues.
1945–1947 270

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
June 4 1947

Dear Jane
Delighted to read that you have forgotten you were supposed to be ill. I hope no
reminders, no matter how slight will occur. I am delighted that you have taken
the Haslip’s house from September 25. We shall be at Vallombrosa still: If you are
alone you must to join us there for a couple of days. If with friends then for the
day. And next Easter! I look forward to the children.
Sybil [sic]91 is here and as merry as a lark. She is in nothing like so bad shape
as I was led to believe. She walks briskly & babbles and ripples like a sparkling
brook. I am enjoying her hugely. Cecil Pinsent has been with us ever since our
return. Do you know him? He architected I Tatti La Foce (of the Origos) many
places in Maremma & is a philosopher and ascetic sage.
Have already seen two exhibitions opened during our absence. The one of
sculptures and paintings from country churches altogether charming. A fabulous
show of Flem. pictures.92 The Turin van Eyck beyond all praise.93 Good the Van
der Goes, the Rogiers, the Memling portraits. As for the bulk of the work they
should comfort us by demonstrating that great artists work as rare in 15th & 16th
centuries as in ours – up to the Picasso finimondo.94
Love to you all
B.B.

91 Sibyl Colefax
92 See n. 87.
93 Jan van Eyck, St Francis receiving the Stigmata, c. 1427, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.
94 Italian for ‘chaos’ (lit. ‘end of the world’).
1945–1947 271

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
June 1947

Dear BB,
Here is a belated copy of my inaugural lecture as Slade Professor.95 It comes at
an unfortunate time when interest in Ruskin is concentrated on his failure as a
husband, and people are surprised that I can take him seriously as a writer on
art.96
About the Lisbon Piero: I wrote to [illegible] when I was in Portugal, but had
no reply. I am now publishing it in the Burlington, but as soon as they have done
with my prints I will send them on to you.97
Alas, I have no fine quattrocento drawing of the kind you refer to: I have
a niceish Milanese drawing – perhaps Andrea Solario – which I will get
photographed and send.
Would you like the catalogue of the Hilliard exhibition in the V.&A.98 – well, I
will send one on chance as it is really very well done and Hilliard is charming in
his insular way. I am writing an article on Roger for the DNB99 – a great sweat
but it will soon be over.
Love to Nicky,
K

95 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin at Oxford: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 14
November 1946, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
96 Sir William James, The Order of Release:The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais told
for the first time in their unpublished letters, London: John Murray, 1947.
97 See n. 79.
98 The Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition on Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, commemorating
the 300th anniversary of the birth of Hilliard, opened in May 1947; catalogue by Graham Reynolds.
99 Clark wrote the entry on Roger Fry for the Dictionary of National Biography, vol: The Twentieth
Century 1931–1940, published November 1949.
1945–1947 272

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov di Firenze)
July 16 . 47.

Dear Kenneth
Thanks for the lecture on Ruskin & the note enclosed – The lecture is appreciative,
judicious, distinguished and agreeable all together. No easy achievement. It
makes me ask whether you could do better than devote your leisure years to an
un-hagiological interpretation of the whole Ruskin. His significance as a human
soul, as a seer, & as an interpreter is still misunderstood, or not understood. Nor
indeed did he understand himself except in Pisgah sights.100
I saw him once. It was in the Venice Accademia, his last visit there 88 or 89
of last century. He was accompanied by a rather fattish yg. man & triple my size
ruddy with beaming placid eyes. I believe it was Collingwood.101 Indiscreetly I
approached too close. Ruskin turned furiously & gave or rather darted a look
more of hate than mere displeasure.The exact look – and looks – of Titian’s Paul
iii (alone) of the Naples Gallery.102
I look forward to yr. article on the Lisbon Piero & the photo when you can
spare it. I should be grateful as well for the photo of the drawing you attributed
to Solario & as for the Hilliard catal. great would be my rejoicing to receive it.
He has been a great pet of mine for the last 50 years at least. What a Van Dyck,

100 See Ch. 4 n. 41.

101 William Gershom Collingwood (1854–1932) was an author, artist, antiquary and Professor of Fine
Arts at Reading University. He studied at University College, Oxford, where he met John Ruskin.
For many years Collingwood dedicated himself to helping Ruskin, staying at Brantwood in the
Lake District as Ruskin’s assistant and travelling with him to Switzerland. Ruskin admired his
draughtsmanship, so Collingwood studied at the Slade School of Art between 1876 and 1878. In
1883 he and his wife settled near Brantwood. Collingwood edited a number of Ruskin’s texts, and
published a biography in 1893. He founded the Ruskin Museum in 1901. He was a great climber,
swimmer and tireless walker. He was friendly with, and influential on the children’s writer Arthur
Ransome. Collingwood’s son was the famous philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood.
102 The Museo di Capodimonte has two portraits, both autograph, of Paul iii, one showing him with
his two grandsons (1546), the other of him sitting alone in a cap (1543).
1945–1947 273

and how little of a Holbein! And what a good thinker & writer on his art! and
craft. So you are writing an article on St. Roger da Fry! Orate pro nobis, Veritas
& Fides.103
Yours with love to you both
B.B.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec. 8, 1947

Dear Kenneth
Since you left I have had no word fr. either you or Jane. Vague & I trust
unsubstantial rumours have reached me that she has been far from well. Also that
Balcarres104 had a miserable time getting back & ill when he did. Write (if you
can find the time) & tell me.
Thank you for the book on Samuel Palmer an illustrator who hitherto has
been to me a mere name.105
We got back fr. Rome a fortnight ago having enjoyed ourselves over much.
Consequently I have been below my so reduced normal level. lumbago. insomnia.
depression. worry toute la [illeg]. I am beginning to emerge – in Rome I sightsaw
a great deal going fr. church to church, to ruin to ruin & museum to museum
enjoying everything classic to say 1830. Since then art has fled Italy, to France for
a hundred years, & since to the Moon.

103 ‘Orate pro nobis’ (Pray for us), the Response to the invocation of the saints in the Litany of the
Saints, and prayers for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the angels and all the martyrs
and saints. ‘Veritas et Fides’ (Truth and Faith) is almost certainly a reference to the closing words of
a lecture delivered by Fry at the Royal Institute of British Architects, 20 May 1921, ‘Architectural
Heresies of a Painter’: ‘I am the victim of a perhaps quite absurd faith – the faith, namely, that the
aesthetic pursuit is as important in the long run for mankind as the search for truth.’
104 David Balniel
105 Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer:The Visionary Years, London: Kegan Paul, 1947.
1945–1947 274

In Rome we saw the enigmatic Hinks,106 Perkins of the Brit. School107 &
Bottrall.108 My compatriots of course. All the Italians, some French heads of
schools, & I received Germans.
Freya Stark is staying with us, wonderful woman, such good company & so
divinely gifted as a writer, as you will see if you read the book she is reading
aloud to us.109
Every good wish to all of you for a Happy New Year & a satisfactory 1948.
Affectionately
B.B.

15 Dec ’47
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
We were delighted to get your letter. I am afraid I am not a letter writer at the
best of times, and last term my time was certainly taken up with my Oxford
lectures and other work, and I have only just got free. Poor Jane is snowed under
with Christmas and family arrangements. Our new form of society with all its
forms, coupons, rations etc. greatly complicates life, and there is no one left to do
the simplest things for one. The young ladies who used to stick photographs on
card board are all either called up or writing theses on industrial psychology, so
that one has to do all mechanical jobs for oneself.
It is true that David got appendicitis on the way home, and had to be rushed
off to a doctor. He couldn’t be operated on at once, and lay for ten days in our
house. After all, it has subsided, and they have decided not to operate. Jane, I am
glad to say, has been quite well, though rather exhausted.
I am glad you found Sam Palmer of interest. He has had a great influence
on the younger English painters – & illustrators as you rightly call them. It is

106 Roger Hinks

107 John Bryan Ward-Perkins (1912–1981) was the Director of the British School in Rome, 1946–74. His
principal scholarly interests were the materials of ancient art and city topography. He was a pioneer
in the use of field surveys to assess archaeological land patterns in Italy.
108 Ronald Bottrall (1906–1989), a poet and professor of English literature, was the Assistant Director at
the British Institute in Florence before 1939. During and after the war, he worked all over the world
as a representative of the British Council. He was in Rome from 1945 to 1950. Together with his
wife, Margaret, they did much to reconstruct cultural relations with Italy in the post-war years.
109 See n. 64.
1933–1939 275

probably just as well for the English School to resign itself to this kind of activity.
How much I envy you your time in Rome. I have never been there long
enough to grow familiar with it – haven’t ever been able to know which hill I’m
on. It seemed abominably spoilt when last we were there, but of course there is
plenty left.
With much love to Nicky, and all good wishes from us both,
Ever your affectionate
K
276
Eight

Reading and Writing, Talking and Travelling

1948–1953

On 13 July 1948, Clark celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. He already had many
achievements and several distinguished publications to his name, but he was
clear about the emphasis of the next phase of his life. As he later wrote in his
autobiography: ‘My overwhelming need was to communicate my feelings about
works of art in words. I wanted to write, occasionally to lecture, indirectly to
teach. This I have done with many interruptions, for the last 30 years, and thus
my resignation from the Gallery was the turning point in my life.’ He also added:
‘my mind worked better from 1945 to 1955 than it had ever done before, and
very much better than it has ever done since’ (Clark OH pp. 77 and 87).
Clark’s Landscape into Art was published by John Murray in 1949. Each
lecture/chapter focused on a particular topic such as ‘Landscape of Fantasy’ or
‘The Natural Vision’. It was a slim volume by today’s standards, but scholarly and
tightly packed with observations and ideas, a personal elucidation of the subject
rather than a heavyweight exercise in academic art history. As he explained in
the introduction (p. xvii), the founders ‘of the Slade Lectures did not intend that
the professor should give his pupils a detailed survey of the history of art, or
should make them proficient in such branches of the subject as stylistic criticism
and iconography. They intended, in Ruskin’s words, that he should “make our
English youth care somewhat for the arts.”
His next post-war publication was a book on Piero della Francesca which
had been proposed by the energetic proprietor of Phaidon Press, Bela Horovitz.
Clark worked on the book while staying at I Tatti in the autumn of 1949, from
where he made expeditions to see works at first hand and to assess how they
had survived the war years. The book takes the form of a critical essay and a
catalogue with detailed descriptions and first-hand observations on technique
and condition. It was a large-format book and one of its principal features was
a completely new set of photographs and details, of the type that had excited
Clark when Director of the National Gallery, which Horovitz now specially
commissioned.

277
1948–1953 278

Clark was adept at reaching out simultaneously to a specialist audience and to

the public at large. He admitted that he was not comfortable with abstractions
and theorising, and preferred talking about specific works of art which he
would then relate to others, probing their wider cultural and historic context
and scrutinising their significance and meaning in the modern world. His most
ambitious book was The Nude, which he also gave as a series of lectures in
Washington, dc, in 1953. But, whereas his exploration of landscape had been
written and conceived specifically as formal lectures, later to be turned into a
book, The Nude was conceived first as a book and the Washington lectures were
abbreviated summaries of the different chapters. Like Landscape into Art, The
Nude was a masterly synthesis of the thematic, the personal and the historical,
with equal weight given to the aesthetic and the symbolic, acknowledgements
of the influences of both Berenson and Aby Warburg.
Every book required a long period of gestation, deliberation, background
reading, looking and discussion. Landscape as a subject for exploration had first
come into his mind during the first years of marriage, and he first outlined the
idea of a book on the nude to Jane in 1940. The influence of Ruskin hovered
always in the background and already in his mind at this time was a book which
was eventually published in 1964 as Ruskin Today: ‘I spent fifteen years on and off
in putting it together, and I believe it to be one of the best things I have done’
(Clark OH pp. 79–80).
Clark wrote easily and well. His younger son, Colin, noted that ‘what my
father enjoyed most was to write. No matter where he was, he would balance
a pad on his knee, take out his fountain pen, and put all his thoughts on paper’
(Colin Clark p. 5). Kenneth Clark also enjoyed talking in public and putting
on a performance. His lectures were not extemporised but well planned, and
written first in long-hand. One of the distinguishing features of Clark’s lectures
and writings was the coherence and tightness of their structure. He also enjoyed
language – ‘a well turned sentence or a well constructed paragraph gives me
happiness’ (Clark OH p. 81) – and his feel for cadence and rhythm made him a
pleasure to listen to, and still makes him a pleasure to read. He also had the ability
to beguile with one of the rarer qualities to be found in lectures and writings
about art: a sense of humour.
Each book was dedicated to a close friend. The Gothic Revival was dedicated
to Charles Bell; Leonardo da Vinci to David Balniel; Landscape into Art to Maurice
Bowra; The Nude to Berenson.The Preface to Gothic Revival concludes:‘Although
I never heard Mr. Bernard Berenson mention the Gothic Revival, I owe him
a debt, difficult to describe and impossible to repay, which most of those who
have heard him talk will understand. To my wife I owe the greatest debt of all,
for without her I should never have written more than two or three chapters.’
Almost without exception, everything that Clark published while Berenson
1948–1953 279

was still alive contains, somewhere, a reference and an acknowledgement to ‘Mr

Berenson’.
In spite of writing and lecturing, Clark did not give up his committee work.
The organisation for which he felt the most affection was the Royal Opera
House at Covent Garden. That for which he had no particular love was the Arts
Council.When Maynard Keynes died unexpectedly in 1946, Clark had hoped to
take over as chairman and confessed disappointment when he was passed over in
favour of Ernest Pooley, a seventy-year-old bachelor whose principal role in life
had been as clerk to one of the grander and richer of the City livery companies,
the Drapers. This had given him considerable experience in administration
and in charitable giving to support education and young people, but he had
no active interest in the arts other than as the vice-chairman of the Old Vic
Theatre Company and Sadler’s Wells. The Arts Council was still an embryonic
organisation and Clark had been in sympathy with Keynes’s unashamedly elitist
ideas. He also had misgivings about the value of state patronage of the arts, and
the use of public money in support of lowbrow or amateur activities. Pooley was
a far different animal, and cynics said he had been appointed by a cash-strapped
Labour government because it was thought he would neither cause trouble nor
ask for money. He oversaw radical changes in structure and policy. Mary Glasgow,
who was the Secretary, and by coincidence the daughter of Clark’s first Keeper at
the National Gallery, was manoeuvred out in favour of William Emrys Williams,
a plain-spoken forceful Welshman, who was an unashamed populist and who
treated the Arts Council as his own personal fiefdom. When Clark eventually
took over the chairmanship in 1953, Williams made it plain that he expected
Clark, like Pooley, to do little other than chair meetings and be a figurehead, and
to leave all the running, policy and decision-making to him. Clark acquiesced
but he later confessed that the only activities that he had enjoyed during his term
of office were the organising of two small exhibitions of drawings by Millet and
Charles Keene.
Clark’s balancing of his public and private life was a delicate act which was
observed closely by Mary Glasgow who later wrote:
he is intellectually a giant with a well-stocked mind and administrative powers
to match. He ought to have taken a leading part in the affairs of the country
at large let alone the cultural ones.Yet whenever he has approached the centre
of things, as when early in the war, he went to the Ministry of Information,
he has shied away, saying to himself something like, ‘all this is dust and ashes; I
must devote myself to things of the mind.’ Then he would retire, to think, to
write and to contemplate, until the pendulum swung back and he would say:
‘what am I doing in a vacuum? I must get back into the Arena.’ I think he has
suffered all his life not being himself a creative artist, knowing so much, while
never producing original work of painting or sculpture. (Glasgow p. 199)
1948–1953 280

Clark was often diverted from pursuing things of the mind by both temperament
and circumstance. Jane’s physical and emotional health were sources of anxiety
and distraction, as were the needs and demands of his three children. Jane
became the president of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers.
Formed in 1942, the Society included in its membership the leading designers
of Mayfair and Savile Row and sought to compete directly with the French
fashion houses. The Clarks allowed Upper Terrace House and the garden to
be used for stylish fashion shows which featured in illustrated magazines and
cinema newsreels.They gave glamorous parties and entertained leading figures
from society and the arts, including the royal family. The children were sent
away to prestigious boarding schools and were taken abroad during their school
holidays. Both Colin and Alan went to Eton when they were thirteen. Alan
went straight to university and Colin went into the Air Force from 1951 to 1953
and became an accomplished pilot, before going to Oxford. Colette went to
school at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and did the ‘London Season’ in 1950 as a
débutante, before also going to Oxford, to Lady Margaret Hall. All of them gave
their parents their due measures of time-consuming pleasure and anxiety. Each
of them was encouraged to visit Berenson at I Tatti.
Needing to escape from the tensions and distractions of family life, Clark
found refuge in the company of his lady friends and in overseas travel. I Tatti
became increasingly important as a peaceful haven where he could think and
write. From 1947 to 1959 he went at least once a year, on occasions with Jane,
often on his own. When Berenson was there in person they could engage in
conversation and exchange ideas. When Berenson was absent he had the use of
the Villino, the guest-house set somewhat apart from I Tatti, and once or twice
he was allowed to use I Tatti as his own, including Berenson’s own study and
desk. In such congenial and familiar surroundings Clark could forget the rest of
the world and immerse himself in his own enjoyment of art, and write.
The Clarks planned many visits to France although they were often cancelled
at the last minute due to Jane’s ill health. In 1946 Georges Salles had invited
Clark to join the Conseil du Louvre, which met several times a year to consider
purchases for the French National Museums. Clark was the only non-French
national on the committee, but he was an irregular attendee.
Clark was also in demand internationally in the English-speaking world as
a lecturer and unofficial cultural ambassador. There were several visits to the
United States, to Australia and to India. In the usa, the Berenson connection gave
him the entrée to the major collectors and to the artistic, political and social elite,
who welcomed him and Jane up and down the Eastern seaboard from Boston
to Washington, dc. His most challenging undertaking was the six lectures from
The Nude which he delivered over a six-week period at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington in the spring of 1953. Clark relates how the then Director,
1948–1953 281

David Finley, promoted them only as a series of lectures by Kenneth Clark, not
daring to reveal in advance that his topic was the nude, for fear of outraging
puritan sensibilities, which were still easily offended by suggestions of nudity
and nakedness.
Visits to India and Australia were organised by the British Council, which was
often confused by those who should have known better with the Arts Council.
The two organisations were entirely different and one of the British Council’s
principal activities, to which Clark was asked to contribute, was the promotion
overseas of British culture by means of lectures and art exhibitions.
Berenson’s early writings were exercises in art criticism whereby he elucidated
and commented on individual artists and set out visual and aesthetic principles
which would lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of Italian
Renaissance art.The Lists which then preoccupied him for the next half-century
were the product of his connoisseurship. Between 1903 and 1945 Berenson
published very little that was new by way of art criticism, connoisseurship and
scholarship. There was the book on Sassetta (1909) already mentioned and a
number of essays on early Renaissance and medieval painting. He also put his
name to published catalogues of the John G. Johnson Collection in Philadelphia
and the Widener Collection in Pennsylvania. What most pre-occupied him was
updating the Lists and the new edition of the Florentine Drawings. It was only at
this period, in old age – he celebrated his eighty-third birthday on 25 June 1948
– that he set about putting down in print those ideas and theories about art on
which he had been musing for decades.
Two books which had been drafted during the isolation of the war years were
pulled into shape. The first was Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (Berenson
A&H). Laconic and gnomic, it was a restatement of his cornerstone principles,
in particular his belief that seeing and looking at works of art at first hand
were all-important and his insistence that the direct experience of the work
of art itself should have priority over all other enquiries, including the life of
the artist, the technique or the history and meaning of the culture in which a
particular work of art is situated. He repeated and expanded on the aesthetic
framework that he had set out more than half a century before in his four essays
on Italian Renaissance art. In addition he declared the necessity of universal and
absolute standards, re-emphasising the importance of the life-enhancing qualities
and spiritual significance of works of art. Aesthetics and History sketched the
development of Western art from the Egyptians to Cézanne and was a vigorous
defence of the humanist traditions stemming from the heritage of Hellenistic
Greece. The second book was his brief autobiographical Sketch for a Self-portrait
which was published in 1949 (Berenson SSP).
There then followed, appearing first in Italian, later in English, a short essay,
Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, inspired by revisiting and experiencing
1948–1953 282

the artist’s Sacra Conversazione in the Brera in Milan, in 1947. Here he linked
Piero to Cézanne, and argued that in the greatest portraits and figure paintings
the artist deliberately avoids imposing character and emotion through gesture
and expression, and simply allows the figure to be what it is, to exist. In 1950
he published his only work on a living artist, a sculptor now forgotten called
Alberto Sani. This was followed in 1951 by Seeing and Knowing, a survey of the
conventions that link what the eye sees with what the mind conceptually knows.
It also contained an attack on contemporary abstract art and Picasso. Caravaggio:
His Incongruity and his Fame, also published in 1951, was an outspoken protest
against the current craze for Caravaggio.
In 1952 he published L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma (The
Arch of Constantine: or, The Decline of Form, 1954), an exploration of what he
perceived as the progressive decay of the figural arts in the ancient world, taking
as his touchstone the famous triumphal arch in Rome that was created in the
closing years of the Roman Empire, with re-used material from earlier buildings.
Berenson had long before ambitiously planned a work in many volumes on the
decline and recovery of the figural arts of all epochs but, in the end, only this
short ‘first chapter’ saw the light of day. The book was also intended to be read
‘in the light of the present day anarchy in artistic standards’ (Samuels ML p. 545).
Writing books did not come easily to Berenson. As he confided in his diary
on 8 September 1950, ‘my Private, portable Hell is paved with intentions of
writing that I let myself be distracted from’ (Berenson S&T p. 194). He did not
have Clark’s instinctive mastery of formal presentation and if – to use a musical
analogy – Clark’s writings of this period have the qualities of the carefully
constructed, consciously harmonious, symphony or overture, Berenson’s have the
character of brilliant, spontaneous, virtuoso improvisations. His style of writing
in his early publications received harsh criticism from Mary and her brother
Logan, and they constantly forced him to rewrite and reshape his words, at times
driving him to despair. It has sometimes been suggested that his difficulty in
writing arose from the fact that English was not his first language, but his letters
and diary entries suggest that his problem was not with language: rather, his
ideas often ran ahead of his pen and his discretion in his quicksilver mind, and
he found it difficult to submit to the constraints and formality of the book form,
where structure, sequence, concision and measured prose become necessary. In
the introduction to Aesthetics and History he disarmingly declared:
The mind as well as the intestines requires bulk. I fear I am no good at
supplying it. I am not a dialectician; I have no gift for developing an argument
with abundance of words and instances. So what I have done is to put down
whatever happened to come into my head as I meditated on art theory
and art history. . . . a pell mell of stray thoughts, desultory thinking aloud,
generalisations, reminiscences, confessions . . . They exhibit the cross section,
1948–1953 283

as it were, of a mind that for half a century and more has been dwelling upon
art problems of many kinds, not only historical but antithetical . . . (Berenson
A&H pp. 23–4)
Berenson wanted works of art to be placed ‘in a universal scheme of things, of
what it means through the ages, what it should mean now’ (Samuels ML p. 555).
He thought that even the best of contemporary academic art historians fell short
of this ambition. Perhaps only Clark came close.
Berenson most enjoyed conversation and writing letters. In his walks with
a single sympathetic companion, he could chase and explore ideas freely and
allow his thoughts to roam wherever they chose to go. At mealtimes he liked
to deliver a monologue and make pronouncements over a vast range of topics.
The speed and nimbleness of his thought processes were remarkable. His
voice was attractive and his views were supported by an extraordinary visual
memory, together with a vast range of accurately remembered fact and opinion
resulting from his widespread reading and travels. His daily letters to friends and
acquaintances were always in pen and in his own hand, and were an extension
of his love of conversation. Berenson’s daily diary in which he wrote whatever
was immediately in his mind, no matter how personal, controversial, trivial or
deeply contemplated, remained a habit until the end of his days. Extracts from
the diaries were published as Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, which appeared in
Italian in 1950 and became a best-seller; Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries 1947
to 1958, was published posthumously in 1963.
New editions of his books were issued in different languages, and Phaidon
Press, with the financial support of the Kress Foundation, launched lavishly
illustrated editions of the Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Berenson IPR) and
The Lists. Berenson also wrote copious articles and contributed regularly to the
Milan Corriere della Sera newspaper.This substantial output required assistants and
much of the donkey work was done by Luisa Vertova (who married Benedict
Nicolson), then in her thirties, and the twenty-year-old, mercurial and devoted
William Mostyn-Owen. Gugliemo degli Alberti, a descendant of the Italian
Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, together with Vertova and Arturo
Loria undertook many of the Italian translations.
If post-war I Tatti was a calmer place than before, it was also busier and Nicky
Mariano held it all together. The number of guests who came to stay increased
and at mealtimes there were regularly twelve seated at the table. Curious strangers
arrived, asking to be shown round the house to see the collection and catch
a glimpse of the ‘Sage of Settigano’. Berenson was featured in Life and Time
magazines, and this publicity increased the number of those who wanted to
come and stare. The Library expanded so much that in 1948 Cecil Pinsent was
asked to begin work on a design for a new wing.Young scholars were taken on
as apprentices, to help out and to learn. I Tatti was gradually metamorphosing
1948–1953 284

into a scholarly collegiate institution, and, although in 1952 Berenson heard that
Harvard had decided to refuse his legacy, friends rallied round to raise the money
necessary for the proposed scholarships. As a consequence, in 1953, Harvard
finally made a commitment to accept.
Berenson involved himself directly in some of these daily activities, and with
some of the guests, but he allowed much of it to pass him by. Although his mind
remained alert, his physical powers were diminishing and increasingly he needed
rest and nurture. Nevertheless, he and Nicky undertook extensive travels, nearly
always within Italy, usually to visit an exhibition or to examine a recently restored
work of art or to revisit, possibly for the last time, places or people that still meant
much to him. To the end of his days he put into practice his own precept about
the importance of seeing and experiencing works of art at first hand.
Chronology

1948

Spring Berenson asks Cecil Pinsent to draw up plans for a new

wing to the Library at I Tatti
April Clark in Paris
April/May Berenson in Siena
May Berenson visits Venice Biennale, Bologna and Maser
June Berenson in Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua
Berenson granted Freedom of City of Florence
Berenson formally honoured by Italian state at Palazzo
Strozzi
July Berenson in Umbria/ Assisi
August Clarks in Cornwall
September Clark and family at I Tatti and Cortona
October Berenson in Switzerland

1949

January/February Clark in Australia

April Clark and children in Portugal without Jane
Clark in Paris
June Berenson in Venice and Lugano
July/August Clarks in Paris and Venice
September Clarks at I Tatti and Vallombrosa
October Berenson at Vallombrosa and Naples
Clarks in Paris
Clark on his own at I Tatti
November Clark in Paris

285
1950

March Clark at I Tatti returning via Paris

May Berenson in Aix les Bains, Dijon, Auxerre
May/June Berenson in Paris
June Berenson and Clark in Paris
July Berenson in Grenoble and Siena
Clarks in Paris and Venice
September/October Clark at I Tatti and Vallombrosa
November Berenson in Rome
Clarks in Rome and Paris
December Clark in Paris

1951

January Clarks in usa for lectures in Washington, Philadelphia,

New York
March Clarks in South of France
April Clarks in Paris and Amsterdam
May Clarks in Rome and at I Tatti
June Berenson in Ischia, Naples, Milan,Venice
Clarks in Amsterdam and Holland
July Berenson in Venice
August/September Clarks in Venice
September Berenson in Ischia and Naples
September/October Clark stays at I Tatti in the Villino
December Clark in Paris

1952

March Clarks in South of France

April Clark and Colette in Florence and I Tatti

286
May Berenson in Ischia, Salerno, Brindisi, Naples, Rome
Clark in Paris
Clark and Colette at I Tatti
June Berenson in Bari, Apulia, Naples with Nicky to study
architecture
Clarks at Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk
August Clarks at Edinburgh Festival
October Berenson in Rome
Clark and Colin in Paris, Rome, Naples
November Clarks in Paris

1953

Spring Clark’s lectures on The Nude at National Gallery of Art,

Washington, dc
Royal Fashion Show at Upper Terrace House,
Hampstead
May–June Berenson in Sicily and Naples

287
1948–1953 288

May 13, 48
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth.
Thank you for Saxl’s Atlas1 and comments on England & the Mediterranean.
It is a publication after my own heart & if the Warburg produced nothing
less relevant to what I consider art history I should be an enthusiastic & not
lukewarm admirer & supporter of the Institute.
As you know Sibyl Colefax2 is here & I ply her with questions about all
& sundry to wh. she seldom fails to give copious & interesting answers. Cecil
Pinsent3 is here as well & so is Barbara Halpern4 my step-grand-daughter a rather
astringent but clear-sighted and clear-minded woman – just beyond being called
young. Tomorrow we expect Rosamund [sic] Lehman & Day Lewis5 for ten
days or so. Auden6 is in the offing & we expect to see him altho’ not to stay. Our
albergo notturno e diurno is filled up.
I look forward to seeing you soon. I am rather alarmed at the onoranze I am
to undergo. If they had come twenty years ago! Now the prospect is repugnant.7
Ever yours
B.B.

1 The ‘Atlas’ is British Art and the Mediterranean by Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower, Oxford University
Press, 1948 (repr. 1969), a large-format publication exploring the history of the relationship between
British and Mediterranean art, which originated from an exhibition held by the Warburg Institute,
London, in 1941.
2 Sibyl Colefax
3 Cecil Ross Pinsent
4 Barbara Halpern
5 Rosamond Lehmann. Berenson had been impressed by one of her novels, which he read in 1947,
and invited her to visit I Tatti, not anticipating that she would bring Cecil Day-Lewis with her.
6 W. H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907–1973), the poet, playwright, librettist, editor and essayist who is
considered by some to be the greatest English poet of the twentieth century.
7 These were the ceremonies at the end of June 1948 when he was presented with the Freedom of
Florence by the Mayor of Florence and a ceremony at the Palazzo Strozzi when the Italian state
honoured him for his services to Italian art. A new bronze medal was struck bearing his image in
profile to commemorate the event, and he was presented with a historic bronze medal by the early
fifteenth-century sculptor and medallist Matteo di Andrea de’ Pasti, a medal that had been discovered
in a wall of the Tempio Malatestiana at Rimini in the aftermath of the Allied bombardment. He
refused to make a speech and was pleased when the Corriere della Sera reported: ‘there he sat, dumb,
monolithic and probably deaf ’ (personal conversation and discussion with William Mostyn-Owen
during the Convegno Berenson at Fifty,Villa I Tatti, October 2009).
1948–1953 289

22 May ’48
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
We were delighted to get your letter and to know that you liked the Saxl-
Wittkover book. I agree with your general estimate of the Warburg, but their by-
products are excellent. Of course Wittkover8 is not a true-blue Warburg man, and
I have found his recent articles (in the Warburg-Courtauld journal) on Palladio
etc. really admirable.
Incidentally, you will have seen that under our friend Ben9 the poor old
Burlington has reached a ‘new low’, and ought to close down.
We lead a quiet and happy life, Jane gardening, I writing on my Oxford
lectures, which continue to draw large crowds. We have become socially lazy
– partly because in these times and in this socialist country entertaining of any
kind involves very hard work: and partly because we are like a satisfied power.We
occasionally buy a few pictures and objects – I will bring photos when we come
– and I am building up quite a good library of source books and early illustrated
books, which no one ever looks at, and so far I have no time to read myself.
A great friend of ours is visiting Florence, and we have sent a telegram saying
that he may ring up. He is called Henry Moore and is a sculptor who has a great
reputation at the moment, not only in England. He is going to Venice to arrange
a show of his work in the Biennale.10 He is the most whole hearted human
being I have ever known, with a great natural understanding of art and life. We
are devoted to him, and he is the guardian of our children should we both perish
simultaneously.
As you know, we never send people to you, knowing too well what a nuisance
they can be, but I think there is a good chance of your liking Moore. He has with
him an old type called Gregory,11 who is a publisher, a modest muse of talent –

8 Rudolf Wittkower. His Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) was a study of Palladio’s
architecture and its relationship to contemporary theories of musical harmonic ratios.
9 Benedict Nicolson. He was the Editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1947 to 1978.
10 The 1948 Venice Biennale was an important event. The previous Biennale had been in 1942, in the
Fascist era, and the 1948 one was designed to give a comprehensive overview of European avant-
garde art. Ernst, Dalì, Kandinsky, Klee, Mirò and Mondrian were featured prominently. There was
strong international support from 15 nations. The British Pavilion showed works by Henry Moore
and J. M. W. Turner.
11 E. C. ‘Peter’ Gregory (1887–1959) was the chairman of the publishing house Lund Humphries.
Collector, patron and philanthropist, he met Moore in 1923 and took an immediate interest in
his work. He was also a patron of Hepworth, Nicholson and Sutherland and helped to found the
Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1947.
1948–1953 290

rather a Henry Jamesian figure. He will not speak at all, so will do no harm. But
perhaps you will be away in Venice all the time they are in Florence. It is lovely
to think that we shall be seeing you soon. Unlike many of my countrymen, I see
no great objections to living in England; but that doesn’t make a visit to Italy
any less welcome.
With love to Nicky, and love from Jane
Ever your affectionate
K

May 26. 48
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My dear Kenneth.
Of course we shall receive Henry Moore with open arms. If he appears before
we leave for Venice in four days it will be here. If not I hope to see him in Venice.
If you can communicate with him please tell him to look us up at Hotel Europa.
We mean to stay in these parts till June 21.
May 28. while writing the last sentence Nicky came to tell me Moore had just
telephoned. He lunched here yesterday. I took to him at sight, his candour, his
naturalness his freedom from himself. I took him to see all the bits of sculpture
& he gave side glances at the pictures. Never more appreciative looker. I do not
wonder that you have taken him to your hearts.12
I am distressed over the Burlington. When Ben was here audiendum verbum
I urged him to avoid articles of interest to very few specialists only. Instead
he has published the snobbish kind of stuffy rubbish about due & tre cento
unprofessionals. I also urged him to reduce the Burlington ‘temporarily’ at least
to a quarterly so as to give a less consumptive aspect.

12 In his diary for 28 May 1948, Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, London: Constable, 1952, p. 81,
Berenson wrote: ‘Henry Moore lunched here, still provincial in clothes and accent, but one of the
most appreciative persons I ever took round the house.We looked at sculpture chiefly, and he dashed
forward without prompting to what best deserved attending to. He talked understandingly about
everything.Then how account for the fact that his own sculpture is so revoltingly remote from what
I feel about art? Is it due to the obstruction of the channels through which the creative spirit of the
last six thousand years has worked? Why does this so sensitive so honest-minded man produce such
horrors of distortion, misinformation, and abstraction? More incomprehensible still are his ardent
admirers, Kenneth Clark for instance. With them it may be a still further exoticism, along with
Negro and Polynesian art.’
1948–1953 291

We are leaving for Venice stopping over at Bologna, Ferrara, Padua & Maser
on the way. At Venice to June 21 the address will be Hotel Europa. Must be
back here 22nd for a house over full of guests fr. Rome for the replanning of
the Baptistery gates.13 Needless to say how much I look forward to the visit of
both of you.
Yours truly, B.B.

[Post Office telegram]

++ tsb 12 c cr 21/5 venezia 38800 22 9 0100
lady clary [sic] upper terrace house hampstead londra=
greatly distressed alarmed and disappointed keep us informed
here till twentyfirst = bb nicky+14

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, n.w.3
Tuesday [August 1948]

Dear BB,
It was very kind and dear of you to write so sympathetically about poor K. I
waited to answer till the heart specialist had given his final report and then got
so involved in long leave from Eton festivities with the twins that I hadn’t a
moment till we got here.
K is much better and if he takes care for the next month should be completely
recovered by the time we come to Italy.We are at the Grand Hotel Folkestone for
a week which is hideous but v. comfortable and he can lie out in what is called a
sun parlour out of the sitting room. There has been no sun since May – then we
go home till we take the children to Cornwall for three weeks in August. Alan
is in Portugal with other undergraduates (after hair-raising experiences in Spain.
They were rescued by Mr G.15 and Sir Nigel Ronald!).

13 Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistery (‘Paradise’) Doors for the Duomo in Florence were restored in 1948
and casts were made of the panels. They were restored again in 1966, after the Flood, and are now
preserved in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo.The doors currently in place on the Baptistery itself
are copies taken from the 1948 casts.
14 Clark was laid low with whooping cough and therefore faced the prospect of cancelling a proposed
visit to I Tatti.
15 Calouste Gulbenkian
1948–1953 292

I can’t tell you how much we are looking forward to seeing you in Sept. and
showing the twins Florence and being at I Tatti. It is very kind and generous and
thoughtful of you to let us come there and we will try to give as little trouble
as possible to the servants. As Kenneth need not be back in London till early
October we would like to send the twins home alone about September 12 and
stay on ourselves till end of the month – we can move to a hotel when it suits
you and we also want to go to Borgo and Arezzo and we shall see more of you
and Nicky and make up a little for our lost visit in June. We are still sad about
that.
K has written an introduction to Praeterita (which is being republished)
when he was ill which we will send you when we get the proofs.16 I have also a
bundle of photographs for you to send off when we get home.
We are very sad about poor Emerald’s death17 and shall miss her very much –
we saw her at least every week.
Best love to you and Nicky from us both
Jane

Vallombrosa (Firenze)
7.27.48

Dear Jane.
I am glad to hear that Kenneth is getting better & better & will be fit to come
here in Sept. N and I say we look forward to seeing you both & making the
acquaintance of the young ones.
By the way what were their hair raising escapes in Spain?
How interesting that Kenneth has written a preface to a new edition of
‘Praeterita’. I look forward to reading it as Ruskin is very much to the fore in
my mind.
Do send over parcel of photos & please send one of an Antonellesque panel
that Morra18 said you had just acquired when he was last in London.19

16 John Ruskin, Praeterita, his autobiography and last major work, is a luminous account of his childhood
and youth, recounting the formation of his taste and intellect through education, travels in Europe
and encounters with great works of art and artists. It was first published in 28 parts in 1885–9; new
ed., intro. Kenneth Clark, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.
17 Emerald Cunard, Nancy Cunard’s mother, died on 10 July 1949.
18 Umberto Morra
19 Jacometto Veneziano, Portrait of a Woman (A Novice of the Order of San Secondo), c. 1490, purchased
by Clark in 1948 from Baron Rochdale; sold by Clark in 1975 to Eugene Thaw; acquired by the
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, in 1976.
1948–1953 293

We returned a day before yesterday fr. five days spent in Umbria ie Perugia,
Assisi, Spello, Gualdo, Nocera. What a paradise is Italy & how easy life as
compared with other lands!
Ever affectionately
B.B.

Carlyon Bay Hotel

St Austell
S. Cornwall
Aug 8

Dear BB,
I hope you have had the first lot of photographs by now – I put in the little
panel tho’ it was not a good photograph and K was going to get another taken.
I am sure you know the picture which was in one of the Burlington Club
exhibitions about 1911 called Jacometto – it was sold at Christies a few months
ago and K wasn’t able to go to the sale so bought it from Agnew and Drey after.
We will bring you out the better photograph and also I hope the introduction
to Praeterita in proof.
We are here for three weeks holiday with the children. K feels very well
but is not allowed to bathe or play golf yet. He is very happy reading the Bible
and working on Rembrandt for his Oxford lectures next term! When we get
home on 19th we are going down to Oxford to see the M.S.S. exhibition at the
Bodlean [sic]20 and will get some of the most interesting pages photographed for
you as many have not been done.
I am sorry Alan is not coming to Italy as it would amuse you to see anyone
as unlike K as his son!
Spain is now open to tourists but when he drove to Portugal with his Oxford
friends it was impossible to change English notes or travellers cheques. Various
Christian innkeepers lent them money to pay for the food they had already
eaten but when they got to the Potuguese frontier post they had been directed
to, high up in the mountains, the Spanish let them out with difficulty but the
Portuguese soldiers would not let them in.The Spanish would not let them back
without re-entry visas, they had a gallon of petrol in the car and no food or drink
and the nearest open frontier post was 180 miles away. They were therefore on
the bridge between the two lots of soldiers. Alan telephoned Mr G from the hut
– not knowing any Spanish or Portuguese – Mr G. then rang them up on the

20 Italian Illuminated Manuscripts from 1400 to 1550, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1948.
1948–1953 294

bridge every 3 hours to say it was all very difficult.Twenty hours later dust could
be seen rising round the bend of the twisting mountain road and the chief of
international police arrived and took them to Braganza for the night and stood
them all dinner and they drove round the town with him all hooting his car like
mad and the police chief very drunk and saying no-one in the town would love
him because he was a policeman.
David Finley21 and his wife dined the night before we left. I can’t tell you how
much we look forward to coming to you. We have got sleepers for the twins on
13th Sept and ourselves 30th and hope to go to Venice. We leave for Florence
Monday 30th August – it will be heavenly. Have you read Flaubert and Mme
Bovary by an American called Steegman?22 If not we’ll send it.
Best love
Jane

23 Aug. ’48
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
I must not arrive in Italy before you have had a letter from me saying how truly
grateful we are to you for letting us go to I Tatti.You could not give us a more
wonderful treat. We are all looking forward to it immensely, and for the children
to see Italy first under these conditions is fortunate beyond words.What would I
not have given for it at their age – but I was lucky enough. I only wish Alan was
coming. Though in some ways the least sympathetic member of the family he is
also the ablest, parents included.
I am greatly tempted to bring you the Giacometto [sic] – it is a pet, and you
would enjoy it.23 But what a nuisance if it was stopped by the Italian customs on
the way back, and I had to abandon it. I will hope for courage at the last moment.
He is an interesting artist – Wilde24 has found out a great deal more about him,
but will not publish it.

21 David Finley
22 Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, New York:Viking, 1939.
23 See n. 19.
24 Johannes Wilde
1948–1953 295

I would also like to bring the Ottonian ivory which is far more beautiful than
you could guess. It is by the same artist who did the passion scenes in Munich –
Goldschmidt thought a Milanese.25
Jane has sent Nicky a line saying that we arrive on the 31st – apparently the
train gets in at 7.10 or so instead of the dreadful midnight. It is many years since
I felt so excited about anything.
I hope we shall see you very soon after, and look forward to longer talks than
were possible – I don’t know why – last year. I am better, but not mended and
have to rest if I am to show a light face.
Love from Jane.
Ever your affectionate
K

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Sunday 10th Oct

Dearest BB,
I am so ashamed not to have written you since we left Italy. Since we got home
we have hardly had a moment’s peace and it will be a great relief to fly to Paris
tomorrow strikes or no strikes!
We can never tell you how grateful we are to you for your great kindness in
lending us I Tatti. It would always have been heaven but with K not well and on
the twins first visit to Italy it was heaven.You are used to the beauty of the pictures,
objects, library and views but to us it is always a fresh surprise and delight and
quite unforgettable each time. And then we enjoyed so much our visits to you at
Vallombrosa and I shall never forget the beauty of the walk we took together.Thank
you for everything from all the Clarks!
The proofs of the Praeterita introduction have just come and we are sending
you a copy. I hope you will like it. We have ordered the Donatello reliefs from
Lille26 and I hope these will reach you soon.
We have not seen David27 since we have come back but he is coming to stay
here in 10 days – when we are back from Oxford after K’s first Rembrandt
lecture and I will write again then.

25 Adolph Goldschmidt
26 Donatello’s marble relief, The Feast of Herod, c. 1435, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, is one of his finer
works.
27 David Balniel
1948–1953 296

Sybil [sic] is as well as possible – she has at last succeeded in getting Henry
Moore to dine! I sat between him and David Bowes-Lyon28 and was neutral
while Henry tried to explain the point of Picasso!
We have seen no exhibitions in London since we got back as too many people
have been to the house but I hope life will be more peaceful when we get back
from Paris in between the Oxford lectures.
The first night of Aida was great fun, the best thing Covent Garden has put
on so far.
K is so much better. His visit to you did him all the good in the world and
the heart specialist is very pleased. From the first night he stayed with you at
Vallombrosa – whatever you said to him – he has been better!
Best love dear BB
Jane

30 Oct ’48
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
A short lull on a grey wintry afternoon gives me the opportunity of writing to
you. We have been in perpetual movement since we left i Tatti, but so far the
stores of health which we accumulated there have kept us going. I am now well
into my two series of lectures, in Oxford and London, without serious mishap,
although like the poet, Donne we are ‘blasted with sighs and surrounded with
coughs’.29 You see how much we owe you, and always shall, for that marvelous
holiday. The work I did there on Uccello has also turned out fairly well, and
makes me realise how much better I could do if I had regular spells in such
auspicious surroundings.
Jane says that she promised I would send you my introduction to Praeterita. It
looks a very small pack of wool about which to have made so much cry – but
it may occupy you for a few minutes. As you will see, it was impossible to write
without the consciousness of the recent, distasteful book on Ruskin’s marriage,30

28 David Bowes-Lyon (1902–1961) was the younger brother of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon who married
the future George vi. He was more interested in orchids than art.
29 Misquoting John Donne’s ‘Twickenham Garden’. He actually wrote: ‘Blasted with sighs and
surrounded with teares, Hither I come to seeke the spring’.
30 See Ch. 7 n. 96.
1948–1953 297

and perhaps I have made too much of this. But at least it is something which has
never been treated candidly in other writings on Ruskin.
I have just had a glance of the American edition of your book.31 It looks
most exciting – and seems to bring one closer to the fullness of your mind than
anything else. I look forward to it with the greatest eagerness. It was particularly
comforting to find on the few pages I read the expression of many of my own
unspoken thoughts and feelings. Perhaps after all it is true ‘that wise men are but
of one religion’.
I do hope that this letter isn’t too difficult to read – my writing has grown
crabbd with use, but a typewriter seems discourteous.
I have been able to fulfill a good many of your commissions. For example, I
hope you will find at i Tatti photos from the Bodleian mss; I have got those of
all the Italian pictures at the Barber Institute (you will certainly have them all
already), and Colin Agnew has had a new one taken of the Bellini St. Jerome
since cleaning.32 I promised to tell you the provenance of my little portrait of
a lay sister. It belonged to Lord Rochdale, and was exhibited in the Burlington
Fine Arts Club in 1924, called Antonello. I saw it then, and loved it ever since.
Of course it would be the perfect Alvise Vivarini if he retained his original
splendour.33
I wonder if, after all, you went on your trip to Switzerland. I long to hear your
account of the Reinhardt34 and Hirsch35 collections.
Please tell Nicky that Colette has her two little wooden figures36 in her room
at school, where they look beautiful – but her companions can’t make them out,
and ask why they are broken – a first experience of Anglo Saxon philistinism.
Please give Nicky heaps of love from us both
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

31 Berenson’s Aesthetics and History was published in New York by Doubleday in 1948.
32 Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome in the Desert, c. 1455, was acquired by the Barber Institute Gallery,
Birmingham, in 1949 from Agnews. Colin Agnew (1882–1975) joined the firm in 1906, retiring in
1967. He ran the Agnew Berlin gallery before the First World War and set up premises in New York
in 1925.
33 See n. 19.
34 Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965) was a Swiss arts patron and art collector. His collection, of mostly
European art, is now housed in the Museum Oskar Reinhart in the centre of Winterthur, and in the
Collection Oskar Reinhart am Roemerholz, his former home, in Winterthur.
35 Robert von Hirsch
36 Colette Clark recalls that she and her twin Colin had chosen and bought these figures with great
enthusiasm while enjoying their first visit to Florence. They remain in her collection and are ‘even
more broken!’ (private conversation, autumn 2013).
1948–1953 298

Settignano.
Nov. 48.

My dear Kenneth.
How did you receive my ‘Aesthetics & History’? I meant to send you one with
a dedicasse directly copies reached me fr. N.Y. Fact is I should have not seen one
as yet, but that my sisters have brought us a copy. Sinister in binding & poor
print & paper. No luck with my publication. Do send me yr. introduction to
‘Praeterita’. You should ignore the private personality of a writer even when
writing about himself & Ruskin had a double one if anybody – for wh. reason
I have found ‘Praeterita’ as dry as dry – I have no photos of the Barber Institute
& those you promise are not here yet. Those of the Bodleian have arrived & I
am truly grateful. The three Triumphs are of course Florentine & close to the
so-called ‘Paris Master’.The two representing ‘Arrival of Aeneas’? & ‘Building of
Carthage’ are even closer to Francesco Di Giorgio while the four fr. a Gonzaga
ms are, one ‘Venus & Cupid’ by a close follower of Cossa & the other three by a
miniaturist betw. Giraldi the Ferrarese37 & the yg. Bart.Vivarini.38
Yes we spent a fortnight in Switzerland including some days in Lucerne to
study the Lichtenstein coll. I took the double miniature in my hand & studied
it minutely.39 I took into account a figure & landsc. in gold on the back of the
male head done exactly as in Contarini his figure in prof. seated. The heads are
to my eye (now) indistinguishable fr. Giov. Bellini’s style & work c.1475. Yours
I must to see in the original. Is it conceivably (only the merest suggestion) by
Ercole Roberti – if your Australian trip permits you should see the collection
of Lombard art at Zürich,40 open into March. Practically except for Brera
everything in all Lombardy worth seeing.
Love to you both fr. Nicky
& B.B.

37 Gugliemo Giraldi (1445–1489) was a favourite illuminator of the Duke of Ferrara and one of the
foremost exponents of Renaissance book illumination. The Venetian painter Bartolomeo Vivarini
(active 1450–99) worked mainly in tempera.
38 See n. 20. Italian Illuminated Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, possibly nos 33, 37, 38, 82.
39 The ‘double miniature’ to which Berenson refers was once in the Liechtenstein Collection, now
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it is catalogued as by Jacometto. It shows A Portrait of
a Woman, possibly a Nun of San Secondo; (verso) a scene in grisaille; and A Portrait of Alvise Contarini(?);
(verso) A Tethered Roebuck. The Metropolitan’s catalogue makes the same connections to Bellini and
to Clark’s painting by Jacometto that Berenson here tentatively suggests.
40 There was an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich in November 1948–March 1949, Kunstschätze der
Lombardei: 500 vor Christus, 1800 nach Christus, catalogue ed. Constantino Baroni and Gian Alberto
dell’Acqua.
1948–1953 299

Nov. 28. 48
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth.
Derek Hill41 yesterday brought yr. gifts. I have not owned the Kelmscott copy
of the Ruskin extract on the Nature of Gothic, so I am delighted to annex it &
grateful.42 Moreover I shall re-read it delighting in the page as a work of art –
then there is yr. preface to Praeterita. I have read it with delight. It is not only
written with lucidity & charm but contains the gist of the book I should like
you to do on Ruskin as revealed in his writings. It is a magnificent & important
theme worthy of the whole of you. All in all there never has been another man
of his gifts who has devoted himself to the study of art & its relations to society.
I hear fr. Jane that you are reviewing my book. It makes me happy for I could
not be in better hands & in a mind more attuned to understand what I mean to say.
And you are off to Aussie lands. Have me in your thoughts if you see Italian
pictures & bring back photographs & catalogues of museums.
I find a little energy left for writing; yet I dream of a book. If only I can pull
it off!
All good wishes dear Kenneth.
Your devotedly affectionate
B.B.

Dec. 12. 48
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane.
Presumably K will have left when this reaches yr. address, wherefore I write to
you to thank you for photos just received. Also so welcome, particularly of the
marvellous Donatello at Lille.43

41 Derek Hill
42 John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic; a Chapter of The Stones of Venice, London: George Allen, [March]
1892, printed at the Kelmscott Press by William Morris, Hammersmith, edition of 500, all on paper
(none on vellum but all with stiff vellum cover), 30 shillings.
43 See n. 26.
1948–1953 300

Do you remember to whom the early St. Jerome by Bellini belongs?44

No news here of transmittable interest. Waley45 has been here for 12 days &
remains another night. I hope he has been comfortable for in other respects he
has given few signs of enjoying our company & mine least of all. What a noble
intellectual face & head, & how precious the rare – so rare – utterances that
come so reluctantly from between his teeth.
We are having marvellous weather & I cannot recall sunsets so romantic &
foliage so fascinating. I get immense delight out of both. How one learns to love
‘natura’ with age & the muses!46
When visitors & correspondence do not absorb me I am writing some
‘Supplementary Essays’. Three are ready & two more in view.
My most loving good wishes to each & all of you for a Merry Xmas and
Happy New Year & a satisfactory 1949. May the coming year bring you here
again & again.
Keep us informed of how K is faring in Australia & its coasts.
Yours
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead,
London NW3
Friday Dec 17th 48

Dearest BB,
It was very nice to get your letter. I do not know if K had time to write before
he left on Tuesday but he was really touched and delighted with the angelic letter
you wrote him about his introduction to Praeterita – nothing has given him so
much pleasure for ages as what you said.
After K left I retired to Claridges to an enormous suite to collect myself
before the Christmas holidays – it was great fun having no responsibilities for

44 See n. 32.
45 Arthur Waley
46 In Aesthetics and History, Berenson quoted with approval the following passage from St John
Chrysostom, written about ad 400, which mirrors his references to the beauty of nature in other
letters written at about this time:‘When you look at gleaming buildings, and the aspect of colonnades
allures your eye, then turn at once to the vault of heaven and to the spacious meadows where herds
graze at the water’s edge. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when at dawn in the stillness
of his heart he admires the rising sun as it sheds its golden light over the earth; or when resting by
a spring in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick-leaved trees he feasts his eye on the far
distance vanishing in the haze.’
1948–1953 301

48 hours! Walter Lippman47 and his wife were also there and I had a drink
with them and the Rex Bensons48 the night before Walter left and then dined
with Rene Massigli.49 The night K left Alan dined with me and left about 11
pm to motor to Oxford and then on to Wales at 7 am next morning to climb
mountains in Wales for two days. I felt relieved to be no longer young!
Now I am back here with the twins and their friends. Robin Balneil50 stayed
here last night arriving unexpectedly on the doorstep at 6.45 with a heavy
suitcase and saying he needed a bed, had had no lunch or tea and was due to
meet Princess Margaret at Covent Garden at 6.45 in a dinner jacket, so I fed him
and lent him a car and thought Alan was no different to anyone else!
About the photographs glad the Donatello’s reached you at last. I seem to
think the early St Jerome belongs to Agnew51 but will check up on this on
Monday and let you know.
Poor Sybil [sic] is I think very ill – she won’t give in but had to cancel a party
for Walter Lippman and then struggled up next day. She won’t go to America
paid for entirely and said if I get better I might go in the spring – which is very
unlike her. She is supposed to be going to Juliet Duff 52 for Xmas but I have asked
her to come here and stay in bed for as long as she likes if she can’t go to Wilts.
One dinner she gave for Larry and Vivien53 she should clearly have been in bed
and I wanted to bring her home with me but she wouldn’t give in – what she
needs is a month in bed. I don’t know if you could influence her?
I sympathise over Arthur Waley!
I have heard nothing from K since he sailed but he went off gaily – he had
really too much to do before he left and I think he will enjoy the peace and
change. I’ll keep you informed and he will send you photographs of everything
in each gallery.

47 Walter Lippmann
48 Reginald Lindsay (Rex) Benson (1889–1968) was the second son of Robert Henry Benson, who
sold his collection of pictures to Duveen in 1927. Rex Benson had a swashbuckling and successful
career as sportsman, soldier, spy, farmer, musician and chairman of the merchant bank Kleinwort
Benson.
49 René Massigli (1888–1988) was a French diplomat and an expert on German affairs.
50 David Balniel’s eldest son.
51 See n. 32.
52 Juliet Duff (1881–1965), the daughter of the 4th Earl of Lonsdale and widow of Sir Robert Duff,
2nd Baronet (killed in action in 1914, age 37). She was a close friend of Winston and Clementine
Churchill.
53 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh
1948–1953 302

We had several amusing evenings before he left – one with Larry and Vivien
and the Stafford Cripps.54 She is total loss as a guest but one can’t help liking him
in spite of the fact that he gets up at 20 to 4 each morning!
Sorry to inflict such a screed on you – my best love to you and Nicky and
every good wish for New Year – am very glad you are writing supplementary
Essays.
Jane
PS We flew over to Paris for 2 days with David for a Louvre meeting just
before K left and the Louvre and Paris were lovely

Dec. 29. 48
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane.
I am distressed to learn how ill, this time seriously ill, Sibyl is. On receiving your
letter of the 12th I wrote at once urging her to come here at once for a long rest.
From others I hear that it may be too late. I am anxious & if you have any precise
news of her condition please let me have it at once.
And any news of Kenneth. I have received no letter from him for some time.
Raymond55 & someone else have written that K. was going to write about my
book for the Burlington. It would make me happy if he would.
Our good news is of matchless sunsets & crystal skies which have lasted for
months even when the cold came at last as it has a few days ago. Influenza is
raging everywhere & at I Tatti all the servants have had it & now Nicky is down
with it & I feel helpless as an infant without its nurse.
Luisa Vertova56 does her best to play hostess & attend to guests. Still they come
& far too often with ‘I am here today & tomorrow only.’

54 Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) served in the post-war Labour government, under Clement Attlee,
as President of the Board of Trade and then, in 1947–50, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. During
the war he had been the ambassador to the Soviet Union. From a wealthy family, he was a deeply
committed Christian and Socialist, and famously ascetic and hard-working. His wife, Isobel, took a
close interest in Chinese political and social affairs.
55 Raymond Mortimer
56 Luisa Vertova Nicolson
1948–1953 303

Derek Hill is staying in the Villino & gathers guests whom he brings over.
Love to K when you write & every good wish to all of you for 1949.
Affectionately
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Tues, Jan 5th 49
From Old Quarries, Avening, Glos57 till 14th Jan

Dearest BB,
Sybil [sic] has been put to bed for a month as Lord Horden says her cough has
affected her heart and that has to be rested and the rest will help the cough. So
she couldn’t travel for some time – Alan and I visited her just before the twins
and I came here last Saturday (Alan’s now in Switzerland) and she looked much
better and is very cheerful. I think if only she will stay in bed she will recover
and be able to visit you later – I am sure your invitation must have encouraged
as well as given her immense pleasure.
I am sorry K evidently did not write to you as he meant before he left. In the
letter I had today from Aden he has finished the proofs of his landscape book
and is deep in your book and the review he is writing. He will send this home
air mail as soon as finished and is full of excitement over it.
I hope that when this reaches you that Nicky’s flu will be ended. It is a horrid
winter plague and I do hope you escape.

57 Arthur Lee purchased Old Quarries, at Avening near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, in April 1936. He
enlarged the relatively modest early 19th-century house by adding an annexe which he designed
to be ‘the gallery of my dreams’ to house his picture collection. The gallery was completed shortly
before the outbreak of war and, anticipating the evacuation of pictures from the National Gallery,
Lord Lee personally designed and had constructed a sophisticated system of storage racks for his
annexe.When the National Gallery pictures were evacuated first in 1939, some 230 works, including
both the Vermeers, the Arnolfini van Eyck and pictures by Bellini, Rembrandt,Velásquez, Raphael,
as well as the Wilton Diptych, were sent to Old Quarries; they were then later despatched to the
Manod Caves in Wales (see Introduction to Ch. 6). Lord Lee died in July 1947 and in his will he left
the Gatcombe estate to Samuel Courtauld and his descendants, and the Manor House to Kenneth
and Jane Clark, subject to his wife continuing to live there if she wished, but with conditions: that
they use it as a residence and that they look after his picture collection until such time as it was
transferred to the Courtauld Institute. It seems that the Clarks declined the gift and that a proposal
by Lady Lee to leave the house to Alan Clark on her death never materialised. Although frail, she
died in 1966, aged 93. Old Quarries is now a care home for the elderly.
1948–1953 304

I am down here for 10 days before the holidays end. It is bliss to have Xmas
over – I will write again when I am in London end of next week and have seen
Sybil [sic]. I had a letter from her this morning and have replied firmly she is
not to write and must stay very quiet. She is being well looked after as she now
has Norah Lindsay’s58 maid. Much love and please forgive this dull note but the
holidays have been exhausting.
Ever affectionately and love to Nicky
Jane

Claridges
Brook Street, w.1.
Feb 11th 49

My dear BB,
Kenneth is now on his way home and arrives on March 1st. He enjoyed Australia
to the last, although when the sirocco blew and he had to make speeches at 100
in the shade it was oppressive. I hope he is bringing lots of photos for you if
he has not already sent them off from Australia. I think the bushman drawings
remained the most exciting things he saw but the Melbourne Gallery has more
interesting pictures than he thought tho’ the rooms are too big and it was v.
badly hung. However I gather he has rehung it! He enjoyed immensely all his
visits to the country and meeting wallabys on walks. Sybil [sic] is about even if
she looks very bent and ill – she is coming to my box at Covent Garden on 17th
with various people and is giving a party for the Oliviers on 21st. I have been
to their three first nights but Richard iii remains the best. I wish you could see
Larry do it. Antigone last night (Jean Anouilh)59 I found puzzling and rather
disappointing – not Vivien’s part and no scope for Larry as the Greek chorus
with modern dress and slang but they both think the play is wonderful so I shall
see it again with K.
I went to the Chantrey Bequest with Henry60 – not a single good picture alas.
If any painter had any merits they chose his worst picture with great skill.

58 Norah Lindsay (1873–1948), who was born into an Anglo-Irish military family, established herself
as a garden designer in the footsteps of Gertrude Jekyll. She and her husband were given Sutton
Courtenay Manor, in Oxfordshire, as a wedding present.
59 Richard III and Antigone (in a version by Jean Anouilh) opened in 1949 at the New Theatre, London.
60 Probably Henry Moore. The sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey (1781–1841) bequeathed over £100,000
in trust for the President and Trustees of the Royal Academy, the income to be used to buy
contemporary paintings and sculpture made in Britain, with a view to encouraging the establishment
of a ‘public national collection of British fine art’.
1948–1953 305

Do hope the influenze epidemic is over and you escaped? David61 has been
down for two days and sent his love when I told him I was writing. Best love to
you and Nicky and to Alda.62
Ever affectionately
Jane
I do hope your writing is going well. Am here for four days as the house was
full of workmen and it is great fun.

Febr. 17. 49
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane.
Thanks for such a nice letter wh. I should have answered sooner if I was not
in the grips of a horrid cold. I really suffer while it is on & then it leaves me a
wreck unable for quite a while to get anything good out of my pen. And that,
silly dodderer that I am, is what counts first.
We are suffering from the most enchanting winter weather that ever threatened
the earth. Radiant sunshine, crystal skies, romantic sunset, sparkling air, nipping
temperature but not cold, daffodils already out – but no rain for months! Streams
drying up fields powdered as you plow electric power & light more & more
restricted. I never thought I should get utilitarian enough to dread good weather.
You know Derek Hill. He is in the Villino where he paints charmingly and
intelligibly. He drops in & out & shares his guests with us. Recently there was
Molyneux63 & a little earlier Hague [sic].64 Just now Morra is again with us &
tomorrow arrive the Nicholsons (Edith’s friends)65 to stay a fortnight & the
Bonners66 fr. Rome for a long weekend. We seldom are alone – just Nicky &
me – almost never in fact.

61 Probably David Balniel.

62 Alda von Anrep
63 Edward Molyneux
64 Dawyck Haig
65 Simon and Molly Nicholson, to whom Berenson had been introduced by Edith Wharton while
staying with her at St Claire in 1932. He was a member of the Colonial Service.
66 Paul Hyde Bonner (1893–1968) was an American diplomat, who wrote novels about international
intrigue. He was with the us Department of State (Division of Foreign Services), based in Rome
and Paris, in 1946–52.
1948–1953 306

I am so glad that K is returning. You must yourself or get him to write at

length about his Australian adventures & about Bushman paintings & whether
they are just like those of S. Africa. Much depends on this. It would take too long
to write about now.
Love fr. both of us
B.B.

28 Mch ’49
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
I promised myself to write to you as soon as I got back from Australia, but of
course there was an Augean stable of papers and arrears of business to be dealt
with, the family to visit, and a trip to Paris for a Louvre meeting, so that only
now can I sit down to it. Actually we are staying with the Oliviers in the country,
which means a long, quiet morning.
As you will have learnt from Jane, I enjoyed Australia far more than I had
expected to do. I find it hard to explain why without seeming patronising, but
the brilliant climate seems to have had a magical effect on the Anglo Saxons,
removing their inhibitions and hypocrisies. Of course they are very naïve –
hardly out of the pioneering stage – but they are a gifted people, only held back
by laziness.
It was fascinating to be in an entirely democratic country, without even the
respect for oneself, or shame of dispossession, of the usa. The landscape, as Jane
may have told you, is most beautiful and I can only convey it by saying that it
is like a Piero della Francesca. The grass is white, the trunks of the trees pinkish
white, the leaves glaucous, exactly as in the Baptism.The light comes through the
leaves, so the woods are all lilac – like the most extreme impressionist Renoirs
of the late 70’s. It is a country for painters, and in fact they have quite good ones
– at least no worse than anywhere else in these years of dearth. Jane has told
you of my enthusiasm for the aboriginal paintings. They are extraordinary, and
totally unlike African bushman drawings or the Paleolithic cave paintings. They
do not represent a total impression of movement but an analytic. As you know
the Australian aboriginal always draws the inside of his subject as well as the out,
and he makes the heart, liver, intestines etc., into a decorative pattern. Most of
1948–1953 307

the paintings are life-size, on bark lined with white clay. By some freak the abos
had what we call perfect taste – all their objects are pretty, delicate colouring,
and their fantasies are gentle, whereas those of the neighbouring Papuans are
ugly and violent. Altogether, a study of Melanesian culture is a good corrective
for the art historian, for each island and district has an art-form independent and
fundamentally different from the other. All the material is in Australia, and has
not been properly studied, nor even exhibited. Of course I was there too short a
time to learn anything – except how ignorant we are.
When I returned I handed over to Ben my short appreciation of your book.67
I’m sorry it has to appear in that moribund organ (slightly redeemed by a very
interesting article, I thought, on Florentine stained glass68). I do hope you like
the review. It is truly a great book, from which I have learnt more than from any
book for years. But it is so often contrary to current beliefs that I had, up to a
point, to forestall criticism.
I am now preparing lectures on the beginnings of romantic painting –
Gericault, Delacroix, etc. All this is so closely connected with English literature,
yet almost unknown in England – tho Gericault, the complete equivalent of
Byron, spent two years here.
I hope that you have escaped wintry diseases. Jane had a bad go of ’flu a
fortnight before I returned and is still not quite better.
With much love to Nicky, ever your affectionate
Kenneth
Vivien has just come down and sends you heaps of love

Settignano
Apr. 2. 49

Dear Kenneth.
I heard of yr. return but imagining how much you would find to attend to I did
not expect to hear fr. you for some time. So I am doubly grateful for yr. letter. Let
me thank you d’avance for having taken the trouble to write about my aesthetics
& history. For me the important thing is that you have appreciated my effort. As
for the art-book-reading public, when in art matters they have ceased playing
the Philip drunk & become Philip sober I wish them to follow my lead rather

67 Clark’s review of Aesthetics and History was published in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 1, no. 554 (May
1949), pp. 144–5.
68 Arthur Lane, ‘Florentine Painted Glass and the Practice of Design’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 91, no.
551 (February 1949), pp. 42–8.
1948–1953 308

than Read’s – let alone the German Jews who run all art matters now in all
Western lands. Indeed they are spread so thick that I cannot hope to penetrate
them and get a hearing in either London or N.Y. In the last named metropolis
of taste & sense in cultural matters the reviews of my last book have been what
one could expect. Almost they make me regret that I published there.69
Ma parliamo delle cose allegre. – the arts of the Australian natives. What you tell
me about them rouses my curiosity to the boiling point. I have read innumerable
ethnographical works about the aborigines but nothing about their art. Have
you brought back photos? Do illustrated accounts exist? Let me tell you why I
am so keen. It is this. If there is a spot on earth uncontaminated by influences
fr. outside it is Australia. What its inhabitants have produced must therefore be
the expression of their minds accompanied by the animal pleasures of successful
functioning. Their artefacts should therefore be as spontaneous as those of the
seals & beavers of bees & ants & termites, as free as a birds song.What I am driving
at is that producing artefacts is almost a physiological necessity the which, when
satisfactory, can become a work of art. In that last phase it may profit from very
distant contact with more evolved forms or be utterly crushed by too hastily &
rashly approached influences.
When you find time write & send me any printed information you have
brought back.
Let me hear more about the lectures you now are giving. When will yr.
preface to ‘Praeterita’ appear.
Love to you both
Yours
B.B.

69 Philip of Macedon was a wise ruler, fair and just. However, one day, after he had been drinking, he
gave a decision against a woman. His judgement seemed unfair to her and influenced by drink. ‘I
appeal’, she said to the King, who answered, ‘To whom do you appeal?’ ‘I appeal from Philip drunk
to Philip sober’, she replied. The next day the King reconsidered her case and decided in her favour.
In Aesthetics and History Berenson does not mention Herbert Read by name but makes explicit his
disapproval of any aesthetic approach which prioritises the appreciation of colour and form over the
content of a work of art. Read was one of the apostles of modern art and of abstract art in particular.
Although never uninterested, Berenson struggled to come to terms with modern art and abstract
art. In Aesthetics and History he attacked the sterility of art theory, and targeted German art historians,
notably Josef Stryzgowski, Max Dvořák and Franz Wickhoff.
1948–1953 309

Apr.8.49
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for the brochure on the Shallal Mosaic.70 Every scrap of that kind is
treasure for me and my library.
And this morning’s post brings word fr. Victoria (Australia) that they are
sending me photos at your request. I am grateful.
I work a little & see too many people, read far too many periodicals & write
too many letters & get very tired & have to waste most of the waking hours
resting. That’s what it’s like after 80.Yet better alive!
Love to you both
B.B.

Apr.12.1949
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane & Kenneth

Both yr. letters reached me yesterday & touched me deeply [letters missing].
Both of you made me feel as if you were my children filled with filial devotion. I
must say that I enjoyed it, & look forward eagerly to recapturing it. So you must
bend the stars in their courses so as to come here again toward the end of Sept.
I am distressed & alarmed to learn that all is not well, dear Jane, with yr.
something-or-other & have to be ‘under observation.’ I pray the results may be
propitious. It is a pity though that you cannot accompany Kenneth to Lisbon.

70 The brochure was probably sent by post from Australia. In April 1917, during the second battle of
Gaza in southern Palestine, a group of Australian signallers discovered a mosaic that had been partly
uncovered by Turkish troops, who had built a trench on a mound in the Wadi Ghuzze near the town
of Shellal. Created in ad 561–2 under the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, the Mosaic
is one of the finest examples of Byzantine art in existence. After tortuous diplomatic wranglings
to prevent the uk government claiming it for the British Museum, the Mosaic became part of the
Collection of the Australian War Memorial near Canberra and is on permanent display in the Hall
of Valour.
1948–1953 310

When there he might look up an ardent student of Portug. painting named

Jirmounsky,71 who lives Rua iveus 6III, Esq. I daresay he haunts the picture
Gallery. He is a Petersburg Jew whom I knew in Paris before he took refuge in
Portugal. One of our most enchanting friends is Contessa Philomena de la Foret
Divonne72 whose address is Quinta da Borroca Cacem (near Lisbon). There may
be a telephone. If K announced himself as coming from us to see her he would
not regret it.
Trevy73 is here with Julian his son. George his brother & Mrs are staying
at Poggio Gherado74 & we have seen them. Freya Stark75 is staying here. I am
reading a sort of confession of her faith, exquisite.
With devoted affection
B.B.
[Added in Nicky’s handwriting in margin of page 1] Darling Jane, a thousand
thanks to your delightful letter. I wish it did not contain such bad news of
yourself. Would it not be better for you to get some high air? Had also very
charming letters from the twins from which I gather that they both are sick
on the plane! It was so lovely to have you here and to enjoy your beauty and
elegance. Ever yours Nicky

Settignano
May 1, 49

Dear Kenneth.
Yesterday after tea Nicky read aloud yr. review of Aesthetics & History.76 Je me
trimoussais de plaisir as she read & made me very happy. It was in the best sense
of the word an appreciation. So-called criticism i.e. telling the writer how he
could have done better & telling the public what he, the critic, thinks they
should think about it profits neither author nor public. An appreciation can
gladden & encourage the writer – continuez continuez la vague – & guide the

71 Myron Jirmounsky (1890–?) was a Russian émigré living in Portugal. An art historian who had
taught in St Petersburg and then at the Sorbonne, he became attached to the Academia das Belas
Artes in Lisbon. He wrote about Portuguese art and Berenson took an interest in his writings. In the
war when communications were difficult, Berenson was able to get news, e.g. to Lawrence Berenson
in the usa, via Jirmounsky.
72 Philomène de la Forest Divonne
73 Robert Trevelyan
74 See Janet Ross
75 Freya Stark
76 See n. 67.
1948–1953 311

reader as to what to expect & how well worth his while to invest time in reading
the book. As appreciation no book of mine has had a more sympathetically
intelligent and more exciting. Nor do I in the least resent the objections. When
as a youngster I listened spellbound to Prof. Paulsen77 on philosophy at Berlin
he used to start his way of thinking on a given subject & then would add Aber
man Kann sagen & would say all that from another point of view might be said
against or supplementary to his own view. I feel the same about yr. review.
Indeed nothing is more refreshing & stimulating than genuine criticism wh. like
yours is without a speck of facetiousness & only points to another approach &
another lighting.
Let me hope this review of yours will appear without any omissions.
X
Sibyl arrived evening before yesterday a little more bowed than a year ago but
as gallant & as keen. She was almost Mardrusian [sic] in her description of yr.
country house78 & even if one deducts a good bit of her magical view of things
it must remain a miracle of comfort & taste. Shall I live to see it? I am getting
cowardly about Paris & London & the coasts. I get tired so easily & collapse
follows & colds & every kind of unpleasantness. If I could count on doing only
so much each day! But I should want to see everybody & every thing.
What are your plans & do they not include a visit here or at least to Italy?
There is a gathering of pictures supposed to have been done in Lorenzo de
Medici’s day.79 That here in Pal. Strozzi, & in Doge’s Palace a Bellini show that
really may be important.80
Don’t forget my interest in the art of the Australian aborigine.
Love to you all
B.B.

77 Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) was appointed the Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy at the
University of Berlin in 1878. Berenson matriculated there in April 1888, staying several months and
attending lectures.
78 In fact, Upper Terrace House, Hampstead.
79 The city of Florence held a number of events, including an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, The
Quincentenary of Lorenzo de Medici 1449–1949. They brought together a diverse range of works of art
produced in Florence during the period of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. A total of eleven nations lent to
the events which ran May–November and attracted 93,000 visitors.
80 The Bellini exhibition, June–October 1949, organised by Rodolfo Palluchini, held in the Palazzo
Ducale, Venice, was a landmark in the reappraisal of the artist. It showed works mostly from the
Veneto and Italy.
1948–1953 312

May 27. 49
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane,
Your friends have just been here, too much in a hurry.They had another party to
go to.Yet I enjoyed them & they seemed happy to pass an hour with us.
We are off tomorrow morning on a jaunt northward as far as Lugano & Hotel
Splendid – where we are due June 6 to stay 2 or 3 days studying the Thyssen
Coll. June 15 we are due in Venezia to study the Bellini’s. The 180 [sic] panels
will be shown.
Would you could you join us. We shall be there till June 28 or 30th.
Love
B.B.
No plans of coming here?!!?

Sat 11th June [1949]

Dearest BB,
Alas I wish we could join you in Venice this month but alas we haven’t any free
time till end of July – we go to Paris for a week and in between there is Eton
long leave and various engagements daily which make it impossible. We hope
to propose ourselves for a short visit end of Sept or early Oct. whichever would
suit you best?
We stay here till middle of August and then plan to go to Venice with the
children for several weeks.They can bathe on the Lido and we can see the Bellini
exhibition – if we can only get rooms in Venice. Otherwise we shall have to go
to Venice in October. K has put off his Oxford lectures till Nov. so as to leave
us free.
We enjoyed Umberto’s visit immensely – tho’ he was so busy we did not see as
much of him as we would have liked. Since then – apart from David Crawford81
who is always here off and on, we had Rene Huyghe82 from the Louvre which
was great fun – you will know him well. He gave a brilliant lecture on Delacroix.

81 See David Balniel

82 René Huyghe
1948–1953 313

It was very kind of you and Nicky to have Freddie and Margot83 who both
adored their visit. I have just been staying with Loelia Westminster84 who also
much enjoyed meeting you at last! We have not yet seen Sybil [sic] but dine with
her on Wednesday so look forward to hearing your news.
K’s lectures are now over at Oxford which leaves us freer! This term it was on
David, Gericault Ingres and Delacroix which was v. interesting for him and me!
Very few people in Oxford had heard of any of them so the lectures were even
more crowded.
Do hope you and Nicky are having a good holiday and wish we could come
to Venice now however it will be lovely to see you in the autumn.
Yours ever affectionately
Jane

24 June ’49
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
The Oxford terms being over, I have some leisure in which to thank you for
your very kind letter about the review in the Burlington, which cheered and
relieved me mightily. I was so very anxious to show people what riches were
to be found in the book – yet I had to prepare them for certain points of view
which are not easily accepted nowadays.
We are having a pleasant summer. I have been lecturing on Ingres and
Delacroix, and thoroughly enjoying it. The relevant literature is so entertaining
and the criticism about the best ever written. In fact art criticism in France in
the 1840s with Gautier, Beaudelaire, Thoré, Sylvestre Delécluze etc is still worth
reading, which can’t be said for the similar productions of any other epoch.
We have been adding to our odds and ends in a last reckless burst before all
our money disappears, and amongst other things have got the beautiful copy by
Degas of the double portrait by Bellini in the Louvre;85 also a screen by Kano

83 Frederick Ashton (1904–1988) was the chief choreographer for Sadler’s Wells Ballet (later the Royal
Ballet) at Covent Garden. Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991) was the prima ballerina. They were soon to
undertake a triumphant tour of the usa.
84 Loelia, Duchess of Westminster (1902–1993) had recently divorced the 2nd Duke after an unhappy
and childless marriage.
85 Edgar Degas, Two Male Figures, 1859–60. Degas copied Heads of Two Young Men in a Landscape, then
considered a Giovanni Bellini but now catalogued as 16th-century Venetian School.
1948–1953 314

Masonobu86 and a gilt copper object of about 1210 which is a real beauty.87 This
last should by all the laws of probability be a fake – but it isn’t. I will send you a
photograph of it.
We are coming out to the Bellini exhibition88 in the end of August bringing
the children to bathe on the Lido while I slink around the churches.
Sibyl, whose broomstick seems to have got her there on the opening day,
says that the pictures have been taken out of their frames and let into the walls,
which sounds unattractive. I am longing to see the Besancon Noah, which I
have never seen.89
I hear that your self portrait will be out in a day or two, and am looking
forward enormously to reading it.90 Extraordinary how, in the end, and perhaps
as a result of the war, you have been able to achieve with the world the kind of
communication which was reserved for your friends.
I am filling in a fortnight and trying to produce a new edition of the Gothic
Revival.91 It has been out of print for over twenty years. I find it a mixed
entertainment.The early chapters in the B. Litt style are very dull; the latter ones
quite amusing.The whole is rather vitiated by inconsistencies of values; however
I am enjoying pointing this out in a series of fatherly notes.
We hope to come on to see you after Venice, probably at the end of September.
Will you be at Vallombrosa then? We shan’t have the children, who will be back
at school. I must spend some time at Assisi, as I am proposing to talk to my flock
about Giotto.
Much love to Nicky from us both
And from Jane to you,
Ever your devoted
Kenneth

86 Sold in the Clark Sale at Sotheby’s, London, June 1984, Lot 12: ‘Kano School: A Six-Fold Screen . . .
bearing signature of Masunobu (Kano Town 1625–1694) and seal Shoin-shi; 18th century.’
87 Sold in ibid., Lot 127: ‘Gilt bronze Romanesque candlestick c. 1200.’
88 See n. 80.
89 Giovanni Bellini, The Drunkenness of Noah, 1515, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Besançon.
90 Berenson SSP was dedicated ‘In Memory of my wife and fifty years of companionship’.
91 London: Constable, 2nd edn 1950.
1948–1953 315

16 July ’49
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB,
Thank you so much for the self-portrait. We have both enjoyed it greatly; it is in
many ways the most fascinating of all your writings, full of wisdom, insight and
encouragement for those who love beauty.
I think you make too much of your supposed lack of skill as a writer.You have
always had a remarkable command of words and (as Logan92 used to say) a rare
plastic sense of language.
Writing is not so much of a debatable technique as you imply. Le style c’est
l’homme is a permanently true platitude, and yours will survive just as your
personality will survive, when others less rich, but more conformative have
evaporated.
I must also thank you for a kind letter93 containing the good news that your
journeys had not proved too exacting.
We set out for Venice on the 16th August, and after the family have returned
in September, I hope I may take advantage of your very kind invitation to stay
alone at i Tatti for a week or two in order to work. I can imagine no greater
luxury. I shan’t need much in the way of food – Nicky needn’t worry about that.
But if it is at all inconvenient I can stay in Florence, or Fiesole, and simply work
at i Tatti. During that time I hope I may come out to Vallombrosa whenever you
lack a companion for your walks.
Work has been almost impossible here during the last three weeks; and we
have been away in Paris where the social atmosphere is detestable, but the works
of art more marvellous than ever. If only the French could take photographs! But
I have now almost given up hope of lecturing on pictures which are in French
galleries, knowing that illustrations will be impossible.
Please thank Nicky for a postcard from Verona. I have thought a great deal
about our tour, and was reminded of it even in Australia, where I met an architect
whom we had met in Bergamo or Verona, and had taken us to a Romanesque
templar church. Strange that even now, twenty three years later, no one has
attempted a book on Lotto.94 One would have thought that with the present
craze for mannerism, neurosis etc., he would have been a gift.

92 Logan Pearsall Smith

93 Letter missing.
94 See Ch. 1. Clark went to the Veneto and Bergamo with Berenson and Nicky soon after they met, in
autumn 1926.
1948–1953 316

Jane will be coming back to Italy to join me in the end of September, and
looks forward to seeing you then. She sends her love, and a special word of
thanks for the book, which she greatly enjoyed.
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth Clark
Someone came in at this moment, and I automatically signed my name.

Sept-29-49
Villa I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My dear BB,
I must write one more word of thanks for the happiest fortnight I have ever
spent – I can’t call it a holiday, as I have managed to do quite a lot of work, but
it has been more refreshing than any holiday. It was so generous of you to let
me stay here so long. Conditions are perfect, both for discourse and for lucid
enjoyment.
Jane tells me that advance copies of my landscape book95 have appeared,
so you will be finding one at i Tatti on your return. Don’t expect too much.
They are only lectures, with that awkward combination of exposition and
potted information which the form involves – at least for a professor. I gave
the Alberti to Alda, who has put it on your desk. The incredible fact is that the
original Latin text has never been reprinted. The book is known only from a
very inaccurate 16th century Italian translation which has served as the basis of
translation into other languages. As the 1485 edition is pretty rare scholars don’t
usually bother to look up the original (even Wittkower96) and make some serious
misinterpretations.97

95 Clark’s Landscape into Art was first published in 1949.

96 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Warburg Institute, University of
London, 1949. It was a seminal book that explored the relevance of mathematical proportion and
influenced both scholars and practising architects.
97 Professor Martin McLaughlin says: “this refers to Alberti’s Latin treatise on architecture, De re
aedificatoria, Florence, 1485. Despite what Clark says, in fact the Latin text was reprinted twice in the
16th century: Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Paris: Bertholt Rembolt, 1512, and Strasbourg:
Jakob Cammerlander, 1541.Then there was no reprint until the 20th century.There were two Italian
translations in the 16th century, the first by Pietro Lauro from Siena (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi,
1546), but Clark is probably referring to the second and more accessible one by Cosimo Bartoli,
Della pittura e della statua di Leonbatista Alberti, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550, repr. Venice:
Francesco de’ Franceschi, in quarto, and Mondoví: Lionardo Torrentino, both 1565.
1948–1953 317

I wish I had had time to visit the Palazzo Strozzi98 before staying atVallombrosa.
It is rather a dull show from many points of view (too many cassoni), but there
are some strange curiosities. What about those grotesque drawings connected
with the engraving of the woman with the hotcakes – they look just like
Pollaiuolo. A sad blow for the Leonardo theorists if Pollaiuolo turned out to
have preceded him in this genre.
I have made a note of all the books I promised to send, and they will come, if
they are to be had. I shall also send a new set of Piero photos – yours are all very
faded, and were originally a little out of focus. By the way, I forgot to tell you
that I bought the other day all Augustus Hare’s99 photographs of Rome and Italy
generally, some of them of the ’50s – eleven volumes.100 They ought to be in the
Tatti library, and I will convey them there one day, if ever I come by car. They
show Sta. Maria Maggiore rising above a few farms and huts, with grass growing
in the streets; and many of the Venetian palaces before they were restored. I
wonder what happened to all Ruskin’s photos. He took hundreds of buildings
about to be restored or pulled down.
It’s sad that you won’t be in Paris with us next week. But I hope that the
Naples expedition goes well and that your sinus clears up with the change of
air. I was deeply touched by your farewell benediction, dear BB, and determined
that in the next year I shall yet be able to show you something worthy of your
confidence.
Ever your affectionate
K

Sept 30. 49
Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth
Thank you for one of the few most heartening letters ever addressed to me.You
encourage me to believe that I have earned my passage on the ship of life.

98 See n. 79.
99 Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834–1903) was a prolific writer and raconteur, born in Rome,
educated in England. He wrote books about his aristocratic relations and travel books for the
publisher John Murray.
100 In his will Hare left to his cousin Mary Shaw Lefevre ‘two volumes of Spanish photographs all the
volumes of photographs bound in white vellum’.
1948–1953 318

Thank you for the Alberti which I shall con eagerly when back at I Tatti.
It would be interesting to see & keep at I Tatti Hare’s material for his walks
in Italy.
Do you, will you, believe that I still glance at the books with pleasure?
Have you read Hare’s Autobiography101 – such a picture of Victorian life in
& out of England as lived by an English gentleman on the margin of the great
world.
I look forward to your lectures on landscape.
X
Jean Rouvier102 who has been here for three days has been giving me curious
glimpses into the character of Georges Salles103 – to whom, when you see him
– my best remembrances.
Love to you & Jane from Nicky &
B.B.

Oct 20 1949
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth
Came back home – this morning & now I find on my desk the 1st ed. of the
authentic Alberti that you gave me. I thank you for myself & for all that will
follow me.
The South was more ravishing than ever. Fr. Clotilde’s104 it was but a few
minutes to Pompeii & there and at Naples I was disposed to realise that I shall
never write as for 50 years I had planned, a book on Antique painting.
It is so beautiful here. I have perlustrated105 the garden & it is lovely.

101 Augustus Hare, Story of My Life, London: George Allen, 1900.

102 Jean Rouvier, the son of a French diplomat, was the French Cultural Attaché in Munich. He and
Berenson first met in 1936. He was a frequent visitor to I Tatti.
103 Georges Salles
104 Clotilde Margheri, whose Villa La Quiete was at Torre del Greco near Herculaneum, a popular
summer resort for rich Italians. The sea there is full of coral.
105 Perlustrate: to go through and examine thoroughly.
1948–1953 319

The Walter Lippmann’s this p.m. for a couple of days & then our friend the
Swede106 for a whole week.
I look forward to your ‘Landscape’.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

Nov. 9. 49
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth.
Your ‘Landscape into art’ is a delight. I have read every word with zestful interest,
and it has given me a delicious feeling of repletion. ‘I am satisfied quite No more
can I bite.’107 Not only have you reached full maturity in the possession of your
materials, in the way you intellectualize them, but you now have achieved an
instrument of expression which enables you to say exactly what you want to put
into words no matter how slippery and squirmy the subject matter.
I agree with the whole trend of yr. thoughts & delight in yr. epithets &
illuminating discourse & I thoroughly enjoyed your parallels between painters &
poets & musicians. In short, dear Kenneth, you have written on a very difficult
subject a book entirely after my own heart.
You now can launch out freely & leave breaking stones on the road to
‘Eothens’ happy sanity.108
Wherefore I wish you would treat some such arguments on the course of
English painting [illeg], art meaningful, no, not meaningful, but created or at least
revealed by Constable, by Ruskin, by Burne Jones, by Pater down to Roger Fry.
Avoiding notions of ‘historical necessity’ & still more the Ass-thetics [sic] of the
meta-fascists.
By the way in the course of the last two years I have scribbled tant bien que
mal four essays on subjects which au paysage du Danube I tangent point in your
so stimulating book.

106 Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf

107 A quotation from The Table, the Ass and the Stock in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
108 Perhaps a reference, albeit obscure, to A.W. Kinglake’s Eothen which became a best-seller in the mid-
19th century. A travelogue of a journey undertaken by Kinglake, an aloof character, to the Middle
East in 1835, Eothen was aimed at the ordinary intelligent person who wished to read a good story;
by bringing the experience of his pilgrimage alive, his book hit its mark.
1948–1953 320

I am better than you saw me at Vallombrosa. It turns out the collapse was due
not so much to ‘hayfever’ as to puss poisoning from the teeth. I have had some
pulled out, and shall return to the charge.
The stay with Clotilde on the slopes of Vesuvius did me good. Of course I
re-visited myself at Pompeii, at Herculaneum & Naples churches & museum.
The Crown Prince of Sweden has been here, so sorry to have missed you in
Paris when you seem to have been there same time.
As I write in bed, the stone pine109 stencils its dark branches its twigs, & its
sunlit hair against the window pane, & in the mirror opposite I enjoy a Van Eyck
landscape.
Love to you both
B.B.

Paris, le 16 Nov 1949

Hotel De Crillon
Place De La Concorde

My dear BB,
I can’t tell you how cheered and delighted I am by your letter about my landscape
lectures.
They are only sketches and I was very reluctant to publish them: I know I
could have done better if I had had the patience and energy to take out and work
up certain motives which they contain. Still, if you found in them something to
interest you it is all the justification I require, & all the reward.
I have had this much confirmation of balanced judgement – that any passage
which one set of people dislike particularly another likes the best. Thus, half
a dozen people have told me that I have grossly over praised Turner, an equal
number that I have treated him shabbily. Most people think that I have been
too tepid about the impressionists, a few feel violently that they are overrated.
I can think of at least one reader who will feel that I have made too much of
Seurat, but I can assure him that the young consider my strictures on Seurat the
most disgraceful thing in the book. All of which shows how important it is to
introduce the sense of value into this kind of quasi-historical writing. It is an
approach which I owe entirely to your little introduction to the Florentine &
Central Italian painters, which makes me the more delighted that you think my
book will pass.

109 Pinus pinea, more commonly known as the umbrella pine.

1948–1953 321

I am so glad that you have got to the root of your sinus trouble, and are now
feeling better. Naples must have been enchanting. My life, since I left I Tatti,
has been too exacting, and I am condemned to it till after Christmas. We are
here only for two days. My lectures take up all my time, and the thought of any
peaceful writing is remote. But I have it in mind partly to fulfill your project, for
I thought I would balance my inaugural on Ruskin with a valedictory on Pater
(I give up the Slade next summer).
In the end I hope to have enough writing on these figures to put together
into a book of related essays. I don’t think I can undertake a continuous, worked
out study of the whole subject. I still think it might be interesting to begin with
an essay on Hazlitt – nothing good on his art criticism has been written, yet he
remains, at his best, the most painter-like critic we have had.110
I do very much hope that I may some day read the four essays of yours which
you mention. If they are typed may I see them!
I have not forgotten the books I was to send you – also the photos of our
limoges plaque,111 when we can have them taken. The Ashmolean have acquired
a very interesting Giorgionesque picture – a Virgin and Child, not far from the
Allendale & Benson holy families in quality, but a little later.112 The Virgin’s robe
is painted exactly like the Castelfranco Madonna. It comes from an old English
collection, but I had never seen it. I have asked Parker113 to send you photos, and
shall be most interested to hear what you think. Not Palma, nor Sebastiano, nor
of course Titian. One needs Mancini114 for such occasions but it isn’t to be. In
any case, it comes in very handy for me to show my pupils how Giorgione laid
on the paint.
We are here for the opening of our friend Henry Moore’s official exhibition.115
The French are a good deal disturbed by the thought of an English sculptor
achieving such eminence, and were not all wholly co-operative. This gave me

110 William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was regarded in his day as one of the finest critics and essayists of the
English language, noted for his essays on the humanities, philosophy and social issues and for his
criticisms of art, literature and drama. He is currently little read and mostly out of print.
111 Possibly Lot 125 from the Clark Sale, Sotheby’s, London, June 1984: ‘An interesting Limoges
Champleve Enamel Fragment . . . decorated with a standing figure of St Peter, with reddish hair and
beard . . . second quarter 13th century.’
112 The Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (The Tallard Madonna) was acquired by the Ashmolean in
1948, from the 6th Earl Cathcart, as by Giorgione but is now considered more likely to be by a pupil
in Venice, such as Sebastiano del Piombo, or an artist close to Giorgione, such as Giovanni Cariani.
113 Karl Parker
114 Johannes Wilde, ‘Die Probleme um Domenico Mancini’, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistor-ischen Sammlungen,
vii, Vienna: Schroll, 1933, pp. 97–135, argued for the attribution of some difficult to pin down
Giorgionesque paintings to the Venetian painter Domenico Mancini about whom, and of whose
works, little is known.
115 Henry Moore’s first solo exhibition in Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1949. His work had
been acclaimed at the Venice Biennale earlier in the year.
1948–1953 322

the pleasure of exercising my old metier and arranging the show with my own
hands. It has made a pleasant break in the town.
Love from Jane to you all,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Dec. 15. 49
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane.
What a happy idea to send me a book of praise, appreciation; & hymns to cats.116
I shall turn its leaves often & recall I owe my pleasure in them to you.
Percy Lubbock117 has just left after a week’s stay. More than ever the
compendium of aristocratic qualities. As compendious were the Clarys118
Austrian Durchlaut119 who were here the previous week. We reminisced about
the past, & such a wonderful [illeg] gay decently human past. How I enjoyed
my glimpse of it ever since 1888, and even until 1938! Sinclair Lewis120 suffers
from the winter & so we shall see him often. He is quick, English, & free from
solemnity & self-importance altho’ a Nobel Prize Americ. novellist.
I had a long & dear letter from K sometime ago for which I have not thanked
him yet. Will you do so for me! What satisfactory reviews his last book has been
having. I am not surprised.
Love to all of you & best wishes for 1950.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

116 Christabel Aberconway, A Dictionary for Cat Lovers: XV century–XX century AD. With five legends
concerning cats, and with notes on the cat in Ancient Egypt, London: Michael Joseph, 1949. Visitors to I
Tatti were greeted by a life-size bronze cat, dating to the Late Dynastic Period of Egyptian art, which
sat on a cassone in the entrance hall of I Tatti.
117 Percy Lubbock
118 Alphonse Clary-und-Aldringen
119 German for ‘illustriousness’.
120 Sinclair Lewis
1948–1953 323

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Jan 17th [1950]

Dearest BB,
I am delighted Christabel’s book on cats amuses you – I hoped it would – I
ought to have written sooner but Christmas makes more demands each year
and after it we had to see Alan off to u.s.a. for about 6 months to find out what
it is like.
Before he went about a fortnight ago, poor Sybil [sic] was angelic with helping
him over plans. Alas I am afraid she is now dying – I heard from her a few days
ago but so incoherently I was afraid – yesterday when we got back from the
country I telephoned to know when K and I could see her, but she now has 2
nurses can see no one and is just tired and has lost interest in life. She just looks
at the list of people who have telephoned and sleeps – I do hope she can die in
her sleep but K and I are very distressed and feel so helpless – and I know you
will feel the same. If she rallies and we can see her I will wire you but I fear you
will soon read of her death.
I hope I shall see you and Nicky in the autumn. After Venice I shall bring the
twins back and when they have gone to school I hope to join K in Florence for
a week before we go back to Paris together. He will not have the Slade lectures
to come back for as he resigns after the summer.
He has almost finished the book on Piero and is writing to you himself about
this and arranging for you to have the new photographs which are lovely.
In the middle of March we go to stay with Somerset Maugham121 at Cannes
– after K may go to Milan and Bologna for a few nights and is writing Nicky
about hotels. I shall wait and join him in Paris.
Much love to you both – I can only think about poor Sibyl
Yours ever affectionately
Jane

121 Somerset Maugham

1948–1953 324

Jan 22. ’50

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
Yr. dear letter of the 17th did not surprise me. I have been hearing from many
that poor Sibyl was very ill. Her letters became notes of a few scribbles & then
ceased altogether.Yesterday we had yr. wish saying she was a bit better. I can not
wish her a lingering death much as I should & shall regret her. She is my last link
with the London that was the world’s capital socially as well as politically.
I wish you were coming here instead of going to Somerset Maugham’s. And
if Kenneth strays as far south as Bologna he surely will come to us if only for a
night or two. Bologna is only an hour & a half by train fr. Florence.
We had a long visit fr. Trevor Roper122 whom we like more & more. Now
Morra is here & Salvemini.123 We expect Freya Stark and husband next week.
Does Alan write? I want to know what he feels about u.s.a.
Much love to you both from Nick &
B.B.

3 Feb. 50
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
You were so kind as to suggest, in your letter to Jane, that I come to i Tatti for a
night or two during my dash to Bologna. I find that by a little contrivance this
can be managed, and if it is convenient to you I could turn up on the night of
March 23rd, and stay two or three nights. My reason for going to Bologna is to
see the Piero della Francesca from Rimini,124 which I understand is still there. I
haven’t seen it since it was cleaned, and clearly it has undergone changes which

122 Hugh Trevor-Roper

123 See Appendix 1.
124 Piero della Francesca worked in Rimini for Sigismondo Malatesta. In 1451 he executed the fresco
of St Sigismund and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in the Tempio Malatestiano, as well as Sigismondo’s
portrait. The Kress Foundation gave $50,000 towards its restoration in 1947. It is possible that the
Rimini fresco had been detached and sent to Bologna for restoration.
1948–1953 325

make it very different, not only in detail, but as a total impression. My Piero
introduction was finished before Christmas, and I think it has turned out quite
well.125 In any case the new photos taken for the book will be of value.This leads
me to ask if you would allow me to dedicate the book to you – or would you
rather I offered you the dedication of a book of studies in English art. I do realise
that it might be inappropriate for your name to be associated with amateurish
efforts to write about Italian art, whereas a book on English art (though probably
equally amateurish) wouldn’t be in your field, and so a dedication might be less
embarrassing. But I would very much like to dedicate one of my next books
to you, as a very small token of all that I owe you. Please let me know, dear BB,
exactly what you feel.
We have just been to see Sibyl. She has ups and downs, but on the whole is
still improving, and this evening was the best I have seen her this year. She is
completely uncomplaining and unselfish, talking and thinking only about her
friends, books and plans for the future.We are both well and working away at our
respective employments. Jane has her hands full with semi-public commitments,
and I continue to prepare my Oxford and other lectures. My landscape book
has sold well, beyond its deserts; of course I was fortunate in that it co-incided
with an exhibition of French landscape painting at Burlington House (which,
incidentally, is a triumph for Claude).126 But its success makes me more than ever
anxious to give up lecturing and concentrate on bringing a few books to a fairer
shape than has hitherto been possible.
I believe I have never thanked you for the off-print of your article on Sani.127
It is really fascinating: the strongest case of a ‘throw back’ I have ever seen, almost
as if he were a medium. Incidentally they teach one a good deal about early
Christian art.
I gather from his letters that Alan is having a good deal of difficulty in
supporting life in the usa. Why he is there instead of the raf is a long story, but
briefly, the Ministry of National Service refused to call him up. I suppose there
was some administrative muddle and they wouldn’t go back on it.128

125 Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca, London: Phaidon Press, 1951, with 219 illustrations and tipped-in
colour plates.
126 Landscape in French Art 1550–1900, Royal Academy, London, December 1949–March 1950.
127 The contemporary sculptor Alberto Sani had an exhibition in Milan in 1950; reviewing it in
Commentarii, Berenson stated that Sani’s sculptures were not merely ‘like’ late Roman ones, they
were just as good. Also in 1950 he published Alberto Sani: Un artista fuori del suo tempo; An Artist out of
his Time, bilingual edn, Electa, Florence, 1950. Berenson was introduced to Sani by Dario Neri, the
founder of Electa, who published almost all Berenson’s books in Italian. Neri was also a painter and
landowner: Sani worked at Neri’s country estate at Campriano near Siena.
128 The muddled story of Alan’s avoidance of National Service is explored in Ion Trewin, Alan Clark:
The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, but it remains unclear if the reason was
administrative confusion by the authorities, rejection on medical grounds (poor eyesight) or Alan’s
manipulation of the system. Nevertheless the fact remains that he did not do National Service like
1948–1953 326

This letter, as is shown by the change of ink, has been interrupted more than
once, and must now be finished or it will never be sent off. I am delighted to
think that I shall be seeing you in March. Now that I am middle aged I count
my blessings more avariciously, and there is none I take more than the pleasure
of your company and the thought of life at i Tatti.
With much love from Jane
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
P.S. Please give heaps of love to Nicky from us all, especially her godchildren,129
who often speak about her, and complain that they don’t see her.

Febr. 10. 50
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My dear Kenneth
You will be more than welcome for three days or three times thereon next
month.
Indeed considering how little time fastest trains now take between Bologna
& Florence I wonder whether you would not be more comfy staying here &
excursing to Bologna.
I am deeply touched by your offer to dedicate a book to me. And first let me
write you to cease being apotropaic130 with me. I regard you in every way as at
least my equal. If I have a vague advantage over you it is because I have had at
least twice as much experience & time for remembering. To come back to yr.
offering me the choice of a book on Piero or one on Engl. landscape I leave it
to you to judge. It is something like this. If what help I may have given you
thanks to my being so much older & more experienced has been stronger in
Italian art then the dedication should be of the Piero. If on the other hand it has
been more diffused & penetrating then the Engl. Landsc. Either would delight
me.131

his peers or his younger brother, who served in the raf. Jane Clark, according to Colin (Colin Clark
p. 26), was furious and accused Alan of ‘treason’.
129 Colette and Colin Clark
130 Apotropaic = intended to ward off evil or bad luck.
131 Clark dedicated his Piero della Francesca to Henry Moore.
1948–1953 327

The Ital. transl. of my diary of the war years is out at last132 & lest the original
be too long delayed, or never be published I am sending it to you. Here & there
may be a page to interest or stimulate.
You must remember to tell me all about Alan.
Much love fr. both of us to you & Jane.
Yr.
B.B.

31 March ’50
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
The inordinate delay in my writing to thank you for heavenly days at i Tatti is due
to the fact that when I got back I found that Jane was far from well, and the next
day she was laid low with a peculiarly ill form of ’flu which seems to be inflicting
everyone in London at the moment. The children are just coming back from the
holidays, and she had arranged a full programme, which I had to take over: so my
life has been a great contrast to the leisurely, philosophical existence of the week
before. Jane is just beginning to feel better now, but will not be on her feet for a few
days. It is very sad for her, as she had got so fit in the South of France, and seemed to
have collected strength to face family life, which is always rather a [illeg] to her. Alan
was also here to greet me. His adventures in America are fascinating but depressing.
Having started with the most hopeful view of the us., he now says that it is all the
creation of advertising agents. In fact the dirt, poverty and disease were appalling,
and even the middle classes are all made miserable by debt. But I will send you a
copy of a letter which he wrote to Sibyl after his return, which is a fair summary.
I have found a photograph of Lee’s ‘Giorgione’,133 and am posting it in another
envelope: also of our portrait of an architect (not Michaelangelo I fear)134 which
is interesting as a likeness. The Lee Giorgione is unpublished, and so I suppose
ought not yet to be put with the general material in case the Fiocco135 de nos

132 Berenson, Echi e riflessioni, Arnoldo Mondadori,Verona, 1950.

133 Arthur Lee’s Moses and the Burning Bush is now attributed to Giorgione rather than accepted as
autograph.
134 Sold in the Clark Sale, Lot 185: ‘Portrait of an Architect, Bolognese School, 16th century.’
135 Giuseppe Fiocco (1884–1971) was a pioneer of art history in Italy, much in the Berenson mould.
He trained as a lawyer and focused more on detail and connoisseurship than iconography. He held
professorships at Florence (1926) and Padua (1929). His principal interest was Venetian Renaissance
art. He was known for his willingness to write certificates of authenticity.
1948–1953 328

Jours gets hold of it – it would hurt Lady Lee’s feelings to see it published in a
derigatory [sic] manner.
Passing through Paris I had time to visit the Albertina drawings at the B.N.136
It is an enchanting and illuminating exhibition, and will still be on when you
arrive. How very nice it is to think that we shall see you there.
I enjoyed i Tatti more than ever. Of course the last two years you have been
at Vallombrosa, and so I have missed the pleasure of garden walks. It was so
particularly nice to have those meals alone with you and Nicky. I was conscious
of being treated like a spoilt son, and as my parents never treated me in that way
it was a very nice new sensation. It is so good of you to say that I can come back
in September. I really feel that i Tatti is my home, and when I am there I can use
whatever faculties I posses with the confidence which is possible only in one’s
natural environment.
– I put off posting this for a day and can now report that Jane is a little better, but
still very miserable at all the hoarded health which has been disipated. She sends
her love to you and Nicky, and greatly looks forward to seeing you in Paris; as do I.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

I Tatti
April 6th 1950

Dear Kenneth.
I do hope Jane is over her cold if not yet herself again. Colds are one of God’s
most effective ways of undoing the good that such a change of air can do for
one. What Alan reports is most interesting. I should greatly enjoy interviewing
and discussing with him – Thanks for the two photos. Of the ‘Giorgione’ I have
nothing to say except that as you recommend it shall be kept apart. The portrait
is perhaps by Jacopino del Conte but scarcely of Michelangelo, altho costume
and even look do reach him. But nobody who had seen M. could have ignored
nose and expression.
The frivolous essay on Piero will be out in a few days and a copy will be
dispatched to you at once.137 What weather – cool, bracing and radiant, with such
‘enamelled meads’138 and flowers as in Wagner’s bucolic scene in Parsifal – House

136 There was an exhibition in 1950 at the Biliothèque Nationale in Paris of 150 drawings from the
Albertina in Vienna.
137 Bernard Berenson, Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, London: Chapman & Hall, 1954.
138 A reference to Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Country Life’: ‘This done, then to th’ enamelled meads/
1948–1953 329

full, Salvemini, Raymond Mortimer, Nina di Cesaro139 and Ruth Draper140

indoors. Derek Hill in The Villino, and Everyman down in Florence. I see them
at meals, walk with them in the garden and doze the rest of the time. Of what I
call ‘work’ I am doing nothing, having neither the leisure nor the disposition.Yet
it makes me feel constipated and nervous not to be up and doing. I fear I must
learn to live in a past.You will carry on what I leave undone. Who better than I
should know that so much, and no more by a man of a given generation can be
achieved in his field!
Ever affectionately
B.B.

April 28th to May 5th [1950]

Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
I have now had time to read and re-read your book on Piero, and have enjoyed
it increasingly. I like very much the form of using an artist or a single work
of art as the starting point for pursuit of a critical idea – the form of Lessing’s
Laocoon,141 and that is what you have done to perfection. And of course the wide
range of allusion is what I enjoy most, especially when it is as telling as your
Jacques Blanche and Degas. I had immediate confirmation of your point in a
piece I have been writing on art and photography.142 I found that modern flash
light photographs of orators etc. have absolutely no spatial quality, and compared
to those photographs by D. O. Hill and Mrs Cameron look quite like works of
art because the sitters are allowed their independent existence. So you see that
I have already profited by your essay. But alas, it comes too late for me to alter

Thou go’st, and as thy foot there treads,/ Thou see’st a present God-like power/ Imprinted in each
herb and flower’.
139 Nina di Cesaro was the widow of Giovanni Colonna, the Duke of Cesaro (1878–1940), a radical
Italian politician and a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s theosophical ideas. Briefly a government minister
in 1922–4, he was implicated in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Mussolini in 1926.
140 Ruth Draper (1884–1956) was an American actress who dazzled her generation with her brilliant
on-stage monologues: see Iris Origo’s portrait of her in A Need to Testify, London: John Murray, 1984,
pp. 79–127.
141 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1898.
142 The text of a lecture, ‘Art and Photography’, given by Clark at the centenary meeting of the Royal
Photographic Society in 1953, was published in The Penrose Annual: A Review of the Graphic Arts, vol.
49, 1955.
1948–1953 330

anything in my Piero, and when I touch on the point of his detachment I treat
it rather differently.
We have had a busy time since I was at I Tatti, with little opportunity to enjoy
the pleasure of our house, garden and friends. Morra has been staying but will
tell you that he has hardly seen us.
Poor Sibyl seems to have taken a turn for the worse. For the first time since
January she was too ill to see me this evening. She had a number of friends to
the house last week to greet Thornton Wilder,143 but she couldn’t leave her bed,
and we went up to see her one by one. I must say she looked terribly ill, and I
doubt now if we can hope for even a partial recovery.
I wonder if you are really going to Paris, and if so where you will be staying.
We shall arrive there about the 7th June and stay about four days – at the Crillon.
I think that you will find a good deal to criticise in the painting department of
the Louvre, but the others are quite good. Cluny is not at all successful – in the
most sonderaustellung144 style, quite inappropriate to its setting. As for the Musee
de l’art Moderne! But you will only need to go there if you feel it necessary to
stimulate the liver – and then it might have the effect of blank depression rather
than stimulating indignation.
This letter was begun days ago, and was left unfinished in a press of activity,
so I must send it off now, without a coda and without saying half the things I
meant to – except ‘thank you’ for the wholly enjoyable book, which will leaven
my mind for many months.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
May 10th 1950

Dear Kenneth.
It is good of you to give so much thought to my Piero so ineloquent. By the way
I cannot forgive myself for having omitted to put as an intro Verlaine’s: ‘Prends
l’eloquence & tords lui la cou’145

143 Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), the much acclaimed American playwright and novelist, received
three Pulitzer Prizes, notably for The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927.
144 German for ‘special exhibition’.
145 ‘Grip eloquence by the neck and squeeze it to death’, from Verlaine’s ‘Art poétique’, in Jadis et
naguère, 1884.
1948–1953 331

I trust you know that this essay was, but for revisions ready two years ago long
before I knew you were writing on the subject of Piero.146
Yes, we mean to reach Paris the evening of May 26th & to put up at Hotel
Prince de Galles Ave. George v (xvie). If I get there alive I shall wait impatiently
for your coming June 3. We leave here the 16th and motor via Turin, Chambery
Autun Dijon Beaune, Auxerres and Laon – all of which I am eager to show to
Nicky and to see again for myself.
My next will be the publication as a booklet of the Sani147 article with
additions and many more illustrations. It seems to have attracted notice in the
States as well as here.
Paris frightens me. I shall want to see so much and so many people and
unfortunately many others whom I am not over anxious to see, will want to see
me. All so fatiguing and I have less and less energy to give out. – I am, I hope,
getting over a peculiarly disgusting and virulent attack of ‘hay-fever’
With love B.B.
I am anxious about Sibyl and very unhappy. I wrote directly I received yours
imploring her to take good care of herself and ‘to put being over her health’.

2 June ’50
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB,
We are delighted to hear that you had reached Paris safely and had enjoyed the
trip through France. By now Nicky will have had a letter from Jane giving her
news. On the whole she is going on well, but of course far more slowly than
she had hoped. The doctor will not hear of her coming to Paris next week,
which cuts down my stay. She is terribly disappointed not to see you and Nicky.
I am arriving at the Crillon late on Tuesday evening, and will ring you up on
Wednesday. I have no engagements (except the meeting on Thursday morning)
so can fit in with any plans you may propose. I shall have to return at lunch time
on Friday, as I don’t like to leave Jane too long. In the last week I have also had
Colin ill in bed and our only sane servant also out of action, so there have been
a good many domestic duties in place of art history.

146 Clark’s Piero della Francesca was published in 1951.

147 See n. 127.
1948–1953 332

Thank you very much for what you say of my note about Bogey.148 The
Times, which had completely ignored his death, cut my original draft – but it
was better than nothing.
It will be a joy to see you.
Love to Nicky,
Yours ever
Kenneth

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
1 Aug ’50

My dear BB,
You were so good as to say that I might once again stay at I Tatti in September,
and I am writing to tell you of my dates. I shall arrive, all being well, on Sept.
6th, in the evening, and would like to stay till the 27th, if that is not too
long. I needn’t say that I shall love to come up to Casa al Dono at any time
convenient to you and Nicky during that three weeks, but as I shall have no
arrangements of any kind, my visits to Vallombrosa can be fitted in at the last
minute, according to the needs of more occupied guests.
We have had our usual busy summer but Jane has grown stronger, and we
should have few cares if the future of civilised humanity did not look so black.
I wonder how the rest of your visit to Paris passed off – and the drive home. It
was fun seeing you there, and I still laugh at the way I began to show you round
the Louvre. I only hope that you didn’t suffer from a reaction on your return.
With much love to Nicky from us both,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
Do let us know if you are likely to come to England in October, and we
will plan accordingly

148 Bogey Harris. An obituary with an appreciation by Clark appeared on 25 May 1950 in The Times.
1948–1953 333

Aug. 6. 1950
Casa Al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. Di Firenze)

My Dear Kenneth
Delighted that you are coming Sept. 6 to stay till 27th at I Tatti. During that
time I shall hope to see you once a week, and when a bed is free (and we shall
do our best that it shall be free) for week-ends.
The rest of the visit passed of[f] in looking and in talking with friends. Salles,
Huyghes, Noailles149 etc. One Sunday at Royaumont wh. bowled me over.
Another at Fontainebleu and Courances.150
On way back took in Chantilly, Chartres, St Sevigny-de-Pres, Orleans, St
Benois and Charite-sur-Loire, Bourges, Lyons, Grenoble, Nice. In last saw
Matisse, content de lui meme.151
Got back and collapsed. I still am not fit to make plans for autumn, but looks
improbable that I shall think it in order to spend Oct in London. And the [illeg]!
I suspect the Soviets are forcing us to starve so as to ruin our economy, the which
they may be fearing was not failing as fast as their calculations.152
Edgell just came here for two days, full of talk about museums.153 Likewise
Constable.154
Love to Jane and tell her I wish she too was coming.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

149 Charles de Noailles

150 The Chateau de Courances near Fontainebleau was built in the 17th century and its gardens
epitomised the formal French style. Royaumont Abbey is a 13th-century Cistercian abbey, located
near Asnières-sur-Oise c. 30 km north of Paris.
151 Berenson called on Henri Matisse on 9 July 1950, recording in his diary that day: ‘Found him
placidly in bed, looking very comfy and nanti.Very different from the anxious, half starved, apostolic
peasant I first met. He recalled that I owned a painting of his and talked of the Steins.Was happy over
what he was doing in the chapel at Vence, which he was sure would be his masterpiece.’
152 Probably a comment about the Soviet Blockade of Berlin (June 1948–May 1949) and its aftermath.
153 Harold Edgell (1887–1954), a Harvard professor and Italian Renaissance scholar. He remained a
leading figure within the University of Harvard until 1935, becoming the Director of the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, 1935–54.
154 W. G. Constable
1948–1953 334

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Nov 11th 1950

Dear Kenneth
I Tatti at last and I have discovered Piper155 and Summerson156 but not yr. landscape
book. When it does come, I shall approach Bompiani about the translation.157
Rome was more and more captivating and a morning spent at Perugia
revealed the Nic. and Giov. Pisani fountain – a resurrection far more important
to our studies than the Baptistry gates here.158
Love to you all
B.B.
Have received lots of photos fr. Ashmolean including Bogey’s Leonardo159 the
which looks like a Piero di Cosimo.

Old Quarries,
Avening,
Gloucestershire
Telephone: Nailsworth 201
8 Dec ’50

My dear BB,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am glad that some of my promises
have fulfilled themselves: by this time I hope that the two volumes of the
2nd edition of the Landscape book will have arrived, and other promises will
trickle in gradually.

155 Penguin published a small illustrated book, Romney Marsh, by John Piper, in 1950.
156 John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture, London: Cresset Press, 1949.
157 Berenson did approach the publishers Bompiani about an Italian edition of Landscape into Art but
they were not interested.
158 The Fontana Maggiore in Perugia was built to celebrate the completion in 1278 of the aqueduct
that brought water to Perugia from the springs of Paciano five miles from the centre of the city.
Designed and built by Nicola Pisano (1220–c.1280) and his son Giovanni (1245–1320), it consists of
two polygonal basins, one above the other, decorated with reliefs that illustrate civic pride, and over
the upper basin three bronze statues who pour water from amphorae.
159 Bogey Harris bequeathed to the Ashmolean a painting, The Virgin and Child with the Young St John the
Baptist, in the style of Leonardo and related to a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
It is catalogued by the Ashmolean as Studio of Leonardo da Vinci.
1948–1953 335

I would have written sooner but have no news which could interest you. We
returned home in fine spirits, but soon became overwhelmed by small troubles,
visitors, family affairs, committees and commitments of every kind. Before we
had gone under completely Bogey’s sale took place, and I managed to attend.
We got some lovely things for little money – the small relief of the Virgin and
Child which he called Jacopo della Quercia for £30, and the low relief of the
Rape of Helen which he called Francesco di Giorgio (but it isn’t) for £35.00.
Also his enchanting gilt gesso cassone for £100. I have absolutely no place to put
any of them, but I couldn’t bear to see them all be bought by small dealers to be
shovelled away in to their cellars.We also bought his little Barnaba da Modena of
the Nativity – very expensive but so beautifully preserved and portable as to be
worth a sacrifice.160 We shall bring it out to you when next we come.
You may remember me telling you that I had found the two other Apostle
panels from the Sta. Maria Maggiore Masolino. I am thankful to say that these are
now safely in the National Gallery.161 Like Mrs Sutton, the owner sold them at
the price I had suggested to him when I found them in 1936. David Crawford162
and the trustees constrained Mr Hendy to ask me to publish them,163 which I
shall do after I have had another look at the Johnson pair. Each pair, by the way,
is a back and front, and the front was far more Massacioesque than the back,
which excuses Vasari’s mistake (in fact Longhi,164 when he sees one of the new
panels, will say that it wasn’t a mistake). I shall send you photos as soon as I can.
I haven’t had any myself yet.
I am delighted to see Zanobi Machiavelli165 – and just as I left the house I saw
an off print of the B.M. mgs [illegible] which you most convincingly give to the

160 Works from the Henry Harris Collection were sold over several days at Sotheby’s in October 1950.
Clark attended the sale on 25 October and the annotated auctioneer’s catalogue records that in his
own name he bought a Florentine copper-gilt shrine (Lot 28, £65); a Flemish bronze mirror (Lot 45,
£5); a gilt-bronze plaque (Lot 48, £9); several marble columns and capitals (Lot 153, £56). Barnaba
da Modena’s Nativity (11.4 x 8.9 cm; 4½ x 3½ in) was sold to the dealer Frank Partridge (Lot 156,
£480), presumably bidding anonymously for Clark. The other works mentioned by Clark cannot
quite be reconciled with the catalogue record. Partridge also bought a white marble relief, Virgin and
Child ‘after Desiderio da Settignano’ (Lot 139, £120); a Florentine relief, Holy Family (Lot 137, £45);
a marble plaque, Rape of Helen (Lot 146, £45).
161 Masolino, St Jerome and St John the Baptist, c. 1428–9 (NG 5962), and Masolino, Pope Gregory the Great
(?) and Matthias, c. 1428–9 (NG 5963), form the two sides of a single panel that was divided. The
panel had been one wing of a double-sided triptych in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. They were
purchased by the National Gallery in 1950. The other side panel of the triptych, also sawn in half,
showed Sts Peter and Paul on one side and St John the Evangelist (?) and Saint Martin on the other. One
side of the central panel depicted the Assumption of the Virgin while the other depicted the Miracle of
the Snow and the Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore. See also n. 212.
162 He was then the Chairman of the Trustees (see David Balniel).
163 Published by Clark in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 93, no. 584 (November 1951), pp. 339–47.
164 Roberto Longhi
165 See Bernard Berenson, ‘Zanobi Machiavelli’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 92, no. 573 (December 1950),
pp. 345–9.
1948–1953 336

master of S. Miniato.Thank you so much for sending it. I am just back from Paris
where I stayed two days, lunched with Paul166 and Charles de Noailles. Marie-
Laure167 is cleaning all her pictures with an eye lotion called Optrex – as it is an
alkaline, with soda in solution, it does nothing except leave a white smear, and is
quite harmless. It would be disastrous if she began to use a real solvent.
We are glad to know that the stay in Rome didn’t prove too exhausting. Jane
has become rather run down and wretched, as she always does after a few weeks
at home. She takes things so hardly and has no idea how to rest and defend
herself. Alan is working for the bar, Colette has just taken her Oxford entrance,
and we are praying that she may be successful. Colin is chiefly occupied in
learning to fly.
As you know, we are going to America in January,168 and will be in Washington
for a fortnight. In spite of many kind friends there, I must confess that I am
dreading it. I can’t face the mixture of heartiness and competition. One has the
feeling that culture is a sinking ship in which everyone is trying to get a seat in
the last boat; and quite prepared to stab their neighbour in the back in order to
get there. However, this may be bracing after the quiet apathy of our home town.
Much love to Nicky. I hope we may all be together again in the spring in spite
of the threats which pile themselves up on our heads.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
December 16th 1950

Dear Kenneth
What a dear and delightful letter you have made the leisure to write. And
some time ago I had one fr. Jane as yet unanswered. Thank her from me and
take thanks for yourself. – I congratulate you on the purchases you made at
Bogey’s sale. I should be ever so grateful for photos, except of the Barnaba da
Modena of which I have the photo already.

166 Prince Paul of Yugoslavia

167 Marie-Laure de Noailles
168 The Clarks went to the usa for January and February 1951. Clark gave lectures in Philadelphia
(Museum of Art), Washington (National Gallery of Art and Phillips Collection) and New York
(Museum of Modern Art and the Frick).
1948–1953 337

I wish you and Jane were going to have the leisure to write fully fr. u.s.a. It is
strange how little news I get therein regarding museum collections, dealers, etc.
All too driven spinning too fast for any leisure. Even fr. Johnny Walker169 I get the
skimpiest notes generally s.o.s’s. So far as I can infer most art matters whether
museums universities or dealers are in the hands of Germans or German-minded
persons. I almost have given up interest.Yet yr. account would revive my interest
if only you could let me have one, as Isaiah Berlin did of Americ. universities in
general.170
I have received two copies of yr. landscape book. As soon as the holidays are
well on I shall approach Bompiani about the translation. I dread his making a
condition that I preface it. Another’s preface is always a kind of patronage and I
could not consent to pretending to be yr. superior.
Glad yr. offspring is flourishing. Please let me have the address in u.s.a. Every
good wish to each and all of you for a Happy New Year and a satisfying 1951.
Love to you both from Nicky
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
19 Jan ’51

My dear BB,
Although the eve of departure is not a propitious moment for writing letters,
I must write to tell you that the Caravaggio171 has arrived, and a quick glance
shows me that it will give me a real treat. My only trouble will be an occasional
twinge of envy – you have put in so many things which I thought no one had
observed but myself. I shall read it in the airoplane [sic], and write about it at
greater length in a bulletin from the us.
We are more or less in condition to go, although slightly nervous of the
influenza plague, which has been knocking out our friends like ninepins. The
sooner we get away the better. I have written all my lectures – one of them on

169 John Walker

170 Isaiah Berlin was one of the founding generation of ‘Oxford philosophers’ to make regular
visits to American universities from the late 1940s. He wrote three short articles for Time and Tide
(November 1949) comparing university education in the usa and Europe, in which he argued for
the justification of curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, rather than for their
contribution to any social or economic benefit.
171 Berenson’s Del Caravaggio delle sue incongruenze e della sua fama, Florence: Electa, 1951.
1948–1953 338

Rembrandt and the quattrocento is really interesting and, as far as I know, new.
The others will do, although I doubt if they will please the Sephardim.172 The
most agonizing assignment is a ten minute pep talk which I have to give at the
Philadelphia gallery. It will probably be printed, and if so I will send it to you,
as I have managed to include one good idea: at least, it still seems good to me,
though God knows what it will seem like on the day. Altogether, the expedition
has cost me a lot of time which could have been better employed, and I hope
will in future.
The chief event of interest in our profession has been the Holbein exhibition
at the R.A.173 It is done in order to show Holbein’s influence in England, but
unfortunately shows England’s influence on Holbein. You would find some
splendid examples of the degradation of form. It also shows how the word
‘derivation’ has come to be used in a pejorative sense, for one doesn’t know how
else to describe the tricked out and flattened imitations of Holbein which the
English produced, except as decorative transcriptions. The same show includes
some Venetian pictures, of which one, the Titian of Three heads, lent by that
horrible Francis Howard, is really fine.174 The R.A. Michelaengelo tondo has
been washed, and looks split new – but this has added to its beauty, for one has
a most vivid sense of communication. It seems as if each stroke of the chisel had
only just been made. I bought an illustrated souvenir of the show to send you,
and a few minutes after saw Francis Toye,175 who said that he was taking one out
next day – which will reach you in better condition.
I am sending a photo of a drawing which I discovered last week in the
Folkestone public library.176 I needn’t tell you anything about it. I believe that the
Dottoressa Toesca published another copy of the Sagra in 1945, but I haven’t seen
her article.177 The Folkestone drawing is interesting as it includes the figures also
copied by Michaelangelo. They had a lot of other drawings there, mostly seicento;
I had one photographed, but it was a spirited affair – a sort of Schiavone178 – and
send a print. I think I shall publish the Sagra copy as any scrap of information
about Masaccio is so precious.

172 Sephardi refers to the descendants of Jewish settlers who trace their origins to the Israelite tribes of
the Middle East and who were resident in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion in 1492.
173 Works by Holbein and Other Masters of the 16th and 17th Centuries, Royal Academy, London, December
1950–March 1951.
174 Titian, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1550–65, now in the National Gallery, London (NG 6376). Francis
Howard (1874–1954) was a genre and portrait painter, art critic, collector and journalist. He was the
stepson of T. P. O’Connor, the Irish nationalist politician and journalist.
175 John Francis Toye (1883–1964) was the Director of the British Institute in Florence. First appointed
in 1939, he had to leave in 1940 but returned in 1946 and remained in post until his retirement in
1958. He was a composer, novelist, art critic and bon viveur, at one time being the managing director
of the Restaurant Boulestin in London. In retirement he bought a vineyard near Florence.
176 See Hugo Chapman, Kent Master Collection, Christie’s, 1991, p. 14, no. 9, catalogued as Andrea Boscoli.
177 Elena Berti Toesca, ‘Per la “Sagra” del Masaccio’, Arti figurative (1945), pp. 148–50.
1948–1953 339

Please thank Nicky for her letter. I am sorry that our plans are turning out
so awkwardly, but April is Colin’s last holidays before going in to the raf, and in
early May I must be in London for the opening of our wretched exhibition, of
which I am on the Council.179 So we shan’t be able to come out till about the
15th May – exactly the date when you leave. Nicky doesn’t say where you will
escape to. Might it not be somewhere where we could join you for a day or two.
We shall be in Rome for about ten days, and might go to Naples. I think we
shall have to be back in London in June, and shall probably come to Italy again
in September – even if Jane doesn’t come then I shall hope to have my ‘retreat’.
Much love to all at I Tatti
Ever your affectionate,
Kenneth

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 2nd 1951

My Dear Kenneth.
I dare say you are home again fr. N.Y. and ‘waystations’ and I can resume our
correspondence. – The enclosed fr. Bompiani speak for themselves.180 I am truly
sorry – My thanks for the enamel of the Entombment – a masterpiece. Likewise
for the photos of Zurbaran. The ‘George & Dragon’181 – is what it says at top R.
by Luca Cambiaso. The ‘Sagra’ drawing is most interesting. I vaguely recall seeing
a reproduction of it in old, old book. I do not remember Ilaria Toesca’s article on

178 Andrea Meldolla (c. 1510/15–1563), known as Lo Schiavone (The Slav), was a painter and etcher,
born in present-day Croatia, who worked in Venice.
179 On 3 May 1951 the King opened the Festival of Britain on the South Bank in London, a popular
celebration and demonstration of Britain’s contribution to civilisation, past, present and future, in the
arts, science, technology and industrial design, marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The Arts Council and the Society for Education in Arts promoted an exhibition at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London, called Black Eyes & Lemonade, which explored a variety of popular British art
and craft such as toys, souvenirs and printed ephemera. The Arts Council also commissioned new
works from Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, which were included in the South
Bank exhibition, and a touring exhibition, 60 Paintings for 51.
180 Letters from the Italian publisher declining any interest in publishing Landscape into Art.
181 See Chapman, Kent Master Collection, p. 10, no. 3, where it was catalogued as Nicolosio Granello,
noting the traditional attribution to Cambiaso.
1948–1953 340

a similar drawing. I look forward to yr. article on the subject182 – as I do to yr.

Piero wh. I read is to appear at once.
It would interest me to hear about yr. American adventures but I fear you will
find no leisure to tell me and by the time we meet again I will be buried under
other interests.
Life here is usual socially but my energies diminish and I get lazier and lazier,
and my assistants are too busy with managing the ‘Institooschen’ that I Tatti has
become to help me in research. So I write nothing, except a rare snippet of a
short article, or a preface. I have become the old, old man whose blessing is asked
for – as a matter of routine. Luckily I still enjoy reading and have delighted in
Turrell’s ‘The French Novel’183 and now Knox’s ‘Enthusiasms’184 and the ‘Life of
Florence Nightingale’,185 etc. etc.
My best to both of you
Affectionately
B.B.

[Undated letter]
As From
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
I was delighted to get your letter which Jane forwarded to me in the squalid
capital of North Wales, where I foolishly agreed to give some lectures. Needless
to say that they were not written when I came back from America, and the
frenzy of putting them together in the last ten days prevented me from sending
you my promised report on your country. Needless to say that we met with great
kindness, and saw many friends, Johnnie, the Lipmanns [sic], Felix Frankfurter186
and others. But personally I found the general impression very depressing. It
really is an asphalt jungle. The economic pressure weighs on one’s spirit all the

182 Clark published the drawing in his review of Krautheimer’s monograph Ghiberti in the Burlington
Magazine (May 1958); see Ch. 9, n. 218.
183 Martin Turnell, The Novel in France, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951.
184 Father Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to XVII and
XVIII Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1951.
185 Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, London: Constable, 1950.
186 Felix Frankfurter. The story of how Jane Clark achieved the ending of the enmity between
Lippmann and Frankfurter on this visit is told in Clark OH p. 90.
1948–1953 341

time. New York is more stupendous than ever – more Babylonian. One can’t
help feeling that the whole thing is out of hand, and that the earth must open
and swallow it up.
However, you won’t want my naïve reflections on America, but a little
information about the arts. The National Gallery, on a prolonged visit, is a
little depressing, because it is like someone who is always trying to live beyond
his means. Of course there are very fine things there, but the scale and the
circumstance with which they are exhibited would smother the contents of the
Louvre and Uffizi combined. Nice little pictures which would give pleasure in
the cabinet of an amateur look painfully inadequate when hung – three to a wall
– in these terribly clean galleries. The Johnson collection with (I suppose) fewer
fine things,187 gives far more pleasure simply because the display is less pretentious.
Moreover, it encourages hope – one may overlook something and have to come
again. And of course the Johnson pictures are dirty, which also encourages hope.
The Washington pictures are horribly clean and shiny – Duveenised. Pichetto188
was as bad – or worse, as he was also completely incompetent. One realises
how much one resents this when one comes on a picture like the Otto Kahn
Byzantine Madonna,189 which has escaped, and gives one a real shock of pleasure.
(Incidentally the Frick pictures, cleaned by a man named something like [illeg],
are very well done.) I wouldn’t be in Johnnie’s shoes for any money. The Kress
Suida190 combine are completely lacking in taste or scruple, and prepared to
try and force any rubbish on him. His colleagues feel that he should take a
firmer line with them, not only for the good of the National Gallery, but to
strengthen the hands of all directors of local galleries who are being bullied by
local millionaires. But I recognise how difficult it is for him – there are so many
border-line cases. Of course all this applies chiefly to the Italian pictures. The
Rembrandts are really fine, and the newly acquired French and Flemish pictures
are also admirable.
The pleasantest place in Washington is still the Freer, which goes on quietly
adding fresh masterpieces of Chinese art, (all very well photographed, by the

187 The Johnson Collection was assembled by John G. Johnson (1841–1917), a Philadelphia corporate
lawyer who was the son of a blacksmith. He was counsel for many of the large us corporations
and banks and declined several offers to be nominated to the Supreme Court. He collected early
Italian Renaissance paintings, Spanish, Flemish and Dutch works and modern artists such as Manet,
Monet, Sargent and Whistler. In his will he left his collection to Philadelphia on condition that it
continued to be exhibited at his house. In 1933 the collection was transferred to the newly built
Philadelphia Museum of Art on a ‘temporary’ basis where it remained for more than 50 years as a
separate collection. In the 1980s it was integrated with the museum’s permanent collection.
188 Stephen Pichetto
189 Enthroned Madonna and Child, 13th century, tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington,
dc, Gift of Mrs Otto H. (‘Addie’) Kahn. It is said to have come from a church or convent in
Calahorra, La Rioja, Spain.
190 Samuel H. Kress; William Suida
1948–1953 342

way), and displaying them with admirable discretion. Of course it is empty. The
Philips Gallery is also a pleasure to visit, because it is an old-fashioned house, and
the pictures have been collected by people who really love them.191 In New York
there are hardly any private collections left. Much the best are Philip Lehmann192
and John D. Rockefeller, the latter most beautifully shown. The Metropolitan is
all in disorder, most of the pictures packed away, and the sound of hammering in
every room. But the objets d’art are inexhaustibly marvellous.
I gave three lectures in Philadelphia which was rather a waste of time, as the
first was on Uccello, and no one knew who he was. On the whole people do
not like a critical approach – they want information, or uplift.193 The strong
Salvationist character of America is very evident in their attitude to art. I was
practically hissed in the Museum of Modern Art for saying that ‘significant form’
was less a critical term than an advertising slogan to comfort the undecided.194
Apparently it had being [sic] giving perfect satisfaction as an equivalent of
‘Alleluja, I’m saved’, and my blasphemy resulted in a number of my audience
having to find an extra session with their psychiatrists.The lectures in Washington
seemed to go better: perhaps I was luckier in the choice of themes.195 My pep
talk in Philadelphia was considered frivolous,196 and may have sounded so after
Dr. Offner’s holy, portentious discourse on method197 – although in fact he was
frivolous and I was serious.
Now this is enough Americana for one letter. I was sad to read that you had
given up writing, but I can well understand how the constant pressure of those
who seek wisdom at I Tatti prevents every other creative activity. Thank you for

191 Duncan and Marjorie Phillips

192 Robert Lehman (1891–1969), who was a banker and head of Lehman Brothers, formed a
distinguished art collection. Acquired over a 60-year period, it displays Western European art from
the 14th to the 20th centuries, including paintings, drawings, manuscript illumination, sculpture,
glass, textiles, antique frames, majolica, enamels and precious jewelled objects. On his death some
3000 works were donated to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and and are housed in a
separate wing which bears his name.
193 Clark’s lectures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were ‘Three Scientific Painters: Uccello, Piero
della Francesca, Seurat’. That on Uccello was repeated at the Frick Collection, New York.
194 The lecture at moma was ‘Form and Association illustrated from the Work of Henry Moore’.
195 The lecture at the National Gallery in Washington was ‘Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance’.
Clark also lectured on Delacroix at the Phillips Collection there.
196 The Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrated its Diamond Jubilee in 1951 by organising, jointly with
the American Philosophical Society, a 3-day conference to which they invited leading scholars and
art historians from all over the world, each to deliver a short paper.
197 Richard Offner
1948–1953 343

your kind efforts with Bompiani. You ought to receive Piero della Francesca
shortly after this letter. I am now conscious only of its defects.
With love from Jane,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
Please tell Nicky I shall write about dates in a day or two.

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
April 2nd 1951

My Dear Kenneth.
I delayed answering your letter about yr. American experiences until I received
yr. ‘Piero’. It has not come yet and at last I discovered that Derek had it & I
borrowed his copy. Let me say at once that I find it satisfactory in every way. Piero
becomes intelligible under yr. pen and alive as well and worthy of the admiration
now tributed to him.The suggestions about his relation to Fra Angelico are most
interesting. I am inclined to believe that they were as from Angelico to Piero.
Angelico seems to have had a Pisgah-sight198 of landskip as modern as Cezannes
and lacked the measurements only for achieving it.Yet with all drawbacks, he still
depicts the Florentine distances as nobody has done since – when you write in
yr. wonderful letter about America provides the other side (as it were) to Isaiah
Berlin’s articles on education there, that appeared about a year ago in ‘Time &
Tide’.199
How I understand what you say about the up-to-date hospital and operating
room display of works of art at the Washing n.g.! I confess that I rapturously
enjoy the pell-mell, helter skelter arrangements of pictures at The Pitti – I am
unhappy because I cannot get used to the loss of the illusion that one is still
creative. Perhaps in consequence I am not too well.
James Pope-Hennessy200 at last has crossed my horizon – so like and so unlike
his ultra laborious and productive brother, our colleague. And I greatly enjoyed
Mary Kessell.201 Such candour naturalness and intelligence all combined, and so

198 See Ch. 4 n. 41.

199 See n. 170.
200 See John Pope-Hennessy
201 Mary Kessell
1948–1953 344

much warmth. How I wish she was living here! Her hair Derek could paint if
he had the leisure.
Jean Seznec202 has just been here and confirmed my feeling for him. I re-
commend him if you want entertaining as well as scholarly companionship. I
look forward to seeing you in May and I hope you will return for the whole of
September. Our plans are to leave for Milan, Venezia & ‘Way-Stations’ towards
the end of May.

With love to you both

Ever Affectionately
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
9 April ’51

My Dear BB,
That your copy of the Piero should have been held up is a flagrant example of
diabolical intervention. Actually I had it sent off before any of the others, as I
was anxious that you should have it before it reached Derek or Morra. Well, the
Devil is always watching for opportunities like this, and in this case he has been
cheated by your generous appreciation of the book, even in someone else’s copy.
I am so glad that you think that it will do.
Your news of i Tatti was most welcome, and I am particularly glad that you
like my dear friend Mary Kessel [sic]. She is indeed an extraordinary product for
a Clapham School, and a series of scholarships to art schools. Her culture is so
genuine and individual. She is also a most remarkable artist, although in the last
year or two she has rather lost heart. However she tells me that you helped her
greatly by your sympathy and imaginative understanding.
We are greatly looking forward to coming in May for a few nights, with our
dear daughter who doesn’t seem at all clever in spite of all her academic honours.
And I am truly grateful to you for saying that I can once more settle in to i Tatti in
September. If I can claim to have a soul at all, it only manifests itself when I am there.

202 Jean Seznec (1905–83) was the Assistant Director and then the Director of the French Institute in
Florence, 1934–40, and taught at Harvard and Oxford from 1941 to 1972. His considerable scholarly
achievements were in the field of classical mythology and its representation in Western art.
1948–1953 345

I can imagine very well how you feel about a life in which you do not do a
certain amount of creative work each day. Heaven knows, you have done enough
and still do through talk and inspiration – for example the help you gave to
Mary. But there is a certain magic about the written word which makes one feel
that the only real work is covering a blank sheet of paper.

With love from Jane and renewed thanks for your kind letter,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
9 Jun ’51

My dear BB,
We are delighted to learn from your postcard, and also from Nicky’s letter to
Derek, that you are feeling better, and that it was really the hayfever which
was causing your troubles. I expect that by now you are in Venice, but will
address this letter to i Tatti.
What with our festivals and Colette’s dance we are having a very full summer
– and from my point of view a very empty one. I must confess that both
activities have been agreeable. The dance was really very pretty and Colette was
incandescent with happiness. The only cloud was that our dear Colin was away
in the Air Force, and that some of our closest friends also had to be abroad then.
After all the fatigues involved (for Jane, not for me) we took refuge in Aldeburgh,
which as you may know is the scene of a comically modest, but very pleasant
festival.203 Walks by the sea and music in the evening restored us to such health as
will carry us through the next epreuves. We saw a lot of Derek, who gave us all
the news. Now we have Colin back on leave, with great family rejoicing.

203 The Aldeburgh Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter
Pears and the librettist/producer Eric Crozier. The English Opera Group provided the initial
programme of operas but the vision for the festival developed over time to include readings of
poetry and literature, drama and lectures, and art exhibitions. At first modest in scope and housed
in small local venues, the Festival developed dramatically after 1967 when a large mid-19th-century
maltings at Snape, near Aldeburgh, was converted into a concert hall.
1948–1953 346

I envy you seeing the Caravaggios.204 I can’t fly out on purpose, and have
no chance of getting to Milan till September, when I suppose it will be over. I
console myself by thinking that a mass of Caravaggios might be rather oppressive:
moreover, I’m never quite sure how much I learn from a ‘one man show’ of this
kind – I know that I went to the Bellini exhibition for 5 weeks – every day,
and was no wiser at the end of it – in fact learnt far more next year by seeing
the pictures one by one in their churches. However, I suppose that the study of
Caravaggio is in such a pre-Morellian condition that close quarter comparison
will be valuable.
We are just off to Amsterdam, and thence to Utrecht where I am lecturing –
very rashly – on Rembrandt and the quattrocento.205 I am worried that the Dutch
will be rather hurt – but I can’t help it – it amuses me, and I may learn something,
which I certainly shouldn’t if I spoke on an English or Italian subject there.
If all is well we hope to arrive in Florence about the 1st September. It will be
a great joy to see something of you under the peaceful conditions of Vallombrosa.
Please tell Nicky that I shall write to her with precise dates in a week or two –
and give her a hug from me.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Hotel Europa E Britannia

Venezia
June 27 1951

Dear Kenneth.
Here we are frivolously enjoying Tiepolo206 carefree and unconcerned as
to which he did or did not paint, or what he meant. Such a contrast to the
Caravaggio Show which I profited by seeing again works I could not hope to
see again, or see at all, like those in u.s.a. in German lands or even Sicily. I fear
my travelling days are over. Going about takes it out of me so – But to return to
Caravaggio, the only ‘really truly’ Caravaggesque work shown is the ‘Calling of
Matthew’.207 All the others are by an orthodox classical artist, who might have
worked in the early cinque-cento.

204 There was a legendary Caravaggio exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, April–June 1951, with
a catalogue by Roberto Longhi.
205 The lecture was arranged by Roger Hinks who was the British Council representative in Holland.
206 There was an exhibition of paintings by Tiepolo at the Ca’ Rezzonico, June–October 1951.
207 Caravaggio, Calling of St Matthew, 1599–1600, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
1948–1953 347

I feel less and less glad of seeing works of art. I see so many of my own making
every step I take out of doors, every time faces come my way. Yet when I do
come across real (ie representational paintings or carvings) I enjoy them more
than ever.
I am so glad Colette’s coming out here was such a success. Do send me yr.
lecture on Rembrandt and the Sphinx. It is a subject that greatly interests me.
We stay here another eight days. It is ecstasy to be here without a problem in
my head. Then Vallombrosa, and the hope of seeing you there in Sept. Let it be
early Sept.
Ever Affectionately
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
Aug ’51

My dear BB,
There has just arrived a generous consignment of your writings, all of them
promising interest and pleasure. Thank you very much for sending them. The
only one I have read so far is the Tiepolo,208 which I have enjoyed immensely – a
piece of true appreciation, which carries the reader along on the tide of your
enjoyment. I much like your comparison with Lautrec and Cheret209 – which
proves that the poster was the only living decorative art in the late 19th c, for
Cheret is only tolerable as a poster artist, and the recent Lautrec exhibitions in
Paris left me with almost the same feelings about him.210 No doubt about the
brilliant talents displayed in the pastels, but they were odius and exasperated,
whereas in the posters his graphomania is liberated. Poor Cheret! I admired the
posters so much (so did Seurat) that I made a pilgrimage to the Musee Cheret
in Nice – but, alas, the paintings are vulgarity itself, with a kind of Bonnard
incandescence which ruins their colour.
I wish I had something to send you equivalent at least in bulk, but this has
been a poor summer for work. However, I am sending, as you asked for it,

208 Berenson wrote two articles on Tiepolo: ‘Tiepolo à Venise’, Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 317,
29 June 1951; ‘Giovan Battista Tiepolo’, L’Illustrazione italiana, vol. 80, no. 6 (1951), pp. 57–66.
209 Jules Chéret (1836–1932), the French painter and lithographer of the Belle Époque. He has been
called the father of the modern poster.
210 L’Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, held a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in 1951 to commemorate the
fiftieth anniversary of his death.
1948–1953 348

my Rembrandt lecture. It can’t be understood without the illustrations, and I

have put in all the references to the drawings in Valentiner’s Klassiker der Kunst
volumes.Unfortunately I don’t think that they are at i Tatti – at least I have never
been able to find them – and they are difficult to obtain. Still you will know
most of the drawings I refer to, and of course all the etchings and paintings. I
am also sending an off-print of an inaugural lecture I gave at Edinburgh.211 It
is roughly written, but it contains so many ideas which derive ultimately (or
immediately!) from your writings and conversations that it may amuse you to
glance at it. I hope you will have had from the National Gallery details of the
new panel from the Sta. Maria Maggiore triptych. I am sending you a copy of a
dry argumentative note I have written on it – the conclusion seems rather odd,
and surprised me, but I can do no alternative.212
Now at last, I am launched on my gross subject of the nude which I am due
to give as lectures in Washington in 1953.213 Of course this involves learning a
great deal more than I know at present about Greek art, and learning is always
enjoyable. But whether I shall be able to digest all this new material and assimilate
it with what I know already about post-renaissance art is still doubtful. As usual,
all the bright ideas I had when I set out have become tarnished by the facts.
It was a bitter blow not to be able to come to i Tatti orVallombrosa in September,
but we couldn’t leave our dear Colin to have his short holidays from the raf
with us away and the house shut up. However I am considerably cheered by the
thought that I shall see you in October. Nicky tells me that you will probably
come back to the Tatti about the 15th, and I have written asking her if I can come
out on the 5th, and have my usual ten days retreat which I value so greatly. I am
really longing for it – and even more for the pleasures of your conversation.
Some of these pleasures I have been able to enjoy in reading Vedere & Sapere214
which I have done since I began this letter. The development of your theme
that art is a compromise between seeing and knowing is most enlightening,
and I agree with nearly all that you say about modern art. Only I think that
the disease from which it suffers goes deeper, and cannot be cured without a
complete catastrophe. I have also re-read the enchanting study of Sani,215 which

211 ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’, the Inaugural Lecture on the occasion of Clark’s election as President
of the Associated Societies of the University, 15 November 1950, published in the University of
Edinburgh Journal (Summer 1951). He had a number of distinguished predecessors, including Ruskin.
212 See n. 161; Kenneth Clark, ‘An Early Quattrocento Triptych from Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome’,
Burlington Magazine, vol. 93, no. 584 (November 1951), pp. 339–47. Clark argued that Masaccio could
have left the triptych unfinished at his death and that Masolino might then have completed those
parts left unfinished and painted the entire back. Clark’s argument for a joint enterprise between
Masaccio and Masolino is now accepted in principal.
213 See Introduction and n. 270.
214 Bernard Berenson, Vedere e sapere, Milan: Electa, 1951 (in English as Seeing and Knowing, London:
Chapman and Hall, 1953).
215 See n. 127.
1948–1953 349

is also a comment on modern art. It is astonishing how well his work survives
reproduction in that sumptious form.
When this arrives Mary will be staying with you. I do hope you have enjoyed
her visit – as she will certainly enjoy hers. She is a wonderful person and after 12
years I have grown to love and admire her more.
I am writing to dear Nicky about my plans. I do hope that when this reaches
you, your fatigues of the summer will be forgotten and you will be bounding
through the birch woods, as I love to think of your doing.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Sept.1.1951
Casa Al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth.
Thank you for delightful letter, and for the three articles. It is most generous to
let me have two of them before they have appeared in print.
In the first place let me tell you how sorry I am, and how disappointed that
you are not to be here this month. Our walks and talks in this solitude have been
among the best moments of my stay here. I fear we shall be away in Ischia216
and thereabouts most of Oct. and when we do get back to I Tatti it will be to
receive the Hands217 and other American friends. Perhaps I shall get glimpses of
you – nevertheless.
You mention Mary Kessel [sic]. She has been with us a fortnight and I am
sorry that she leaves tomorrow. She eagerly joined in all our talks with such a
variety of folk as come here! She is so participating so intelligent, so human, so
restful and soothing. A great acquisition.
A couple of days ago we had the visit of that distilled quintessence of Zentral
Europa, the Phaidon publisher.218 How he reminded me of Joe Duveen, with that
noble peer’s power of persuading without convincing.
Now to turn to your three papers. I can congratulate you with all my heart
on all three of them. First and foremost on the Rembrandt paper, that fulfills all

216 See William Walton, who had a house on Ischia.

217 Judge Learned Hand
218 Bela Horovitz (1898–1955), born in Budapest, established the publishing house Phaidon Verlag in
Vienna in 1923. In 1938 he transferred his publishing activities to London. In the 1950s Phaidon
Press produced art books of the highest quality in both content and presentation.
1948–1953 350

my expectations.219 You have attained full maturity in scholarship, in thought, in

wording and in phrasing.You now can count on a quarter of a century of active
and qualitative work on the lines started by yr. Gothic book.
I liked the Edinburgh address almost as much. It is the best defence of our
Schlemmer’s Geschaft that I have ever seen in English.220
And now for the article on the panels you discovered and helped yr. Nat.
Gallery to acquire.You were good enough to send me photos of the Jerome and
Baptist. Obviously masaccio. I read yours with admiration of yr. skill in handling
the evidence. I have become doubtful of the possibility of such evidence to
bring conviction.
Millard Meiss221 has published in the June ‘Art Bulletin’ an article on a little
‘flagellation’ recently acquired by the Frick. He brings to bear all the big and
little up-to-date artillery to prove that it is by duccio. It is obviously (so far as a
reproduction can tell) by cimabue.222
Johnnie Walker is here and we have talked about Kress and his N.G. and how
he looks forward to yr. lectures on the Nude.
So much more to say – happily
Ever Affectionately
B.B.

[Undated letter]
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357

My dear BB,
One always forgets to enclose things – this one wasn’t really worth the postage.
We aren’t going to the South of France after all – the doctor thinks it is too
far for Jane. We are going to Paris – the Crillon – for a fortnight. More fun for
her – and she needs fun as well as rest. But she really is a good deal better.
Much love
K

219 See n. 205.

220 See n. 211.
221 Millard Meiss
222 Purchased by the Frick Collection in 1950, The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1280, is now catalogued as by
Cimabue.
1948–1953 351

‘As From’
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
September 15th 1951

My Dear BB,
Your generous letter gave me as much pleasure as any which I have ever received.
I am really delighted that you found the Rembrandt lecture was on the right
lines. The other paper is very sketchy and I should not have ventured to send it
but that it contained so much which I have derived from you.
Talking of which, I have just re-read your Sketch for a Self Portrait,223 and
have enjoyed it even more than the first time. It is incredibly true and far richer
than is apparent at the first glance. I believe it will be one of lives [sic] to survive
from this epoch.
Nicky will have had my card in which I say how gladly I avail myself of your
kind offer to let me have the Villino in the first weeks of October. I hope to
arrive on the 5th, and may catch a sight of you before you leave Vallombrosa: and
in any case will see you when you return after the 15th.
We are in the country with ample opportunity for work and reflection, which
I am greatly enjoying. I am working on my nude lectures – interesting to me, if
to no-one else. I am not sufficiently a pagan to do justice to the pure, sensuous
nude – but hope to do better when it becomes hardened with thought and
emotion. Incidentally your Vedere e Sapere put me on to Julius Lange,224 who is a
real humanist. Strange how that kind of writing went out after the 19th century.
I am greatly relieved that you agree about the Masaccio. Everyone I have
shown the articles and photographs to is of the same mind – except the officials
of the National Gallery, who are displeased.
Yes: Horovitz is a sort of Duveen of publishing. But I must say that he
produces the books with great care – assisted by a very gloomy, pessimistic
unpersuasive Viennese named Graefe and he has been idealistic enough in some
of his publications.

223 See Introduction and n. 90.

224 Julius Lange (1838–1896), was the first director of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen,
founded by the brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842–1914), who assembled one of the largest private art
collections of his day. He named the museum after his brewery, Ny Carlsberg.Towards the end of the
19th century, Denmark witnessed an extraordinary increase of interest in ancient sculpture. Today,
the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek contains ancient and modern art, sculptures and paintings.
1948–1953 352

Thank you again, dear BB, for your most generous encouragement, which
delights me now, and will comfort me when I no longer get favourable reviews
and when readers in general are tired of hearing me called the just!
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
[but probably written while in Italy]
6 Oct ’51

My dear BB,
This is a note of gratitude for your great kindness in letting me stay at the Villino.
As far as I am concerned it is quite perfect – I couldn’t wish for more – and I am
happier than I have been since I was at i Tatti last year. I have been over to I Tatti
each day, and am delighted at the re-arrangement of the library. It was hard to
make up one’s mind that a private library should turn into an institutional one,
but now that it is done, it is a great convenience. And after all, it is still extremely
personal. Really Alda has done marvellously – one wonders where all the books
were before the new library was built.
I am looking forward very much to your return. There is a great deal which I
wish to ask you and talk over with you, if you can spare me the time. Meanwhile
I hope that Ischia has helped the hay fever, and that you will come back strong
enough to face the inevitable pilgrims.
All being well, Jane arrives at about the same time you do. She has not been
well, and I am a good deal worried about her – she has grown into a sort of
tragic figure without in fact being associated with any tragedy – a sort of Muse
without a role. Still, I suppose it is sufficiently tragic to feel ill and nervous three
quarters of the time.
Much love to dear Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
1948–1953 353

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
As From i Tatti
Settignano
15 Oct ’51

My dear BB,
Thank you for your kind words of sympathy about Jane. She hates anyone
mentioning that she has been ill, for the very reasons you give in your letter225 –
that she is naturally so full of zest and spirit; and usually I do not refer to it. But
in fact it has cast quite a shadow over the last few years. She has just been to see a
new doctor in whom she is disposed to have faith and I look forward to hearing
the result when she arrives on Wednesday. But I am much afraid that she will
never get right without a troublesome major operation, and this she naturally
wishes to postpone as long as possible. Please don’t mention this to anyone but
Nicky, and don’t talk to Jane about it. In fact I have never told anyone, but I take
advantage of your quasi-parental relationship with me to get it off my chest!
I am still reveling in the peace of the Villino and the library, and have been
able to concentrate as I have not done for many years. I am sorry to hear that
you have been laid up with a cold – but the cold (which in spite of what doctors
say gives me a cold) has been hard for the youngest and strongest to bear. Your
sisters226 have been very kind in inviting me to i Tatti for luncheon twice.
Please tell Nicky that she must have thought me an intolerable fusser,
telegraphing about my arrangements, but that the postcard in which she
explained that all was in order only reached me here, a few days ago. We had just
missed one in Aldeburgh, and it had then been mixed up with some invitation
cards of Jane’s.
Longing to see you both on the 20th. I hope that by then your chill will have
vanished and Il tromantana227 have dropped
Love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

225 Letter missing.

226 Senda Berenson Abbott and Bessie (see under BB), who travelled from the usa to visit Berenson.The
last time they had done so was in the 1930s.
227 Tramontana: the North Wind.
1948–1953 354

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
5 Nov ’51

My dear BB,
It is less than a week since we got back, but it seems like the best part of a year,
spent entirely in meetings and public works. Arts Councils, Commissions on the
authorisation of artists’ materials, Conferences with the Ministry of Works, the
Fine Arts Commission and Covent Garden – every day, morning and afternoon.
You can imagine how regretfully I think of i Tatti, the library and the Villino. It
is indeed my salvation that you are so kind as to allow me to stay there so often
and for such long periods, and I can never be grateful enough. Apart from all this
public grind, we have found things well enough at home – the children well and
happy, and fewer major domestic disasters than usually attend a home coming.
Those few weeks of talks with you, dear BB, have revived my spirit, and I
am greatly delighted that you approve of my plan to do a Justi’s Winckelmann
about B.B. and his circle.228 As I said, I must deal with the Nude, and Rembrandt
first, but in the meantime can be collecting materials. I am only regretful that I
didn’t think to extract more historical data from such figures of the past as Miss
Paget.229
I was very glad that the few samples of my ‘nude’ ideas which I displayed to
you, seemed to hold out promise. It will take a great effort to put them into
order, and to do so I shall have to retire to the Country for long spells during
the next year.
I hope the pressure of pilgrims has not grown too intense. You may feel less
active or resistant to fatigue, but you looked almost unchanged, and in your
company I completely forgot the passage of time.
Jane sends her love.You were so sweet and sympathetic to her, that I think it
has helped her greatly.
With much love and gratitude
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

228 Carl Justi (1832–1912) was a German scholar and art historian with a particular interest in biography.
While teaching at Marburg he read the works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and during 1866–72
published a massive 3-volume account of Winckelmann’s writings. Winckelmann (1717–1768) was
one of the founders of scientific archaeology and the first to propose categories of style as a basis for
the study of the history of art. Many consider him to be the father of the discipline of art history.
229 Violet Paget
1948–1953 355

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Nov 13, 1951

Dear Kenneth.
Thank you for a letter wh. warmed my heart. It would be wonderful if you
wrote about my evoluement during the last 60 years and more. If, when you will
be ready to give yr. full attention to the task, I still remain alive and I mean alive
as distinct fr. senile surviving, hochst subjectif 230 no doubt, yet worth considering.
A propos have you seen the N.G. catal. of Ital. Paintings just appeared?231 It is an
Augean stable of antiquarian rubbish, and piled so high that it is not easy to read
it and to find what one is looking for – even if it be a mere fact.
Its whole tendency is to ignore and even to do more than ignore, to throw
contempt on style-criticism and all that it has tried to do in the last 75 years.
- Nicky read me Jane’s beautiful letter. I am glad Jane has decided to have the
operation. –
The Hands did not leave before the Francis Biddles232 arrived. Katherine
Biddle is one of the most genuine as well as likeable human beings of my
acquaintance.Yet half-sister of that arch comptress Marguerite Bassiano.233

230 German for ‘highly subjective’.

231 Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: Early Italian Paintings, London, 1951 (see Ch. 6’s intro-
duction).
232 Francis Biddle (1886–1968) was the us Attorney General during the Second World War and the
principal American judge during the Nuremberg trials. He was married to the poet Katherine
Garrison Chapin (1890–1977). His brother George was a painter who visited I Tatti in early 1952.
233 Marguerite Caetani Bassiano (1880–1963) was a patron of the arts and well-known in the literary
world as the editor of Botteghe oscure, a biannual review publishing poetry and fiction in their original
languages (e.g. André Malraux, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, Ignazio Silone, Robert Graves, Archibald
MacLeish, e.e. cummings). Born Marguerite van Auken, in 1911 she married Roffredo Caetani, 17th
Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Bassiano. His niece Topazia (1921–1990) married the composer
Igor Markevitch (1912–1983) who had lived with his first wife at the Villino at I Tatti in 1941–7.
Roffredo was the last male member of the line and a noted composer. The celebrated gardens at
Ninfa, south of Rome, were the creation of his family.
1948–1953 356

Yesterday a film on Michelangelo was shown in the sitting room downstairs.

Fascinating reproduction of the sculptures, but the ‘talkie’ was ‘Savonarola-Brown’234
With love to you all
Ever Yours
B.B.
PS Thanks for book on Venetian portrait photos – altogether admirable and
remarkable

Nov. 23.1951
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
Thanks for the pretty double-faced scarf and still more for the p.c. with such an
extraordinary good likeness of your dear self prise sur le vif.
Which reminds me that I need photos of you and of Kenneth for my conostasis.
I am glad you have decided to have the operation. It is a heroic decision but such
a wise one! You have my whole-hearted sympathy.
Is it true that K is going to America again this winter.
With love to you both
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
26 Nov. ’51

My dear BB,
We delighted in your letter. The thought of I Tatti has a settling and inspiring
effect on me. I am still in the midst of the Vita attiva which is producing a large

234 Possibly a reference to John Nicholas Brown or a cryptic comment on the style and content of
the commentary. One of the chapters in Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, London:William Heinemann,
1919, a book of stories based on six fictional characters, was about ‘Savonarola’ Brown, the author of
a tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance.
1948–1953 357

crop of weeds at the moment. For example, it looks as if our new Government
is going to shut down Covent Garden, opera and ballet, which it has taken us
six years and much heart’s blood to build up. That is the trouble about the life of
action: it doesn’t require much intelligence, but continual attention.
I have been relishing your characterisation of the N.G. Catalogue. It is an
extraordinary production. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t really eschew
stylistic criticism, but accepts it only if it is either over 80 years old, or the work
of the editor himself. In other words, only if it is uninformed or second rate.
My modest and, as I thought, inoffensive article on the Masaccio-Masolino altar
piece has unfortunately become ‘news’, and I am attacked on the subject by
waiters and cloak-room attendants. I have had a characteristic effusion from
Longhi in almost exactly the same words as when I published the Lisbon Piero,
i.e. that he had really known it all along (only had not had the good fortune to
have seen the picture) and so that it was really his discovery, and I should have
said so.
By the time you get this Rosamund [Lehmann] will have arrived to stay with
you, much in need of the rest and atmosphere of work which one only finds at
i Tatti. How I envy her, and wish I was there too. However, I am escaping for
ten days before Christmas, while Jane does some shopping. She has been a little
better but now is fallen back, poor darling, into great distress of mind and body.
However, she seems more or less decided to have the necessary operation.
Your girl friends are all well. Vivien, after various colds and sinusitis, is
extremely bright and able to face the horrors of a New York season. Mary is
blissfully happy doing rather beautiful sculpture. You really changed her whole
outlook by your sympathy.
Thank you for sending me the off print of the Sacra Conversationi in the
Louvre.235 I suppose you are right. But it is so much finer than the signed
Mancini, which has always seemed to me rather a pastiche236 – whereas the
Louvre picture is a rich new creation. Did you know the Degas copy of it.237 I
have a photo which I can send you if you haven’t got it already.
Much love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

235 Bernard Berenson, ‘Une “Sacra Conversazione” de l’Ecole de Giorgione au Louvre’, Revue des arts
(June 1951), pp. 67–76.
236 Domenico Mancini, Virgin and Child enthroned with Angel Lutenist, 1511, Duomo, Lendinara, nr
Rovigo,Veneto.
237 Degas’s copy of 1868–72 is of what is now identified as Sebastiano del Piombo’s Holy Family with St
Catherine and St Sebastian, Musée du Louvre.
1948–1953 358

Just after I had folded this up your letter to Jane arrived – for which she is
most grateful. She is having a final consultation with the surgeon on Thursday.
Of course I am not going to America this winter, or next year, and never was.
K

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
22 Jan ’52

Dear BB,
I have written you a longer letter, which I have posted separately, in which I give
particulars of the original of the enclosed photographs. The owner is martin
asscher, 4 joubert studios, jubilee place, london s.w.3238
Unfortunately, he has decided to ask such an exorbitant price that I doubt
if there would be any chance of the Gallery buying it, even if it was thought
desirable to do so.
Yours ever
Kenneth

[Typewritten letter]
Upper Terrace House
Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
23rd January, 1952

My dear BB,
I put off writing to you every day in hopes that I may find time to write with
my own hand but at this rate the letter will never get written, and in any case my
hand grows daily more illegible.
First of all I wanted to thank you for the beautiful Christmas present.239 The
landscape details are most revealing, even more so than one might have expected.
Perhaps there are rather too many of them, but then it is intended as a book

238 See next letter.

239 Probably Hanna Kiel and Dario Neri, Paesaggi inattesi: Nella pittura del rinascimento, intro. Bernard
Berenson, Milan: Electa, 1952.
1948–1953 359

to dip into and not to go right through. It was just the right picture book for
Jane to look at through her convalescence, which, I am glad to say, is now going
quite well, although she has had a number of setbacks, the last only a week ago.
Of course, it is impossible for her to relax and she soon tires herself with letter
writing and telephoning. She is in an ideal nursing home run by Augustinian
nuns,240 with a view over London and a large window to admit any rays of
sun which reach us in January. She will be there for another ten days, after
which we go down to the country for three weeks. I am greatly looking forward
to this as for the last two months I have hardly opened a book or written a
word. Household business, arrangements for the children and visits to Jane twice
daily, added to my ordinary Committees and other engagements, have made
contemplation or study of works of art impossible.
I did, however, go to see a picture which had been discovered by a rather
obscure dealer called Martin Asscher.241 For some reason it sounded interesting
and, in fact, turned out to be remarkably like a Simone Martini. (I am sending
the photographs of it in a separate envelope.) He found it in an antique shop in
Worcester. It has not been restored recently but the Madonna’s head must have
suffered a little in the past.The Child is perfectly intact and looks very Simoneish
to me but I have not yet had time to do any work on it. As we have nothing of
the sort in the National Gallery, I told Hendy about it but have not heard, and
probably will never hear, the result.
I expect you have had more news of our friends than I have.Vivien has been
ill almost all the time they have been in New York and has, in addition, had
savage criticisms.242 I do not think I have ever had more miserable letters.
I saw yesterday a very old friend, Gilbert Murray,243 who was as bright, curious
and credulous as ever and wished to be remembered to you.
By the way, I do not know if you are on good terms with Sir Robert Witt.244
He recently had an 80th birthday and I am afraid is in a very poor condition, so
that if he is a friend a letter would be very welcome – but I can well understand
it if he is not.

240 Probably the Bethanie Nursing Home, Highgate, London.

241 Martin B. Asscher was a fine art dealer at 36 Bywater St, Chelsea. There is correspondence between
Clark and Asscher dated January–May 1952 in the Tate Archive.
242 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had taken Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard
Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra to New York (having received good reviews for their performances in
the plays in London). The New York reviews were mostly good but the young English theatre critic
Kenneth Tynan, seeking to make his reputation, and with the slogan ‘Rouse tempers, goad, lacerate,
raise whirlwinds’ pinned above his desk, wrote that Vivien Leigh had a mediocre talent which forced
Olivier to compromise his own.
243 Gilbert Murray
244 Robert Witt
1948–1953 360

I have not seen Rosamund since she came back from you, only talked to her
on the telephone. She is distracted with house moving and the last chapter of
her novel.245
[Continued in handwriting] I left this unfinished, and must send it off in
this state, as I see no prospect of the chance to write in a more leisurely state. I
am motoring Jane down to the country tomorrow. She is much better, though
whether quite well enough to undertake the journey, I am not sure, and I am
afraid that after the calm of the nursing home, the change of regime will be
distressing for her.
You will have seen that our chances of travel have been much curtailed, but
even so I hope we may be able to come to i Tatti in May – or to the Villino if
that were possible. I am longing to get back to work.
With love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
Easter [1952]

My dear BB,
I needn’t tell you with what sorrow and reluctance I left you. I didn’t seem to
say half of what I meant to say to you, and there was so many things which I had
wanted to ask you, which for some reason faded from my mind. i Tatti seemed
more than ever my home, and I was miserable at the thought that I shouldn’t get
back for a year or so. All this made me, after the first few evenings, distracted and
apprehensive – although I loved our walks, and shall never forget the beauty of
the spring landscape.
I was also grieved to find your hay-fever tormenting you so continuously. It
is particularly hard for you of all people to have an affliction which seems to
grow worse when brought into contact with new life in nature. And then all
those unknown people at tea-time! Surely, dear BB, you can get Nicky to tell
them that you are not as young as you were, and can see them only once a week.
There was a time when they seemed to exhilarate you, but not now. I was really
worried for you when, on coming in from your walk, you had to brace yourself
to meet all these unknowns.

245 Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, London: Collins, 1953.

1948–1953 361

I had a good journey back, and was met by the two boys, looking the
embodiment of youth. The sight of them consoled me for the departure from i
Tatti.
You were so kind to Colette; I am sure that she will soon loose her nervousness
and speak easily to you.You will find her very youthful and unlearned in speech
– but she is actually very perceptive.
It is as warm here as it was in Florence, and the garden, which is Jane’s delight,
is full of flowers. Unfortunately she is still forbidden to do much digging or
lifting.
Thank you again, dear BB, for all your kindness to me, and the way in which
you make me feel that the Tatti is my home. I value it more than I can say – more
every year.
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth Clark
Will you please tell Nicky that I shall write to her in a day or two, when
things have settled down a bit. Give her all my love and gratitude.

Wentworth Hotel
Aldeburgh, Suffolk
Telephone 312-313
5 June ’52

My dear BB,
It seems a long time since I left i Tatti – very sorrowfully, for I have never felt
more strongly that I ought to have stayed there. I wonder, and have wondered
every day, how you have been since; and am grieved to hear from Derek that
you have been rather low. I do hope that Ischia, followed by Vallombrosa, will
revive you.
I have been struggling with a multitude of things and people. Every day seems
to bring a fresh complication. But as you see I am now in the country, near my
old home,246 where I am able to give a little more time to writing. I can’t say
that my nude book is going very well. I haven’t got the right balance between
exposition and criticism, and keep on putting in bits of information, which I
then have to cut out. Altogether, I am sorry I took it on – but I must grind away
at it now; and of course I have learnt a great deal in the course of preparing it,
which may come in useful later. Either I am growing prematurely old, or the

246 Sudbourne Hall, near Orford in Suffolk, was bought by Clark’s father for the excellent shooting that
the estate offered. Many of Clark’s early childhood years were lived there.
1948–1953 362

work of my colleagues has greatly declined. At any rate, I am being continually

irritated by the dishonest or imbecile stuff written on the history of art – although
it sometimes reaches the farcical, as in M. Iserlow’s [sic]247 article on Leonardo,
which made two points – first that he was a ‘solid realist’ and second that the
Mona Lisa was really a boy dressed up as a woman.
I suppose those monsters in the Louvre will never have sent you those detailed
photographs. They only sent them to me after three telegrams. The only treat
I shall have to offer you is a set of details I am having taken of the frieze of the
mausoleum,248 which really is a masterpiece, and greatly under rated because
not properly photographed – oh, and some photos of the Mildenhall treasure249
which you may not have had.
Jane is a good deal better, but easily grows tired and depressed. I was so glad
to hear from Colette that she had some talk with you before she left Florence.
She loved it, and now is able to recognise something of what her father owes to
you. Of course she is longing to return to Florence at the first possible moment.
Colin is still flying, and Alan pursues his strange independent life, half idle and
half crazily energetic, and both halves equally pointless, as far as I can see. If Colin
gets three weeks leave in July we are all going to Venice, so that the children can
bathe. I like to potter about the churches in the early morning, but if it is very
hot I can’t work, and I confess I would rather stay at home till this wretched
book was in better shape: or, best of all, go back to i Tatti, where I can work, and
where I feel completely in harmony with my surroundings. But, alas, I fear that
will be impossible.
We are supposed to be going to Greece in October.The present Ambassador250
is a war-time friend of mine, and has asked us to stay: and although I don’t like
staying in Embassies, the present currency regulations make it a necessity.
Do, if you can, send us a line to say how you are, dear BB. I am really anxious
to know.
With much love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

247 Probably George Isarlov, a French art historian who wrote on a wide range of artists, ancient and
modern, from 1929 onwards.
248 Possibly the Amazon frieze from the tomb of Mausollos at Halikarnassos (Bodrum), in the British
Museum.
249 The Mildenhall Treasure is a hoard of highly decorated Roman silver tableware from the 4th century
ad, which was unearthed by a ploughman near Mildenhall in Suffolk in 1942. Not realising what
he had discovered, he did not bring his find to the notice of the authorities until 1946, when it was
acquired by the British Museum.
250 Charles Peake
1948–1953 363

Bari, June 10.52

My Dear Kenneth.
Delighted to read yours of the 5th wh. found us here yesterday. News except
for dear Jane, excellent. To her with my love the assurance that with rest and
good thoughts she will recover L’operazione. Operations leave one depressed for
months but not for years.
The Nude is a task that demands much tunnelling and by-passing. To do it
in the American-German-Jewish way would take several life-times and produce
the usual boring rubbishy meta-fissical results.You would not embark with that
theme nor have you the time to do it. So preach from on high.
You speak of photos of the Mausoleum and of the Mildenhall treasure. I
should be grateful for prints of them.
We are having enchanting weather. La fond de l’ocean remains cool, and one
enjoys the sea breeze nearly always. Since I used to haunt the regions more than
50 years ago they almost are unrecognisable. Squalid villages of 80 or 90,000 [sic]
have given place to Pharaonomically grandiose cities. The roads wh. were more
piste are now as good as any in Europa. Showy hotels everywhere. So, as far as
material civilisation goes Apulia is as up-to-date and easy to get about it in [sic]
as the most advanced regions of the North.
But by way of art there is architecture only. The cathedrals are among the
most fascinating anywhere and the chiselling that edges doors and windows
is exquisite in its quality and entertaining as illustration. A whiff of Italy and a
breeze from France enliven the Byzantine mass.
As for painting, but for one fine Giov. Bellini, two or threeVeronese a Tintoretto
or two there is only native rubbish – rubbish so rubbishy as to be disgusting.Yet
Brandi251 has raffled some of them to give employment to his Istituto de Ristauro.
I wish you were coming to Vallombrosa in the summer. At all events remember
our tryst in Rome next Oct. It would be such fun to see things together the way
we did more than 25 years ago.
Sight-seeing is not only sheer delight but when it is to what one has seen
again and again, a way of measuring one’s own growth. Durer on his 2nd visit to
Venice discovered that.
Write again soon
Ever affectionately,
B.B.

251 Cesare Brandi (1906–1988) was an art historian and critic who became the first Director of the
Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome in 1939, retiring in 1959. He was a specialist in the theory
and practice of conservation and restoration of works of art.
1948–1953 364

We expect to be zigzagging in these parts till the 26th.Then Naples and Hotel
Excellium Excelsior till July 1.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
[August 1952]

My dear BB,
I saw these photographs of the Lothair Crystal252 in the Warburg the other day,
and managed to secure a set for you, as I was sure you would find them exciting.
So little survives from that period which was clearly the work of the very best
man available and not of some provincial artisan. Are they not beautiful! And do
they not show how even the Utrecht Psalter253 is a sort of caricature of the style
from which it is derived.
I am so glad to hear that you were feeling better. How I wish I had been with
you in Naples. I think we shall be in Rome from about the 17th to the 26th
October. Is there any chance of your being there then? Our dates are more or
less fixed, as I have a Louvre meeting on the 16th and we are going on to Greece
on the 26th.
Jane has been saying every day that she will write to thank you for your
Rumour & Reflection, which she has read from cover to cover with great
enjoyment. I have only had the chance of dipping into it, and have delighted in
what I have read – far more than in the Italian edition. The feeling of a speaking
voice is so important.
I am still struggling with my Nude – sometimes I think it is good, sometimes
hopeless. I really don’t know. We are staying here enjoying lovely hot weather –
tropical suit every day for a fortnight. Our garden is still green and shady, and the
assaults of claimants are beginning to slacken.
Much love to Nicky,
Ever your affectionate
K

252 The Lothair Crystal, British Museum, is a large rock crystal (18.6 cm in diameter), from the 9th
century, from Lotharingia (Lorraine), and is engraved with scenes of the story of Susannah as
recorded in the Apocrypha. It has a long vertical crack supposedly caused when it was thrown into
the Meuse during the sack of Waulsort by the French in 1793.
253 The Utrecht Psalter is a 9th-century illuminated psalter famous for its 166 lively pen illustrations for
each psalm and its other texts. The extent of the dependence of these on earlier models has been
1948–1953 365

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
August 15th 1952

My Dear K.
Thanks for yr. note, and the photos. What a treasure, and how explain such a
classical and monumental work just then and there. No terms of comparison
with the Utrecht Mss which was normally [illeg]. But why should Lothair have
chosen the story of Susanna for the subject of the crystal? That is the kind of
information the Warburgites should provide. Have they?
It is golden, radiant, beautiful up here, but does not seem to suit what remains
of my body. I could stand coughing, sneezing, etc. but my eyes prick and water!
Nevertheless, I go on with my Lotto.254 But why for a generation that wants
meta-fussion, superanalysis, iconosance, antiquarianism, [illeg], everything in
short that I, belonging to the vintage of Consula Manlio255 the decried 1890s
can not give them!
We plan to be in Rome for a month or more from Oct. 15. and look forward
with joy to seeing you and Jane. I am glad she is reading Rumour & Reflexion.
Give her my love.
Ever Affectionately
B.B.

Sept. 17. 52
Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth
Let me hope that the rumours that reached of Jane’s having to undergo another
operation are grossly exaggerated. Meanwhile we are very anxious, and hungry
for authentic news. It would be sad if true.

a subject of art historical controversy. Housed in the University Library in Utrecht, it is the most
important manuscript in the Netherlands.
254 See n. 278.
255 Tito Manlio was a Roman consul who, according to the plot in Vivaldi’s opera, punished those who
1948–1953 366

Here our season is drawing to an end, and Oct. 1 we transcend to I Tatti.

There we mean to stay till Oct. 15, and then, weather permitting, Roma for a
few weeks. May you and Jane join us there.
Johnnie Walker was here last month for ten days, and one afternoon he
snatched from the embrace of the Continis, Rush Kress to have tea with us.256
Never had I met a sweeter or more impenetrably dear innocent sachem.257 Of
him was it prophesised that anybody could bamboozle but nobody debamboozle
him.258
It has been relatively quiet here and I have been able to go on with Lorenzo
Lotto. Another month equally quiet and I could finish it. Distressingly little to
change
Please write at once
Affectionately
B.B.

[Telegram received/stamped North London 18 SEP. 52]

from berenson at vallombrosa
to kenneth clark upper terrace house london nw3
hope report of janes being threatened with another operation not true
please wire news = b b nicky

[Copy of telegram sent 18th Sept. 10.30 a.m.]

to: berenson casa al dono vallombrosa (prov. di firenze)
jane had emergency operation last week getting on very well indeed
writing love from both

would not swear allegiance to Rome. Set in Rome some centuries before the birth of Christ, the
story concerns the Romans and the Latins, who, once allies, were in conflict because the Roman
Senate refused to allow a Latin to share in the city’s government.
256 In 1927, the dealer Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878–1955) met Samuel Kress in Rome
and began to sell him works of art. He continued to do so during Kress’s annual trips to Italy which
lasted until 1941. After 1946, when Kress was incapacitated by illness, his younger brother Rush
(1877–1963) took over the leadership of the Foundation. He expanded the collection from its mainly
Italian focus to include masterpieces of Northern European and French art and more than 1000
Renaissance bronzes.
257 A sachem was an Indian chief from Massachusetts. The title ‘sachem’ was adopted for the leaders of
Jewish communities in Colonial America.
258 It was reported that at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 Lloyd George remarked of President
Wilson that ‘it was harder to de-bamboozle [him] than it had been to bamboozle him.’ Berenson
often quoted the remark.
1948–1953 367

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
20 Sept 52

My dear BB,
You will by now have heard from Jane herself about her disaster. It was a terrible
blow, just as she seemed to be getting fit again, and was about to have a holiday,
but she has accepted it with great patience – almost she had anticipated it. It
seemed to confirm her tragic and fatalistic view of life, and since the operation
she has been more serene than I have known her for years. Actually, the operation
was well done, and she has made a remarkable recovery. All being well, I think
she will get to Rome, though not of course to Greece. We propose arriving on
Oct. 17th, and have written for rooms in the Hotel Eden, where the Hamiltons259
tell us that you and Nicky will be staying. It is a joy to think that we shall see
something of you then. I shall have to be working hard and systematically, as this
disaster has meant little time for work in the last month, and I am now terribly
behind with my book. Besides which, new ideas come up in the writing, and
need time to be examined. So I am in a bad way, but my grievance is small
indeed compared to that of Jane. It really seems as if she had only to raise her
head for fate to give it a fresh knock.
I greatly enjoyed your description of Mr Rush Kress. Johnnie told me that he
would introduce you, and hoped that you might be won by his transparent good
will. But Lord, what patience it requires to talk to those old Sachems. In that
respect I fear I have been spoilt and could never qualify as a museum director
in the u.s. Forgive a short letter, but you may imagine how many I have to do.
Much love to Nicky,
Yours ever
Kenneth

259 Jamie Hamilton

1948–1953 368

[on Upper Terrace House paper]

London Clinic,
Devonshire Place, w.1.
Thursday Sept 18 52

Dearest BB,
I am so sorry not to have written since you sent me your enchanting and
wonderful book. I took ages reading it as I enjoyed it so much, then I was rather
busy for a few weeks and hadn’t time to write a proper letter then I suddenly
had an operation.
I now feel very well and very surprised and apologetic at having worried
everyone all over again. I didn’t want K to worry you and he has been very
distracted anyway poor man – as I meant to write as soon as I was convalescent
which I am now!
The operation was for acute intestinal obstruction due to adhesions after the
last operation. A slight strain gardening brought it on but I would have had it
soon anyway and the surgeon said better here than Delphi. He says there are 2
very good abdominal surgeons in Athens but I mightn’t have got down in time!
It is disagreeable before the operation – before one is allowed morphine – but
perfectly tolerable afterward (I was operated on at 3.30 am after a journey in a
white ambulance like a French film) and now I am luxuriating in having time to
read. I only wish I had another new book of yours dear BB. I can’t tell you how
much I admire your reflexions all through the bombardment. It made me realise
again as I have so often done in the past years what a waste it was for me to meet
you first as a young and stupid bride! It was so long before I could understand
and appreciate what you said and tho’ I mightn’t always understand now I would
always appreciate it now we meet so seldom alas – however I couldn’t have
enjoyed the book more and it was dear of you to send it to me.
I hope to see you and Nicky in Rome – if the doctors allow me to go we shall
stay in a hotel and not at the Embassy as one is freer if also convalescing. K will
go to Naples and Greece from there and I will stay put.
Family all well and we are sorry Angelica Rasponi260 couldn’t come. Colette is
in Scotland staying at Cawdor with the Thane and dancing.261 Colin is flying jets

260 The family Rasponi dalle Teste owned the Villa Font’Allerta which was close by I Tatti. Angelica (b.
1930) and Anna (b. 1934) were of similar age to the Clark children and became friendly and swapped
visits. Anna Rasponi was a friend of Colette.
261 Cawdor Castle, east of Inverness, was built round a 15th-century tower house. Originally belonging
to the Clan Calder, it passed to the Campbells in the 16th century and became home to the Earls
Cawdor. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth is made ‘Thane of Cawdor’ but this is dramatic licence,
since the castle was built after the life of Macbeth.The earl is always known as the Thane of Cawdor.
1948–1953 369

and is a pilot officer. Alan reading for Bar Finals. He has a young lady in the ballet
he is fond of, who must now be getting hopeful as each evening Alan collects
enormous bunches of roses, etc from here and takes them to her! My room looks
like a cross between a decayed flower shop and a new grave – Vivian [sic] came
to see me yesterday and we talked of you with much love.
Best love to you and darling Nicky and I trust this is the last time I will bother
my friends with bulletins!
Ever affect.
Jane

Casa al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
Sept. 23. 52

Dearest Jane.
It did my heart good to read in your letter of the 18th that you were enjoying
the relief and the leisure of a comfortable convalescence.
Nicky and I are greatly relieved.
Of course I am glad that you enjoy ‘Rumour & Reflecton’. I fear it is the last
chance of pleasing you with a book. I doubt whether I shall bring out a readable
book once more. I am busy preparing un-readable books, that is to say art books.
Thanks for news of yr. offspring.With such blood in their veins, such bringing
up, and such advantages, they must turn out satisfactory.
And when do you mean to be in Rome, and where? It is time you made your
‘reservations’, for Rome now is a whole-year town.
We expect to get there Oct. 15 and to stay four or five weeks. I shall not
attempt to see people. What strength I retain I must dedicate to having I fear my
last look around.
It is crisp and radiant here again. Bad weather decided us to go down to I Tatti
the 29th, and too complicated to change.
Love to you all from Nick and Willy262
B.B.

262 William Mostyn-Owen

1948–1953 370

Oct. 8. 52
Eden Hotel–Roma
49 Via Ludovisi

Dearest Jane
Day before yesterday we were going out and whom should we see coming
out of a cab but Kenneth and Colin. ‘Where is Jane’ was my exclamation and
I learned you were not feeling well enough. I was distressed and even more
disappointed. I had been looking forward to seeing you here more quietly, more
intimately than even at I Tatti!
Thank you for the delicious shawl, so soft, so caressing so warm.
K and Colin dined with us yesterday in our sitting room. Colin with the
impression of knowing how life already feels and what he means to get out of it.
K and I will be sight-seeing together.
Hoping for better and better news of your health
Lovingly
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
5 Nov ’52

My dear BB,
I promised to send you the little catalogue of my Charles Keene exhibition263 –
here it is. It may amaze you for seven minutes.
On my return I found, as I had feared, that Jane had been in very poor shape
during my absence. I think she was cheered up to have me back, and has been a
little better for the last two days, but still far from well. I don’t know what to do
to pull her up – it is such a bad time of the year for convalescence.
It was such a treat to be in Rome with you, and visit some of the collections
together. I should have liked a few more dinners, if British Schools and British
Councils hadn’t interfered. But there it is – I remember Mary saying that after 40
one was either a failure or an invitation, and I am afraid I am an invitation.You

263 The exhibition was a part of the Aldeburgh Festival of 1952: The Drawings of Charles Keene (1823–
1891) at Sand Hill, arranged by Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B., for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Keene
was a celebrated illustrator in black and white for publications such as Punch.
1948–1953 371

have no idea how public life closes round me the moment I return. If I can free
myself for two hours work I am lucky.
Since beginning this letter, we have been lunching with Somerset Maugham
who has offered to lend us his house in the South of France, so we shall probably
go out there for a few weeks at the end of November, which will give Jane a
good rest. It would be a load off my mind. After that we shall be better able to
face the exertions of Christmas. I wonder if you in the end went on to Naples
– how I wish I could be there with you, and hear your comments on those
marvellous antique paintings. With much love from Jane,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Dec. 22. 52
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
Thank you so much for the Browning book.264 I am glad to receive it, as I have
been hearing its praises sung.
Let me hope that you are your best self again, and ready to enjoy your manifold
occupations and to cope with as many pre-occupations.
Nicky is slowly recovering from a violent flu. I am not allowed to see her for
fear of infection. I have only recovered from one. I suppose we spent too much
of our physical capital in Rome, and are now paying for it.
Morra is back from u.s.a. and very interesting.265 Say what you will against the
present moment but boring it is not.
With love to you all and every good wish for 1953.
B.B.

264 Several books on Robert Browning were published in 1952.

265 Umberto Morra was in America for 2 months at the end of 1952 on behalf of Italian–United
Nations Association. After the fall of Mussolini, Morra had hoped to establish an active role in Italian
politics and government. In 1943–5 he worked with the Badoglio government but the constantly
shifting loyalites and jealousies of post-war Italian politics were not to his taste. Instead he devoted
his energies to working with international organisations, including the Italian Atlantic Committee
and the Italian Society for International Organization, and made numerous trips abroad. From
1955 to 1959 he was the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In recognition of his
outstanding contribution to Anglo-Italian relations, he was awarded an honorary cbe in October
1960.
1948–1953 372

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead N.W.3
Sunday 28th [December 1952]

Dearest BB,
It was a lovely surprise to get your angelic letter and I am so glad you had not
already been sent the Browning book. Poor Nicky and poor you but I am very
relieved she is now getting better and that you haven’t caught it. K has written
his own sympathy so I am sending her only a note. It is so depressing for so long
after one is up.
I am now entirely well again which is the most wonderful feeling. Last
Christmas I was in the nursing home the one before I felt very ill and this time
it was such a surprise and relief to feel well whatever happened and things always
do happen! Christmas Eve morning I was waked by the telephone at 4.30 am
– it was Colin bewildered who had been with 2 other pilot officers in a police
station since 11 pm, being accused of stealing a woman’s bag! He didn’t get
back till 6 am and then had to go back for an identification parade at 9.30 am.
To cut a long story short it was collusion between the police and 2 prostitutes
but mercifully I had met the head of Scotland Yard when we were both staying
at W.S. Maughams. When I got on to him on the telephone, he was v. efficient,
sent down his Chief Inspector and the boys were released at once and a good
deal of cleaning up is now going to take place in that station! But it was a shock
and v. bad luck on poor Colin who left today for Yorkshire to learn to fly heavy
bombers and later pilot troops to Singapore. He gets out on May 28th which
will be a red letter day.
Otherwise we had a good Christmas and all is well. Poor Maurice Bowra266
couldn’t join in as usual but is now back from Greece today but still very shaky
after the bad accident. Alan has gone to Cape Wrath. Colette is here very well
and pretty and young men drift in and out. K working away on the book and a
peaceful time is – I hope – ahead.
Best love darling BB and a Happy New Year
Jane

266 Maurice Bowra. He had had a serious road accident in Greece.

1948–1953 373

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
20–1–53

My dear BB,
The Arch of Constantine267 arrived a few weeks ago, but I have only yesterday
found time to read it. I have enjoyed it immensely. At every page I felt like
uttering prolonged cheers – in fact as I was alone in a railway carriage I did
shout out loudly ‘Bravo’ every few minutes. It is really splendid that you should
have come out with so many necessary truths, backed by such an overwhelming
weight of knowledge and experience. It is a distillation of wisdom of very great
value to us all, and an incomparable encouragement to those of us who are
trying to do the same sort of thing.
Of course the Arch does remain extremely mysterious. The idea that they
wanted to do such miserable travesties is obviously disposed of – but it is very
strange that there was no one left in Rome who could do better. After all, even an
ordinary Italian mason could make a better shot at copying the Diocletion reliefs
than those poor wretches did. And those splendid heads! It is an unanswerable
riddle – but at least the answer should not involve us in a complete set of false
values. Dear BB, please write some more on this theme. It is what we need
most from you; and when I say ‘we’, I don’t speak only for middle aged people
like myself, but for young people like my children, who often speak of you as a
prophet and source of wisdom.
I am in the last stages of my lectures for Washington. The final book will
require another six months work. I have no idea what it is like. If it turns out
to be any good I should dearly love to dedicate it to you, for nothing else I am
likely to write will contain more that I have learnt from you. But I musn’t land
you with a failure – so let me see how it goes in Washington, and if it is well
received (by me!) I will ask your permission to dedicate it. I think some parts are
new and illuminating, but there is, inevitably, rather a lot about Michaelangelo,
and those damned Germans have made it absolutely impossible to write about
him except in the style of a Seventh day Adventist.
We are all well: Jane a good deal stronger, although frantically occupied –
Washington will be a rest for her – and perhaps for me. I wonder if you have seen

267 Bernard Berenson, L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma, trans. Luisa Vertova, Florence:
Electa, 1952; The Arch of Constantine, London: Chapman and Hall, 1954.
1948–1953 374

the reviews of Irene’s Portia.268 She is really splendid. Strange how such a goosey
character can become an extraordinary human being when given a good script.
You must have had a wretched winter with dear Nicky so ill: but Derek, who
is most kind in writing, says she is now better.
Love from us both
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Jan. 25. 53
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dear Kenneth.
Thank you for yrs. of the 20. A few days before I had a good letter fr. Irene
enclosing cuttings about her Portia.
I answered urging her to come for a visit to I Tatti. Do encourage her to do so.
I should feel honoured to have yr. book on the Nude dedicated to me. No
subject is nearer to my thoughts. More & more, and ever deeper is my conviction
that it is to the visual arts what blood is to our bodies. I am confident that you
will pull it off – altho’ of course it will take years before you have forgotten what
you wanted to say and can judge the book for what it says.
I am very happy that you liked the essay on the Arch of Constantine. As you
may have read in the introduction, it was to be the first chapter of a big book on
Decline & Recovery. I was going to be as free from meta-fissics and icononsences
as in this first chapter, and meant to carry it down to and comprising Giotto, and
the Florentines till Mich. [illeg] and the disabilite viscine intervened. Since then
I have been unable to continue. However I have another chapter or two ready
and may publish them.
I am so glad that Jane is herself again. Give her my love and loving admonition
to walk in the fear of the Lord of good Health.
Nicky is nearly well again, and alarmingly eager to be up and doing. Freya
has been with us for a wk and leaving tomorrow. The previous weekend we had
Lady Mallett mother and son!269
Affectionately
B.B.

268 Irene Worth. Her Portia received a rave review in The Times, 7 January 1953.
269 See Victor Mallet.
1948–1953 375

Wardman Park Hotel

Washington 8, D.C.
3 April 53

My dear BB,
If you can face a page or two of my miserable script it may amuse you to
have some impressions of Washington.270 We have enjoyed the us. much more
than in the last few visits – perhaps because we have been here, among friends,
entertained, but not rushed, no cocktail parties and few big parties of any kind.
No doubt one can live very pleasantly in Washington, now that everyone has a
small house in Georgetown: at least one can in March and April. The town has
begun to grow to its plan and status, and is profiting by all its green spaces. At
present all the people of the town can think of is the cherry blossom.
Everyone – taxi men, waiters, porters – begin by asking if one has seen the
cherry blossom, and the streets are blocked by miles of cars filled with people
on the way to enjoy this aesthetic experience. Aparently this mania antedates the
conquest of Japan – one would like to have put it forward as one more example
of the conquered culturally victorious. I must say it is very spectacular, stretching
all round a sort of lagoon of the Potomac.
The Gallery is unchanged – somehow not quite satisfactory; the spaced out
hanging does for the Casa Alba Madonna and the Hermitage Botticelli,271 but it
makes lesser works look ridiculous. And then the pictures are so evenly glossy –
they look in worse condition than they are. Pichetto was a complete fraud and
swindler, and all his retouches will have to be taken off and done again. Poor
Johnnie is overworked and has no competent help – only old Mrs Shapley.272
There are dozens of typists in every room gossiping or filing index-cards, and
dozens of accountants, but no scientific staff at all.Yet there is a good Library, and
it should be possible to produce a decent catalogue.
One of the great pleasures of Washington is the Duncan Phillips’ – sweet
people and real lovers of painting. But they have to be seen among their pictures
– they would be deadly shy at i Tatti. He would start lecturing and she would
dither like a Virginia Woolf heroine.Their collection is one of the most enjoyable
I know, every picture chosen with love. We also see a lot of the Lipmanns [sic]
and the old Blisses – I say old, as I am thinking of dear Robert, who falls asleep in

270 Clark had been invited to give the six, newly established, Mellon Lectures, at the National Gallery
in Washington, in March–April 1953. He chose as his subject ‘The Nude’; see Introduction.
271 Raphael, The Alba Madonna, c. 1510, and Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1478/82,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, d.c., Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Both were acquired in
1937 and are among the major works in the Gallery.
272 Fern Shapley
1948–1953 376

the middle of a sentence, but Mildred is as active as ever – just a shade goosier.273
David Finley is cumbered about with much saving. He has the hunted look of
the high bureaucrat, and seems to move from one committee to another – rather
as I do at home. It seems that amongst his other worries was the subject of
my lectures, and he had been anxious to persuade me to change the title from
the Nude to the Human Figure: but hadn’t quite screwed himself up to do so.
Instead he had announced the series without a title – it isn’t even printed on
the tickets. However he now seems reconciled and reassured by the approval of
his mother-in-law, Mrs Eustace [sic], who is his model of the proprieties. The
lectures are going quite well so far, and although I groan over the amount that
has to be cut out of each chapter to fit into the hour, I think I have learnt quite
a lot which will be useful in the final stage of the book. One really only sees a
subject in perspective by dragging it into the open in this way.
We have taken only one expedition, to Toledo274 and Cleveland. The first is
a shapeless provincial town – a real Babbitt Warren and I had the fascinating
experience of lunching with a group of prominent Babbitts in their club.275
Sinclair-Lewis did not – could not – really do justice to the banality, complacency
and false heartiness displayed: but it was only a social convention. Each in his
business was no doubt as agile as a panther and as tenacious as a boa-constrictor,
and small signs of their attributes was perceptible through the banter. Cleveland
is very large and rich, and the gallery is really remarkable276 – not the pictures,
which are not much above the average, but the amazing early medieval
Kunstgewerbe.277 Milliken has a genuine feeling for Imperial Art of any epoch, and
I have never seen such Ottonian things outside Germany.The Chinese section is
also very fine, and altogether we felt that the pains we suffered in a disagreeable
journey were not wasted.

273 Robert and Mildred Bliss

274 During this stay, Clark was invited to lecture at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (26 March 1953),
and for the New Republic in Washington (16 March 1953). The Toledo Museum of Art was founded
by the glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901 and is best known for its major collections
of glass from the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1912 it moved to a Greek Revival building, which was
developed further in the 1920s and 30s.
275 George F. Babbitt is the central character in Sinclair Lewis’s eponymous novel of the early 1920s. He
is a middle-aged, middle-income male from Middle America, the proprietor of a middle-size real
estate business, with a moderately happy marriage and three average children. The driving forces in
his life are success in business, money, gadgets and status; ‘his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love
and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car was his perilous excursion ashore.’ Professor
C. E. M. Joad, who was a panellist with Clark on the radio and later television programme The Brains
Trust, in 1927 published Babbitt Warren, which criticised the usa.
276 The Cleveland Museum of Art was founded in 1913. Its international reputation was established
under William Milliken, its second director, 1933–58. In the 1940s and 50s a series of large bequests
enabled numerous and exceptional purchases to be made.
277 German for ‘decorative arts’.
1948–1953 377

Our spirits are much damped by the news of Vivien. I expect you will have
heard as much, or more, than we have, but a letter from Larry this morning
makes it clear that she is really very ill. She had suffered from melancholia last
summer, but of course nobody could conceive that it would end in positive
derangement. But that, I fear, is what has happened; however please do not repeat
this, (unless of course it is generally known). Of course I don’t know what the
chances of recovery are: I suppose Larry expects that she will become normal
again, but even so the future will be full of complications.
We hear from Colette that she had a lovely visit to i Tatti and that you were
kind and inspiring. I am so glad you saw her again and were so good as to talk
with her. It will always be a joy to me to think that you got to know her. She
was enraptured with Florence – how I wish I could have been there to go sight-
seeing with her. Jane is far stronger and sends her love to you and Nicky – as I do.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Hotel Excelsior
Napoli
May 18. 53

Dearest Jane.
Vague rumours reach us that you are back, and let me hope in the best of health.
From Washington, Cleveland and waystations glowingly enthusiastic accounts of
K’s lectures.
Begin reading the Browning you sent without my realizing it was yr. gift. Best
thanks!
We take train in an hour or so for Messina, and expect to remain in Sicily til
June 20th or so. ‘Letters will be forwarded’ from Settignano.
‘Lotto’ is finished and ‘going to Press’.278 When we return I mean to tackle
two problems. Giotto and Giorgione, each separately of course. I mean to but
shall I?
Love to you both
B.B.

278 Bernard Berenson, Lotto, trans. Luisa Vertova, 3rd rev. edn, Milan: Electa, 1955, and in English as
Lorenzo Lotto, London: Phaidon 1956.
378
Nine

Television, Journalism, Altamura, Conoscing

1953–1958

In 1954 Clark accepted an appointment which immersed him in a business

world which held real fascination and which would eventually involve him in a
creative activity for which he developed a flair: television.
The Conservative government, which came into office in the uk in 1951,
had determined to create a commercial television channel as an alternative to
the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc). Until then, broadcasting in Britain
had been a monopoly operated by the bbc and financed by an annual television
licence fee. Commercial television was a controversial subject, since the only
other example, in the United States, was widely considered to be unsatisfactory,
with too many of its programmes pandering to vulgar tastes and of poor quality.
The Television Act of 1954 created a new Independent Television Authority
(ita), which would be responsible for constructing and operating the transmission
stations to be used by the network and awarding franchises for the making of
programmes to commercial broadcasters. The intention of the act was to set
up a system which was deliberately different from the American model so that,
for example, commercial advertising had to be clearly distinguishable from
programmes and be limited to not more than six minutes per hour. National
news was to be provided by a separate body to be called Independent Television
News (itn). Having set out the broad principles, the Act left the details of the
operation to be worked out by the ita.
The Television Act received Royal Assent on 30 July 1954 and, four days later,
on 4 August 1954 the members of the ita were announced. The appointment
of Clark as Chairman was a surprise to many but the Prime Minister, Winston
Churchill, was an old friend, as was Lord de la Warr, the Postmaster General, who
was the cabinet minister with responsibility for telecommunications, and thus
empowered to appoint the Authority. (It was Lord de la Warr who had brought
Clark onto the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts [cema],
the forerunner of the Arts Council, in 1939.) Clark was also a member of the
General Advisory Council of the bbc (he resigned from it on 2 September 1955).

379
1953–1958 380

Thus, in venturing into what was then unknown and vexed territory with many
opponents, the government was deciding to put their trust in someone who was,
to them, a known quantity and whose views on public responsibility for the arts
were avowedly in favour of quality and high art rather than popularity.
There were seven other members of the Authority, three of them being charged
with representing the regional interests of Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland.
The initial deputy chairman was Sir Charles Colston, formerly the chairman
and managing director of the appliance manufacturer Hoover; there was a
trades unionist: the former General Secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’
Association; two women: Dilys Powell, the film critic and a former member, like
Clark, of the bbc radio programme The Brains Trust, and Margaret Popham, the
recently retired principal of Cheltenham Ladies College, the headmistress when
Clark’s daughter Colette had been a pupil there.
The Authority initially had no premises, no broadcasting equipment, no staff
and no chief executive, but it was expected to broadcast the first programmes
in just over a year. The responsibility falling on the chairman was considerable.
Salaries for the members of the Authority were generous and commensurate
with those of the Director-General and governors of the bbc. Clark’s salary was
publicly announced as £3000 per annum; other members were paid between
£1000 and £500 per annum. At a press conference on 5 August, Clark said that
he envisaged a staff of about forty or fifty and that they would invite applications
from those willing to produce high-quality programmes and that they would
probably favour a system of allotting time on each regional broadcasting station
to several contractors. He also added that all but two of the members of the
Authority did have a television set.
In September he announced that the Director-General would be Sir Robert
Fraser, who was at the time the Director-General of the Central Office of
Information. Fraser was Clark’s personal choice. They had worked together at
the Ministry of Information in the war and had become friends. Fraser, who was
Australian-born, had been a leader writer for the Daily Herald and had stood as
a Labour Party candidate for Parliament in 1935. Operating at first from Post
Office headquarters, they moved into temporary accommodation in Park Lane
in October 1954 and in June 1955 acquired freehold premises at Princes Gate
next to Hyde Park.
The first programmes were broadcast on 23 September 1955, the centrepiece
being a live broadcast from the Guildhall in London where five hundred guests
had assembled at a dinner with speeches from the Lord Mayor, the Postmaster
General (by then Dr Charles Hill) and Clark. In his speech, Clark commented
that ita was an experiment in the art of government – an attempt to solve one
of the chief problems of democracy: of how to combine a maximum of freedom
with an ultimate direction. ‘There are many who have felt that competitive
1953–1958 381

commercial television would open the floodgates to a rapid decline in the

standards of national entertainment, but as the main duties of the Authority will
be the preservation of good taste and impartiality in news and political matters,
I think you will agree in due course that there is no truth in this assertion’ (The
Times, 23 September 1955).
Clark’s appointment was for three years and in the judgement of his peers and
of historians it seems that he did an excellent job. Nonetheless, his term was not
without its problems. In January 1956, the experienced and charismatic Aidan
Crawley, who had been appointed as editor-in-chief of itn, resigned because he
considered that the programme makers would not provide itn with the support
and finance that a serious news service required. At the end of his term of office,
Clark was not reappointed. However, by 1957 the political climate had changed
considerably. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. He had been succeeded
in April 1955 by Anthony Eden, who resigned less than two years later in the
wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Harold Macmillan becoming Prime Minister in
January 1957. Eden replaced Lord de la Warr with Dr Charles Hill. Hill was a
different animal, a man from a relatively humble background who had won a
scholarship to Cambridge, become a medical practitioner and had made a name
for himself during the war as the ‘Radio Doctor’. He then entered politics in
1945 as an independent member of the House of Commons for the University
of Cambridge. Hill was an unashamed populist and neither afraid of expressing
his own opinions nor of challenging the establishment. Clark clashed with him
in October 1956 when he publicly criticised Hill’s department for its lack of
financial support: the 1954 Act had allowed the government to provide funds for
‘balancing’ material in itv programmes, that is, to provide money for the making
of quality or minority programmes which the television companies themselves
would not support. Clark thought that ‘solemn and precise assurances’ had been
given by members of the government to enable this to be done and he publicly
professed his shock when Hill declined to make the grants available. In his Annual
Report, Clark wrote: ‘This meant that we could not discharge one of our most
important responsibilities and we feared that there had been a radical change in
Government policy’ (quoted in The Times, 2 October 1956).
The official announcement of Clark’s departure from the ita said that he had
not sought a further term because of his other responsibilities and commitments.
In a speech in Glasgow, to mark the opening of a Scottish broadcasting station,
on his last day as the chairman, Clark again referred to the democratic question:
namely to what extent should those in authority should give people what they
wanted. He said: ‘The escape clause used to be that one did not really know
what they wanted, but this is no longer viable because the audience research
figures for television are terribly convincing. These accurate figures are really a
very dangerous weapon and, used irresponsibly, and with an eye to quick returns,
1953–1958 382

research of this kind could deliver a serious blow to civilised values’ (The Times,
2 September 1957). His final plea was that television should not be allowed to
drift on the tide of popular preference: instead it should look for what was best
in popular preference and build on that.
Clark’s departure from the ita in 1957 brought to an end his active career as a
public servant. Although he was the chairman of the Arts Council from 1953 to
1960, he was essentially a figurehead. The publication of The Nude in 1956 was
his last major publication as a writer and critic on the arts who aspired to serious
scholarly recognition. However, new opportunities were beckoning and it was
to be as a presenter of television programmes that he would come to make a
unique and lasting mark.
An interest in reaching out to the public and in promoting publications and
exhibitions about art which would gain popular attraction had always been one
of Clark’s priorities. His directorship of the National Gallery had first given him
a platform for this, as had his work in wartime. His skills as writer and lecturer,
able to reach out to new audiences, did not go unnoticed. The Sunday Times,
for example, commissioned two prominent series of articles about individual
paintings and he undertook several lecture tours in the usa and was asked by the
British Council to lecture in India.
The medium of television intrigued Clark. He made his first television
programme in 1937 and went on to make in excess of a hundred. He had an innate
understanding of the intimacy of the medium, as well as of its impressionistic
character. His discernment did not go unnoticed by those in the industry. Less
than three months after he left the ita, it was announced that Val Parnell, who
was the managing director of Associated TeleVision (atv), the company to which
the ita had allocated the London weekend franchise, had asked Clark to create,
prepare and participate in a special series of programmes on the arts and to act
as adviser in the public service and cultural fields for atv. The first programmes
were not a great success – unscripted and unstructured, and broadcast late
in the evening just before closing time, they explored such general topics as
‘Is art necessary?’ and ‘What is beauty?’. However, Clark was quick to learn
and in 1959 he created a tightly scripted and well received series for atv, Five
Revolutionary Painters (Goya, Breughel, Caravaggio, van Gogh and Rembrandt).
This experience paved the way for Civilisation in 1969.
There were changes on the domestic front.The Clarks had never had a house
in which they felt they truly belonged or settled, other than Old Palace Place in
Richmond, which they had intended to be a permanent home but where they
had lived for little more than a year in 1930–31. Clark found Upper Terrace House
too small and inconvenient. The library had space for only a small proportion of
his books. However, in the early 1950s, by serendipity, they discovered Saltwood
Castle in Kent, close to where they had rented a weekend house from Philip
1953–1958 383

Sassoon in the pre-war years. In his autobiography, Clark called the house a
‘dream’ with which he became ‘besotted’, a ‘love affair’. Indeed, it became the
place where both he and Jane ended their days.
Saltwood is everything that the imagination supposes a castle should be: high
stone walls, a keep, a gatehouse, an inner bailey, a great hall, a moat, a ghost.
Private and secluded, it has fine gardens and a splendid view down the valley to
Hythe. Dating from before the Norman Conquest, the structure is essentially of
the twelfth century, and it is said to have been at Saltwood that, in December
1170, the four knights planned the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury
Cathedral less than twenty miles away. The Castle was rendered uninhabitable
by an earthquake in 1580 but some of it was restored as a habitable residence in
the nineteenth century. Rumour had it that the Nazi Reichmarschall Hermann
Goering, having once holidayed on the Kent coast, identified Saltwood as a
suitable residence after a successful invasion of Britain, and ordered the Luftwaffe
not to bomb Hythe as a consequence.
In June 1950, the elderly and reclusive Lady Conway of Allington advertised
the property for sale with three hundred acres and all ‘mod cons’. However, in
spite of re-advertising the next year at a ‘greatly reduced price’, the property
failed to sell. The Clarks saw the advertisement and speculated that it could
be their dream home but they did not go to see it. Then, by chance, in August
1953, when returning from holiday in Venice and being delayed in France by a
rail strike, they learned from a friend that Lady Conway had died. Without a
moment’s postponements they called at Saltwood and asked to buy the Castle
and the estate. There were postponements and complications but eventually, by
October 1953, it had become theirs and they moved in the next year.
Lady Conway had been born in America and had first married into the
Lawson family who were the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. She
liked castles and had bought Saltwood among others, carrying out restorations,
including the re-roofing of the Great Hall. She then filled Saltwood with bric-
à-brac, especially tapestries and textiles, though often of a high quality. Her
husband committed suicide and she became a virtual recluse. However, on a
visit to another castle, Allington, near Maidstone, she met Lord Conway, recently
widowed and in his late seventies, and they married. A few years later he died
and she remained at Saltwood Castle with a female companion. She died on
14 March 1953. As well as purchasing the Castle and the estate, the Clarks also
purchased the entire contents.
Clark thrived on the move to Saltwood. He enjoyed sorting out Lady Conway’s
‘junk’; he had a beautiful and interesting medieval environment in which to
display his own works of art; he turned the Great Hall into a library for all his
books with a cosy room in which to work next door, and both were separate
from the main house. He had a busy and interesting professional and creative life
1953–1958 384

which kept him in London during weekdays so that Saltwood was the perfect
retreat for weekends. It was everything that he wanted. For Jane the move was
less easy. It meant giving up her London life and reverting to the dislocated
lifestyle with frequent absences by Clark which had put their marriage under
stress in the early years of the war. Although she busied herself with the gardens,
she was not fulfilled and suffered frequent bouts of depression and ill-health.
They still enjoyed travelling together but there were many times when Jane was
not able to go and trips were either cancelled or Clark went on his own. Alan
was now in his late twenties and leading a rackety unsettled existence, aspiring
with some difficulty to become a popular novelist and a military historian.
Then he sprang a surprise. In mid-August 1956 he met Jane Beuttler, a school-
girl aged fourteen, half his age. He courted her persistently over the next two
years, proposed more than once, and was finally accepted. The engagement was
announced on 3 July 1958 and the wedding ceremony and reception in London
were held less than a month later. The twins, Colin and Colette, in their early
twenties, were beginning to find their own feet and lead their own lives.
Behind Clark’s purchase of Saltwood and Berenson’s creation of I Tatti lurked
the dream of Altamura. Altamura was a fantasy aesthetic haven which first made
its appearance in a short-lived literary magazine, The Golden Urn, which had
been initiated by Logan Pearsall Smith in late 1896. Privately printed in Fiesole,
it ran for three issues between May 1897 and 1898. Exquisite and pretentious,
the magazine consisted of short literary and aesthetic articles. One of the articles,
on which Berenson collaborated, was called ‘Altamura’ and was a fantasy which
gently parodied the refined aesthetic life and lofty conversations of the social
and intellectual circles which the Berensons inhabited and of which they were
leaders. The fantasy setting was a monastery, dedicated to a fictitious St Dion of
Altamura, somewhere in a remote mountainous region of Italy. The narrative
describes the liturgy of their religion of culture and includes among the saints
who are worshipped month by month Keats, Mozart, Giorgione and Marlowe.
The inhabitants spend their days in the worship of poetry, music and philosophy
and they celebrate the great writers of antiquity in their festivals. They also
identified certain ‘sacred’ pictures which they treated as objects of faith because
of their beauty, quality and certainty of authorship.
Freed from that narrow, feverish grind of passions and activities which is called
‘Life’, the Dionites derived a richer more wonderful sense of self conscious
existence from the contemplation of Nature . . . the study of their sacred
books, and the devout worship of those great forces and persons and works of
art in which the spirit of Being has been most splendidly manifested . . .What
chiefly connects the followers of St Dion with the life about them is the belief
that, by real and devout enjoyment, the burden of the world’s joylessness can
be, in some mystical way, abated. (Samuels MC p. 273).
1953–1958 385

On 24 June 1953, Berenson celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday. There were to

be only five more such anniversaries. Never blessed with a robust constitution,
his last years were marked by increasing infirmity, physical aches and pains,
tiredness and the fear of losing his sight. Yet, even to his last remaining months,
his mind remained alert and his hunger for life and interest in people and works
of art continued undiminished. He was stubbornly determined to cling on as
long as he could.
The writer Eric Linklater had recorded a conversation with Berenson during
a brief visit that he made to I Tatti in the summer of 1944. Linklater, in his mid-
forties, was well established as a novelist and was serving with the British Army
in Italy. After showing him his collection, Berenson took him into the garden
where, under the olive trees, he said:
I have so little time! . . . There are mornings when I wake up and think that
I must go into Florence, and stand at the corner of a street like a beggar, and
take off my hat . . . and say to the people who pass me by, ‘Will you give me
five minutes please? You are quite young, you have so many minutes, and
really you do nothing with them. Give me five! – for that is what a man of
my age truly wants: a few more minutes . . . (Samuels ML p. 497)
I Tatti continued to be filled with visitors and was a constant hive of activity.
Some visitors, such as the Clarks, were old friends whom he welcomed warmly
but many were people whom he hardly knew – callers, rather than true visitors
(including Linklater), who made their way up the hill to I Tatti more out of
curiosity and in order to be able to say that they had met so great a celebrity. If
it was a day when he was alert and full of good humour, he would engage with
these callers, but there were days when, with increasing infirmity and deafness,
he might sit uncharacteristically silent and let the conversation flow around and
over him.
One regular visitor was Sylvia Sprigge. She and her husband Cecil were
correspondents for English newspapers in Rome. She conceived the idea of
writing a book about Berenson and, having found a publisher, was determined
to see her project through, even though Berenson much regretted his half-
hearted acquiescence in the proposal. He mistakenly thought that her intention
was to write nothing more than a personal memoir, but it soon became apparent
that she wanted to write a full biography: he was alarmed when she started to
dig around for information and to ask family members for interviews. Her book,
which two publishers backed out of, was eventually published in 1960, a year
after Berenson died. Clark had also had it in mind to do a book on Berenson,
which would have been much more to Berenson’s taste: it might never have got
off the ground and, once he was aware of Sylvia Sprigge’s proposed book, Clark
abandoned his idea altogether.
1953–1958 386

Berenson continued to read voraciously and to write incessantly. His mornings

were devoted to correspondence: sitting in bed he wrote copious letters in
increasingly illegible long-hand, hungry to maintain contact with the people
who had been part of the tapestry of his life. Starting in 1952, he contributed
regular articles to the Corriere della Sera. He was also persuaded to undertake
new editions of his books, including the Lists, although the work involved in
the revisions and bringing them up to date was burdensome. Nicky Mariano
worried that he took on too much, but the habit of such work was not one that
he could relinquish.
Such a busy and active life would not have been possible without a dedicated
group of supporters. His principal support was, of course, the ever faithful Nicky,
who was herself now in her late sixties. Berenson was utterly dependent on her
and could not bear that she not be with him for even half a day. Nevertheless,
her strength, health and energy – although formidable – were not infinite, and
when they faltered Berenson was left bereft. On such occasions Luisa Vertova
would step into the breach as hostess.
With Nicky, Berenson continued to travel, but in these final years it was
mostly to places that he knew, such as Venice and Rome. He continued to make
the effort to see important exhibitions of art and artists whom he admired
and understood, such as Tiepolo, and those with whom he struggled, such as
Caravaggio and Picasso. His last trip abroad was to Libya in 1955 to see such
sights as the extensive and impressive Roman ruins at Leptis Magna.They stayed
with Anna Maria Cicogna, who owned an eighteenth-century Turkish villa on
an oasis on the outskirts of Tripoli. His last trip in Italy further than Florence was
to Naples, Rome and Assisi in June 1957.
The work and travel took their toll, but Berenson’s love of ‘conoscing’ (his
catchword for connoisseurship) was too deep-rooted to permit any compromise.
Berenson discovered ‘conoscing’on his first visit to Italy in 1887 at the age of
twenty-two. The word was his own (and Mary’s) and it describes the multi-
faceted activity of seeing, identifying, puzzling over, tracking down, discussing,
making judgements on and above all enjoying works of art. For him it was best
enjoyed not as a solitary pleasure but as an activity with others: with Mary in the
early years of their marriage and partnership, with like-minded individuals such
as Clark and John Walker, and with collectors and dealers who demonstrated the
requisite commitment and adventurousness. Nothing pleased him more than the
possibility of a new discovery, or of a new light shed on an old unsolved problem,
and in conversation and correspondence he would constantly probe, query and
suggest. His passion for ‘conoscing’ was one of the reasons for the establishment
of I Tatti, its collections and the library, and one of the principal driving forces
behind the travels, the publications, the friendships and the involvement with the
commercial art world.
1953–1958 387

The uncertainty over the future of I Tatti, which had long caused him much
anxiety, was finally resolved in February 1953, when the Harvard Corporation
formally agreed to accept the bequest which he intended for them on his death.
Although his intentions had been publicly announced in the New York Times as
early as 1931, he was well aware that Harvard had never been enthusiastic about
the idea of a remote outpost in a country of uncertain politics and economics, and
was concerned that his proposed endowment would barely cover the running
costs, let alone fund any scholarships. Consequently, he deliberately did not place
any specific obligations on Harvard. Nonetheless, he constantly worried about
what would become of I Tatti and how Harvard would run it. Eventually, in
1956, he committed his wishes to a paper, ‘On the Future of I Tatti’, in which he
spelled out a vision in which Clark was to have a role as a member of an advisory
committee, although both knew that in reality such a vision would never come
to pass (see Appendix 2).
Berenson’s last five years were overshadowed by declining physical powers,
although his mind remained alert until the last few months. For example, even
when he became physically unable to write, he continued to contribute articles
to the Corriere della Sera by dictating them to Nicky. The catalyst for the decline
was an accident which he suffered in December 1954. Berenson and Nicky had
driven by jeep to take a morning walk above I Tatti. Having got out of the car
to walk, he asked Parry, the chauffeur, to drive on, and as he did so a door of
the jeep swung open, knocking Berenson into a ravine with a drop of some
twenty feet. From then on he suffered constant and severe pains in his spine
and ribs. On Christmas Eve 1955, he nearly died from food poisoning. In the
spring of 1957, shortly after returning from the trip to Naples, Rome and Assisi,
he collapsed in agony while out walking. The diagnosis was osteoporosis of the
spine. From then on he was virtually bedridden, still reading, but writing less
and less. By mid-January 1958 he had given up replying to letters by hand, and
in the summer he gave up writing his diary. He was also plagued by bronchitis
and bladder ailments. For the last eighteen months of his life he was an invalid,
attended night and day by Nicky and by the long-serving Emma Melani, who
had joined the household in the 1940s. Gradually, all the things which he had
pursued and enjoyed with energy and passion became fewer, until, finally, even
conversation became no longer sustainable.
Chronology

1953

Spring Clark’s Lectures on The Nude at National Gallery of Art,

Washington
Royal Fashion Show at Upper Terrace House, Hampstead
May/June Berenson in Sicily and Naples
June Berenson in Rome
August Clarks in Venice
Sept/Oct Berenson in Venice and Milan
Clarks buy Saltwood Castle, Kent
November Berenson in Rome
Clarks in Rome
December Clarks in Paris

1954

April Clark at I Tatti with Colette

May/June Berenson in Venice
Clark in Venice
June Clark in Holland
August Clark appointed Chairman of the Independent
Television Authority
October Berenson in Bologna
Oct/Nov Clarks in the usa
December Berenson suffers severe accident
Clarks stay with Somerset Maugham

1955

March Clarks in usa

April Clarks at I Tatti
May Berenson in Syracuse, Tripoli, Naples, Malta

388
June Berenson in Calabria and Rome
September Berenson in Ravenna and Ferrara
Clarks in Venice

1956

March Clarks in usa

8 May Berenson awarded Laurea Honoris Causa by the
University of Florence
22 May President Gronchi makes Berenson a Cavalier of the
Great Cross of the Order of Merit
November Clark in India

1957

February Clarks at I Tatti

March Berenson collapses and is diagnosed with osteoporosis
of the spine
June Clarks in Paris
August Clark’s chairmanship of the ita finishes
June Berenson in Naples, Rome, Assisi
September Clarks at Abano Terme, near Padua
Clark at I Tatti
November King of Sweden visits I Tatti
Clarks in Copenhagen

1958

April Berenson suffers further ill health and requires constant care
July Alan Clark marries Jane Beuttler
Sept/Oct Clarks in Canada and Boston, Mass.

389
1953–1958 390

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
[Various dates in June 1953]

My dear BB,
We are very sorry to hear from Louisa [sic]1 that owing to a number of circumstances
you haven’t been so well – the chief circumstance being the delay in leaving i
Tatti. I hope by now that you have escaped from pilgrims and hay seeds, and have
re-established the rhythm of your daily life.We have had a disagreeable six weeks,
made up of Traffic blocks and functions, and innumerable guests.2
What time I didn’t spend in dressing up and hanging about, was spent in my
car, stationary behind a row of ’buses. No work, no sight of friends, no talk, no
reading. However, things promise a bit better now, and I am at last back at work
on a supplementary chapter in the nude book – a sort of appendix really, on the
Gothic nude. I am sorry that I couldn’t work it in to the structure of the book,
but it can’t be done. The interesting moment is when the nude of shame and
humility suddenly turns into the Gothic nude of Cranach and the mannerists. I
find that my new job (if it can be called that) by giving me a nice quiet room, is
going to help me greatly in my work.3 Before that I was like a landless man in
the middle ages, any body’s chattel.
I am sending you in a separate envelope a drawing I discovered years ago (but
have only just had photo’ed) in the Royal Academy at Edinburgh.4 It interested
me that a drawing of the St. John in the S.ta Croce fresco5 shd’ be so like Pollaiuolo.
Is it simply a Pollaiuolesque copy of the fresco – or is it a copy of a drawing for the
fresco, which is so like Pollaiuolo in a number of ways? I am also sending some
beautiful new photos of details of the Torrigiano tomb in Westminster (I mean
Henry vii) which shows that he was a disciple of the della Robbias.6

1 Luisa Vertova Nicolson

2 The Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii took place on 2 June 1953, 15 months after
her Accession on 6 February 1952. Preparations were extensive and an estimated 3 million people
lined the streets of London. The event was televised by the bbc for an audience, unprecedented in
television, of more than 20 million viewers.
3 Clark became the chairman of the Arts Council in early summer 1953. ‘I sat at an empty desk in a
large, dignified room . . . and once or twice a week had a short interview with the Director-General’;
Clark OH p. 135.
4 See Keith Andrews, National Gallery of Scotland: Catalogue of Italian Drawings, Cambridge University
Press 1968, vol. i, p. 128, RSA 124, and vol. ii, fig. 851.
5 Veneziano, St John and St Francis, 1440–60, fresco, Santa Croce, Florence.
6 Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528) was a Florentine sculptor who benefited from the patronage of
Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. After employment as a mercenary soldier, he was invited to England
to execute the magnificent monument for Henry vii and his Queen, with two effigies which are
1953–1958 391

As usual, I began this letter weeks ago, and had to lay it aside during a week of
official business. Some of it was interesting, including a dinner at no. 10 Downing
St. to meet de Gasperi – like a more charming Devalera.7 In a way de Gasperi
made the evening by asking Lord Alexander if he had ever been in Italy – an
occasion where the safe opening was not a success.8
Our old warrior is much worn out. Eden’s illness has been a great blow and
burden to him. After dinner he clung on to Jane saying ‘I’m tired. I just want to
see an old friend’.9
Talking of friends, you will have heard that Vivien is marvellously better.10
When we first got back we wondered if she could ever recover, but she now
seems quite calm. Whether she can stand the strain of theatrical life again is
another question. You may have heard that Irene is in Canada, rather enjoying
herself.11 I am told (by Rosamund) that you liked her novel – or at least admire
it.12 So do I. It is relentless, and true. Apparently it is a novel for men who like
women, as the other kind dislike it. I must get this off before it is put aside again,
love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

well modelled and lifelike. Still existing in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, the tomb appears
to have been begun before Henry’s death in 1509 but was not finished until 1517.
7 Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) was a leader of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain in the
War of Independence and of the anti-Treaty opposition in the ensuing Irish Civil War (1922–3). In
1926 he founded the Fianna Fáil party and was head of government at various times from 1932 to
1959. His political creed evolved from militant republicanism to social and cultural conservatism.
8 Sir Winston and Lady Churchill (Churchill had been knighted in the Coronation Honours List)
hosted a dinner for the Italian Prime Minister, Alcide de Gasperi (the founder of the Christian
Democratic Party), and Signora de Gasperi, who were on an official visit to London, in June
1953. Some 40 guests attended, including the Clarks and Lord Alexander of Tunis who had been
Commander of the Allied 15th Army Group, which was responsible for the invasion of Sicily, the
bombing of Monte Cassino and the entry into Rome in June 1944. Clark retells this story in his
autobiography (Clark OH p. 128) where he attributes the question asked to Signora de Gasperi who
was seated next to General Alexander (although he also says that she spoke no English).
9 At the dinner, Churchill made a sparkling speech about Italy but immediately afterwards slumped
in his chair with what was later diagnosed as a stroke. Anthony Eden, then the Foreign Secretary,
was not present. He had undergone a routine operation in London in April 1953 which had gone
wrong. To save his life, he had been taken to the us for emergency surgery and had remained to
convalesce. Eden regained his health; Churchill’s declined but he stubbornly refused to relinquish
the premiership. Eden succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955.
10 Vivien Leigh
11 Irene Worth. In 1953 she joined the fledgling Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, for its
inaugural season, performing in an enormous tent as principal leading lady with Alec Guinness in
All’s Well That Ends Well and Richard III.
12 Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, London: Collins, 1953.
1953–1958 392

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
July 4, 53

Dear Kenneth.
Delighted with yrs. posted June 25th. Yr. observations about the Gothic nude
are most interesting and I look forward to reading what you have to say about it.
Thanks for the photo you so kindly sent of the drawing in the Edinburgh
Royal Academy. It looks as if a Pollaiuolo-schule was copying the DomVeneziano
of S. Croce.
I too have heard fr. Irene in Ontario, very happy there.
Got back seven days ago to piles & piles & piles of books, periodicals, photos
that it will take me weeks to work thro. Weather is queer showery bain-marie
atmosphere, and not too good for me as you may infer fr. my unsteady writing.
In Rome I did my duty by Picasso, went three times to his show.13 Barberini
palace now houses all Corsini and earlier Pal.Venezia pictures. Only one unknown
among them. A curious Ercole Roberti ish St. Sebast. and St. Catherine.14
La Terme, now Villa Livia fresco of garden wall transported & entire re-
arrangement most satisfactory,15 tho’ not yet complete. Enjoyed this last short
visit to Rome. Saw nobody but Schwarzenberg,16 and Lady Mallet.17 I wonder
who will succeed them, for they go soon.
Love to all of you, and would you were coming soon!
Yours
B.B.

13 A major exhibition of paintings by Picasso, from his blue period to the 1950s, was held at the Galeria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, May–July 1953.
14 Probably Francesco Pagano (c. 1450–1500), St Sebastian and St Catherine of Alexandria.
15 Frescoes from the Summer Dining Room of the Villa Livia are displayed in the National Roman
Museum – Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.
16 Prince Johannes Schwarzenberg was the Austrian ambassador in Rome in 1952–5 and subsequently
in London in 1955–66.
17 See Victor Mallet. Their successors at the Rome embassy were the Ashley Clarkes.
1953–1958 393

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Sunday July 12 53

Dearest BB,
Thank you so much for both your charming letters. I am very sorry not to have
written for so long but since we have been back from America I haven’t had a
free moment. Or rather I haven’t written any letters – I can’t resist the garden
and in between dressing up for engagements, household chores and seeing the
children. Whenever it is fine I put on old trousers and dig in the garden with
a sigh of relief – till the telephone rings again! I wish the latter had never been
invented.
But I envied Johnnie18 very much when he lunched here a few days ago on
his way to see you – instead of going to Manchester tomorrow with K!
Is there any hope that you will be in Venice for the Lotto exhibition? K and
I will be at the Monaco19 with the twins from Saturday 8th August till Thursday
27th.Then we have to come back for the Edinburgh Festival and a visit to David
Crawford.20 He and Mary stayed with us for the Coronation also Tom Lindsay
who was David’s page in the procession and Georges Salles21 – faintly bewildered
by the Gilbert and Sullivan atmosphere, enough [illeg] of peers in robes and stays
whose names he couldn’t quite catch like Osbert Lancaster or Baron von Hirsch
or the Piper family or Colette’s young men. It was tiring but fun as was the ball
at Buckingham Palace a few days later to which Colette was also invited and
looked ravishing.
Colin is now out of the r.a.f. till he goes to Oxford in October – his last flight
was thro’ the Bay of Bengal to Singapore with 45 women and children on board
and his Wing Commander with a high temperature out of action. Life at home
is boring and he can’t yet bring himself to read for Oxford so he has taken a job
at the Zoo looking after little birds.
I am now very well and have long ago forgotten the operations and long to
see you and Nicky feeling normal again.
We go to Holland next week to see the Venetian exhibition22 and wish we
were going to meet you there.

18 John Walker
19 Hotel Monaco,Venice, on the Grand Canal, one of the best hotels in Venice. The exhibition, Mostra
di Lorenzo Lotto, Palazzo Ducale,Venice, June–October 1953, was curated by Pietro Zampetti.
20 David Balniel
21 Georges Salles
22 Venetiaatise Meesters tekeningen 1480–1880, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1953.
1953–1958 394

Poor Vivian is still far from well tho she thinks she is better. Larry looks 10
years older and as he might have a nervous breakdown at any moment – the
Fates are cruel.23
America was great fun and a rest cure – anyone can do only one thing at a
time.
Best love to you and Nicky dearest BB,
Jane

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
July 17, 53

Dearest Jane.
How good of you to write at such length and with such good news of all of you
and that you are your marvellous entire self again.
You write of being in Venice from Aug. 8 till 27th. We shall not be able to get
away, but would be delighted to have a visit from you after Aug. 21. If you could
spare 3 or 4 days with us! Incline yr. hearts thither!
So cool that we still are here, but expect to transcend to Vallombrosa in a few
days and to stay there till end of Sept.
Johnnie Walker is with us, and more charming and stimulating and vivifying
than ever. We talk shop a good deal of course, and about the Mellon lectures.
Yours, I mean K’s, were wildly adored.24 J. leaves Sunday the 19th and the same
day arrive the John Coolidges of the Fogg Museum25 to stay four days, and to
talk of the future of I Tatti. A tedious subject, for I fear the worst when I am gone
and Harvard takes over.
I mean to devote the summer to a reconsideration of the Giorgione problem.
Love to you both
B.B.

23 Laurence Olivier
24 See Introduction to Ch. 8 and n. 270.
25 John Coolidge (1913–1995) was an architectural historian and the Director of Harvard’s Fogg Art
Museum, 1948–72. Coolidge’s family was closely associated with Harvard University and Boston. As
a result of this visit he wrote a report which was influential in persuading Harvard to accept I Tatti.
1953–1958 395

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
28 July 53

My dear BB,
For many years you have been encouraging me to see a fountain by Rustici in the
gardens of Wool Beding [sic] Hall.26 At last I have managed to do so, and it may
amuse you to hear the result. The house belongs to some elderly people called
Lascelles – very poor and sensitive, nothing changed or renewed for at least 60
years. They had the reputation of not allowing visitors, who often rang the bell
attracted by the beauty of the façade, but I found a friend who had stabled some
polo ponies with them, and got in through his introduction. They were dimly
aware that the fountain was of interest: it was naturally known as the Cellini.
There is no doubt at all that it is by Rustici, but the interesting part is (as I expect
you will remember) that it derives from a drawing or model by Leonardo of the
Neptune made for Antonio Segni.27 In fact it is exceedingly like the standing
Neptune drawing at Windsor 12591 which is so strangely like Michaelangelo’s
David, especially the lower slighter sketch on that sheet. The reaction of the
figure to the sea horses is identical.The head is ‘Leonardo Classical’, especially in
profile, which is almost [illeg]. The modeling is Verrocchiesque – the base of the
fountain typical Verrocchio workshop, so it must be an early Rustici. Of course
it is thickly coated with verdigris, so that one can’t be dogmatic about the actual
facture. Apparently it comes from the 16th C. manor house of Cowdray, which
was burnt down in 1800, and the fountain, which stood in a courtyard, was given
to the agent. I must try to find out when it reached Cowdray.28
Jane was delighted to get your letter. We may have to come home early from
Venice for the Edinburgh festival, so do not like to propose a visit then.What we

26 Woolbeding Manor, with origins in the 16th century, is near Chichester, West Sussex. In 1893, the
Manor was bequeathed to Colonel H. A. Lascelles, who was succeeded in 1913 by his son Edward
(1884–1956). The fountain was once in the centre of the court at Cowdray House, West Sussex, and
was removed to Woolbeding Manor after a fire of September 1793 which left Cowdray House,
dating from the 16th century, as a permanent ruin. The fountain remained at Woolbeding until the
National Trust, who took over the house in 1956, loaned it to the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London. It is dated c. 1536 and now attributed to Benedetto da Rovezzano, a Florentine sculptor
who worked in England in 1524–43.
27 Leonardo da Vinci executed a large finished drawing of the sea-god Neptune for his friend Antonio
Segni, the Master of the Papal Mint. That drawing was celebrated during the 16th century but is
now lost. However, there is a sketch for the composition, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle,
inscribed with a note by Leonardo to ‘lower the horses’ (RCIN 12591).
28 A drawing, dated 1783, of the Great Court at Cowdray by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, in the
British Museum, appears to show that the dragon-head taps were originally used for filling buckets.
1953–1958 396

should really love is to come out to i Tatti in December. Would it be possible?

We could come on the 11th and stay till as near Christmas as you could have
us – only unlike Beryl29 we really would go on the appointed day, as we must be
home by Christmas Eve. If it can be managed I can’t imagine anything which
would give us both more happiness.
What splendid news that you are returning to the Giorgione problem. May I
offer a small piece. There is a Durer drawing, Winkler 85,30 dated 1495! It seems
to imply the kind of nude used by Giorgione in the Fondaco di Tedeschi.31 But
is it really possible for that date? On the whole I think the date and monogram
must be fake, but if true it would be an interesting light on Venetian art.You see
that my mind is still running on the nude. But, alas, no writing for weeks. Love
from Jane
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Casa Al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov. di Firenze)
July 28, 53

Dear Kenneth.
That is good news that you both can come Dec and stay for a fortnight.
I am thrilled to read that you have seen the fountain at Woolbeding. I have
not seen it in 50 years, and I doubt whether I ever had the chance to study it in
detail. How I wish you could get it photo’d and publish it in all its details in the
sense in which you write to me.
I have been suspecting for very many years that Rustici deliberately imitated
Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and of course Leonardo. So what you say does not
surprise me. Indeed I never could accept the so-called Verrocchio ‘Resurrection’
wh. some decades ago was brought down from Castello to the Bargello.32 I

29 See Arthur Waley

30 Friedrich Winkler, Dürer, des Meisters Gemälde Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte, Stuttgart, 1928.
31 The Fondaco dei Tedeschi inVenice, on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge, was the headquarters
and living quarters of the city’s German merchants. In about 1508 the façade on the Grand Canal
was frescoed by Giorgione and Titian. Their work soon deteriorated because of the humid climate
but a few fragments survived and are now housed in the Cà’ d’Oro.
32 Ascribed to Verrocchio, Resurrection of Christ, c. 1463, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
1953–1958 397

kept suspecting that it is by Rustici who worked so much at Castello. Did the
Woolbeding fountain come from there?
Heavenly weather up here!
Affectionately
B.B.

Hotel de Crillon
Paris, le 4th decembre [1953]

My dearest BB,
I do hope you are now feeling better and back at I Tatti and did not find the
journey home too tiring.
I can’t tell you how much we enjoyed seeing you again and our whole visit
to Rome and especially seeing the manuscripts with you. It was so long since I
had seen you and Nicky it was all a great treat.
We lunched with Georges Salles who sent you his love – he took us all round
the new rooms at the Louvre – the Beistegui collection33 is also on view now.
Some of the re-arranged pictures look very well but on the whole I like pictures
to stay in the same places so that one knows where to find old favourites!
We went to tea with Huyghe34 – we had not yet met his wife who is very
nice. They have a lovely apartment in a ramshackle house in the Rue Jacob but
too many books everywhere. No room for anything else.
The Harveys35 are away and Georges S. goes to u.s.a. end of the month so he
won’t be given his k.b.e. till Feb on his return but he is very pleased and I am
sure he would like you to congratulate him!
We are sad to be going home tomorrow but were much sadder when we left
you and Rome
Thank you again from our hearts for all your goodness and our love
Jane

33 Carlos de Beistegui (1863–1953), of Basque origin, whose family made a fortune out of silver mines
in Mexico where he was born, lived in France and was much influenced by the painter Léon
Bonnat, from whom he caught the urge to collect. In 1942 he gave the Louvre a group of paintings,
mostly portraits, by such as Rubens, van Dyck, Largillière, Nattier, Drouais, Fragonard, Goya, David,
Lawrence, Gérard, Ingres, Meissonnier and Zuloaga, bought with the advice of the Louvre’s curators.
His collection entered the Louvre when he died in 1953.
34 René Huyghe
35 Oliver Harvey was the ambassador in Paris, 1948–54.
1953–1958 398

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec 11. 53
Dearest Jane
Thank you for the loving words about our hours together in Rome.You added
greatly both of you to our pleasure in being there.
We got back three days ago. I still have a bit of a temperature & stay in bed
most of the day. Freya Stark was already here to welcome us & just left. She read
me some chapters of her book on Ionia.36
What a gift she has for calling up places she describes.
When do you transcend?
Every good wish for 1954.
May it bring you back soon
Love
B.B.

Upper Terrace House

Hampstead, N.W.3
Hampstead 1357
21 Dec 53

My dear BB,
We were glad to know that you were back at i Tatti. I do hope that the infection
has quite cleared up by now. I am sending you in the envelope a few photographs
I have got together for you. Most of them come from the Scottish Museum of
Antiquities37 – you probably know the Traprain Law pieces already – Viking loot,
hastily buried, with coins from Constantinople.38 The piece of horse armour is

36 Freya Stark, Ionia: A Quest, London: John Murray, 1954. Stark travelled along the west coast of
Turkey in 1952, meeting only one other tourist.
37 The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was founded in 1780 to collect the archaeology of Scotland.
Its collections passed into public ownership in 1858 as the National Museum of Antiquities of
Scotland. In 1985 the museum was amalgamated with the Royal Scottish Museum.
38 Traprain Law is a hill east of Haddington in East Lothian, Scotland. The first archaeological
excavations were begun in 1914 and continued until 1923. In 1919, a hoard of sliced-up Roman-era
silver was discovered. Four coins were also discovered with the hoard, which dated the find to the
5th century ad.The quality of some of the items suggests that they may have come from as far afield
as Constantinople. The Museum also owned the Skaill Horde, discovered on Orkney in March 1858
1953–1958 399

really superb and shows the technical skill of the Celts in the pre-Christian era.39
I know nothing about the dragon’s head – it is loan [sic] from a local museum.40
The bracelet is the finest – and most tete nigre41 – of about a hundred in the
museum. The beautiful head from the Torrigiano tomb is by a really marvelous
young photographer whom we (the Arts Council) are commissioning to do
a series of photos of English tombs and monuments. As for the Belliniesque
picture – it is of course dreadfully repainted head entirely new, but it has some
interest, as it appears to be signed Opera di Antonio S, which must I suppose be
Saliba.42 It was brought in to me to look at by a modest young woman. It will
add a grain to your material.
Colette and I are hoping to come to Italy in the second half of March in order
that she may work on her ‘special subject’ in her history schools – which is Italy
1492–1521, or so. We hope to spend about 3 weeks there. Is there any chance (I
ask without ceremony as you said I could) of our having the Villino? It would
be absolutely perfect for us as we shall both have to lead hermit-like lives, she in
the last throes of her final schools, I writing notes to the Nude, and composing
the Romanes lecture for May.43 Of course Derek44 may be back, and will have
made his own arrangements. But it would be lovely for us if it could be managed
– approximately 18th March to 9th April.
We are now in the throes of Christmas, looking wildly for presents for
forgotten friends, and usually ending in the desperate course of seizing a first
edition of Shelly [sic] or Goethe from the shelves. We are much encouraged

when a boy named David Linklater, digging at Muckle Brae, came across a few pieces of silver.
More than 100 items were eventually unearthed, the largest Viking treasure trove found in Scotland.
39 Probably the Torrs Horns and Torrs Pony-cap, Iron Age bronze pieces of c. 200 bc, forming part of
a small surviving group of elaborate and finely wrought metal objects that were commissioned by
the elite of British and Irish society before the arrival of the Romans.
40 A sandstone dragonesque head was found, in c. 1917, in the burial ground of St Ninian’s Church, the
old aisle church of Kirkintilloch, in East Dunbartonshire.
41 Clark probably meant that it is dark brown in colour.
42 Antonio de Saliba (c. 1466–c.1535) was a nephew of the more famous Antonello da Messina. Also
from Sicily, where he worked primarily, it is likely that he followed in his uncle’s footsteps to paint
in Venice and the Veneto, coming under the influence of Bellini and his circle.
43 Clark delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on 11 May 1954. George John
Romanes (1848–1894) was a Canadian-born biologist and physiologist and the youngest of Charles
Darwin’s academic friends. He was interested in the similarity of cognitive processes and mechanisms
between humans and other animals. Cambridge-educated and resident in England, he founded a
series of free public lectures, including the Oxford Romanes lecture. It can be on any subject in
science, art or literature, approved by the vice-chancellor of the University. Clark’s invitation came
from his old friend Maurice Bowra, who was then the Vice-Chancellor. Clark’s lecture, ‘Moments
of Vision’ (the title borrowed from Thomas Hardy), was written in the solitude of the Villino at I
Tatti, and explores experiences of heightened perception.
44 Derek Hill
1953–1958 400

by Saltwood,45 which looked more beautiful empty than full. How I wish you
could see it.
With all good wishes for 1954, dear BB, and much love from us both
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Saltwood Castle
Nr. Hythe, Kent
Tel. 67190
Apr. 20. 54

My dear BB,
I should have written a week ago to tell you how grateful Colette and I were for
unforgettable time [sic] we had at i Tatti and at the Villino. I don’t think I have
ever been happier or felt more completely in my true centre. I wish we could
have stayed a few days longer – and we made a great mistake in going to Milan,
which really is a nightmare. Hammering everywhere – outside our window in

45 See Introduction above. On 26 October 1953, Clark had written to Nicky: ‘Our life in London has
grown so complicated, expensive and exacting that at the end of last summer we decided to leave
and at the same time it chanced that the place in England we most wanted to buy was for sale, so
we have bought it and, if all goes well, will be moving there next spring. It is a ruined castle about
a mile and a half from the sea near Hythe. From the battlements one can see across the channel to
France, back on to the downs. It is entirely enclosed by high walls of the late 12th century. We shall
live in tolerable comfort in the 14th century gatehouse and in a little 18th century building which
was attached to the gatehouse when the whole castle was used as a farm. It was given by Canute to
the Archbishops of Canterbury and was a continual source of dispute between the Church and the
Crown throughout the middle ages. It must have been an enormous place and living there is rather
like living in the middle of Hadrian’s Villa. But it is quite easy to keep up – or rather everything
that could fall down fell down in the 16th century. For the time being this purchase has still further
complicated our lives and made it very difficult for me to concentrate on my book. But we have no
regrets, as it was time for us both to get out of London and we could not have gone anywhere more
beautiful.
Incidentally, we had to buy the castle fully furnished, and amongst a great quantity of roba di
antiquario were one or two quite respectable-looking trecento pictures in deplorably mouldy
condition, of which I shall send you photographs when they are cleaned. They belonged to old
Martin Conway who used to give us so much trouble over his “Giorgiones”.’
1953–1958 401

the Manin from 6.30 am to 7.0 pm., in the Castello, in Saint Ambrogio. The
only peaceful spot was the Poldi, which is most intelligently done.46 Otherwise
I hated it all. At least it made me less sad to leave Italy.
Here it is now relatively peaceful. It will take us another three months to get
the house straight, and a year to sort out the library; but already we are able to
enjoy some of the pleasures of being here, and can see that it is going to suit us
as well as we hoped. It’s strange to change one’s whole way of life at our age,
and in a way I haven’t yet realised it; I feel unconsciously that I am only staying
with someone, and will soon be going back home. It is odd to wake up in a
14th C. town, white washed, with sky and tree tops all round, absolutely quiet
and isolated, after living so long within sound of London. The confusion in the
library is apalling. Thousands of books I have never seen before, each posing the
problem – is it worth keeping. The trouble is that there is no half way house
between a book shelf full of Everyman, Phaidon, Penguin etc. – all that one
needs for reading – and a huge library, all that one needs for reference. However,
I haven’t been able to give my attention to the problems, because I have been
scribbling hysterically at my Romanes lecture, which is, I fear, doomed to failure.
I have taken too abstract a topic for my creaking, concrete mind, and the result
so far is a series of platitudes.
I did enjoy our walks, especially going once more to the Tree.47 What a great
part walking has played in your whole being. It seems to liberate your mind
more than any form of intellectual exercise.
Thank you again, dear BB, for your kindness to us both. I hope Venice is a
pleasant change – I wish I was there with you
Ever yours affectionately
Kenneth
I am writing a separate letter to Nicky, but send her my love in this one too.

46 The Hotel Manin is an old established hotel in the historic heart of Milan, near the Castello
Sforzesco, the former seat of the Duchy of Milan and one of the biggest citadels in Europe, housing
several of the city’s museums and art collections. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is the historic library
of Milan and also houses the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. The Museo Poldi Pezzoli houses the 19th-
century collection of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and is noted for its holdings of Northern Italian
and Netherlandish paintings.
47 In the second volume of his autobiography, Clark OH p. 106, says: ‘There was one old tree which he
visited as a kind of pilgrimage almost once a month. He said that its roots were a better illustration
of his theory of tactile values than anything in art. There should be a photograph of this tree in any
book on Mr Berenson, but it is very hard to find; indeed I have never been able to find it since his
death, and cannot even say what kind of tree it was. I remember only that it was some miles north
of Fiesole, and that the valley behind it led to the Convent of the Camaldoli’.
1953–1958 402

Saltwood Castle
Nr. Hythe, Kent
Tel. 67190
7 Jun ’54

My dear BB,
Amongst the many things I promised to send you, two have now become
available – the off-print of a lecture I gave on photography48 and the photos of a
picture which I bought with Saltwood. The former is an example of the kind of
thing which I find myself having to do from time to time – and which I try to
do as well as possible. I fancy that it might be worth expanding and illustrating
one day. The photos show details of my polyptych after cleaning, and before
any restoration. It looks to me rather like Alegretto Nuzi – but it isn’t a field
with which I am at all familiar. It is a nice work, and not badly preserved in the
essential parts.49
After a lot of work we have made this place look quite presentable, and I
wish you could see it.We love being here, and go to London with reluctance –
although we have a pleasant pied a terre in Albany.50 I am finishing the proofs of
my nude book – also giving parts of it as lectures to London University.
You will have the page proofs soon, and much hope that you will find
something in them to interest you, as I am not likely to do much better than
some of the chapters – alas!
I do hope Venice has been a success, and that the sun has lit up the dark
corners of the churches. If ever I go back there it will be in May and early June,
before the Piazza has become impenetrable owing to my compatriots. But at
present I feel I can never leave England again, except to see you.
Colette is in the middle of her finals. She will feel very strange when they are
over and she has no more definite goal to work for. It must be an uncomfortable

48 The text of a lecture, ‘Art & Photography’, given by Clark at the centenary meeting of the Royal
Photographic Society was reprinted in The Penrose Annual: A Review of the Graphic Arts, vol. 49,
London: Lund Humphries, 1955.
49 Allegretto Nuzi (1315–1373) was trained in Fabriano and worked in a style influenced by Giotto and
the Sienese Masters.
50 The Albany (or simply ‘Albany’), in Piccadilly, London, was built 1770–74 by William Chambers for
Viscount Melbourne and was first known as Melbourne House. A three-storey mansion with a pair
of service wings and a courtyard, it was occupied in 1791 by Prince Frederick, Duke of York and
Albany. He relinquished the house in 1802 when it was added to and converted by Henry Holland
into 69 bachelor apartments (known as ‘sets’). In the early days there was a requirement that residents
be bachelors. The Albany is governed by a board of trustees. Rents are well below commercial levels
and the sets are said to be allocated through social connection. Among Clark’s contemporaries and
acquaintances who also lived in the Albany were Arthur Lee, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Nicolson and
Aldous Huxley.
1953–1958 403

feeling – I have never had it – I have always been terribly behind hand with at
least three books or articles.
I went to see Mrs Sprigge51 and she outlined the scheme of her biography,
which sounds v. ambitious. Her point of view is certainly v. different from mine,
and although we may overlap in certain passages of pure fact narration, I am sure
that our books will in no way resemble each other. She wrote afterwards that in
‘a saner age we should collaborate’ – a comical concept.
With love from us both, dear BB. – in which I know that the twins would
join if they were here
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
Have you seen the enclosed drawing, which reached me in a dealers catalogue
and twas possible, tho’ only a scrap. (dealer named Franklyn, Primrose Hill,
unknown to me).

Hotel Europa E Britannia

Venezia
June 22 [1954]

Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for a dear letter. The very interesting and entertaining paper on
‘Photography & Painting’52 as well as for the photos of a polyptych, you believe
may be by Allegretto Nuzi. You may be right about this, altho’ the saints look
more sculptural and rougher than usual with him. I shall examine them in
connection with more certain works. I should be helped by a photo of the entire
panel of the polyptych.
We are here for another week. Then I Tatti for a fortnight or so before we
move up to Vallombrosa.
Perhaps a gentle zephyr will waft you to us in the course of the summer.
The Biennale is rather an unpleasantness and an elaborate search for infancy.
The Chinese exhib. has wonderful bronze [illeg] and as yet no paintings except
four grand ones sent by Jap. G’v.t. and no sculptures.53 Basil and Nicolette Gray54
are here, and others I avoid. G. B. Constable55 [sic] with whom we gossip and

51 Sylvia Sprigge
52 See n. 48.
53 A seminal exhibition, Mostra d’arte cinese, was held in the Palazzo Ducale,Venice in 1954.
54 Basil Gray
55 W. G. Constable
1953–1958 404

talk shop. The stately Stewart [sic] Preston,56 the Laurance Roberts57 of course.
Sir Ashley Clark above all.
Hartley58 in this hotel. We meet often and discuss prose and poetry.
Love to all of you from Nicky and B.B.

B5 Albany
Piccadilly W.1
Regent 0458
10 Sept 54

My dear BB,
You may care to see the enclosed,59 which was in great part written at the Villino
this spring. It doesn’t amount to much but seemed to do well enough at the time.
I wonder how you have passed the summer. We have had little sun and
much rain, but that hasn’t destroyed our love for Saltwood, and or altered our
conviction that we were right to go there. Unfortunately Jane has had a series of
minor mishaps – a sort of ’flu, a broken arm etc. which have put her back.
I have to go to New York in October to see through the press my book on
the Nude – also give a jaw at Columbia. You may have seen the first chapter in
the Cornhill60 – the mss is now substantial and less sprightly. If you didn’t like
it, let me know – for otherwise your name will appear on the dedication page.
With much love to Nicky from us both
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

56 Stuart Preston
57 Laurance Roberts
58 L. P. Hartley (1895–1972), the novelist and short-story writer, had little commercial success until
the publication in 1953 of The Go-Between. A lifelong bachelor he had, in 1922, suffered a nervous
breakdown and shortly thereafter started to spend much of his time in Venice. Clark had met Hartley
through Ethel Sands in Venice in May 1933.
59 Kenneth Clark, Moments of Vision, Romanes Lecture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.
60 The Cornhill Magazine, a literary review, had been founded in 1860 with William Makepeace
Thackeray as it first editor. In summer 1954,with John Murray as the editor, it published its 1000th
number. There were articles by Freya Stark, Osbert Lancaster and Compton Mackenzie, and by
Clark on ‘The Naked and the Nude’.
1953–1958 405

Casa Al Dono
Vallombrosa
(Prov di Firenze)
Sept 14 1954

Dear Kenneth.
I cannot imagine yr. writing anything I should not be proud or happy to have
dedicated to me. Thanks for the enchanting causerie on ‘Moments of Vision’.
It is a favourite theme of mine, and the exponent who best has understood it
was Wordsworth. Goethe comes close, and Petrarch so often. I would call these
moments Moments of ecstatic re-cognition. If ever you and I can enjoy an
hour or two of real leisure – not pre-occupied by the pigheds [sic] – we could
antiphone61 delightfully on the subject.
But I am immersed in my pig trade. Just at present it is the new catal. of Ven.
pictures. Will you be an angel and let me know what Ven. paintings are in your
possession? Have you still the over-coiffed lady who so resembles the one in the
Lichtenstein miniature ascr. to ‘Giaconalto’.62
And what of a panel or canvas with the busts of an elderly and a much
younger man that I do not hesitate to ascribe to Giov. Bellini?63
We are having divine weather and hope it will outlast our stay. Oct. 1 we go
to Bologna for three days, and then settle down at I Tatti, where you will be ever
so welcome – when?
I regret to read that Jane is far from well. My best wishes for her recovery.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
10 Nov. 54

My dear BB,
Having just returned from a fortnight in the usa, or rather in NewYork, I thought
you might like to hear something about that strange land from an unprejudiced
observer.

61 Antiphon = the response one side of the choir makes to the other in a chant.
62 See Ch. 8 nn. 19 and 39.
63 See Ch. 7 n. 73.
1953–1958 406

I must say that I find it life enhancing for a short visit. I spent most of my
time talking to the heads of various broadcasting companies who on the whole
are more intelligent than most of our colleagues – have to be. The weapon they
hold is terrifyingly powerful, and they are just beginning to wake up to their
responsibility.
I also spent a little time in the new Metropolitan. It is certainly much improved
– in fact the part containing objets d’art and tapestries is really beautiful, partly
because they lend themselves to the art of display, partly because the old style
millionaires, the Birbo Morgos64 etc seem to have had more feeling for the
substance of tapestry and enamel than for the more intellectual qualities of
painting. The Italian pictures are really the least satisfying part – the Havermeyer
[sic] collection remains the best because it shows evidence of an individual taste.65
How on earth did Mr Frick manage to get such good pictures!66 However, their
latest purchase, the Rothschild Van Eyck is a dull work, ruined by transference
to canvas.67
I returned home to a great political row over our television.68 It was exhausting,
but rather fascinating, and helped to make more vivid one’s reading of 19th C.
history – for example the recent excellent biography of Gladstone which you
will certainly have read.69
I am taking the opportunity of sending out with our dear Irene. It is good of
you to have her to stay, and I am sure you will find as we all do that the more
you know her the more you love her. She is extremely shy, and sometimes
talks nonsense from embarrassment; but in the end she has such understanding,
especially of music and English poetry. See if you can persuade her to read aloud
to you one evening – something unfamiliar or out of fashion like Pope’s Eloise
& Abelard70 or Thompson’s Seasons.71 How I wish I was going to be there too!
I am overworked, and think longingly of the heavenly time Colette and I had
in the Villino.

64 Jack Morgan. Berenson’s nickname for J. P. Morgan Sr. was Birbo Morgo, birbo being colloquial
Italian for scoundrel.
65 Havemeyer Family
66 Henry Clay Frick
67 Jan van Eyck and workshop, Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor, early 1440s, purchased by the
Frick Collection in 1954 from the French Rothschilds, through Knoedler. It is catalogued as being
on panel.
68 The ita awarded the first franchises in early November 1954, causing an outburst of criticisms and
protests that it had shown political bias by favouring newspaper and other commercial interests who
were supporters of the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was especially vociferous, and there
were angry questions and a stormy debate in the House of Commons.
69 Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1954.
70 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) published his poem Eloisa to Abelard in 1717.
71 James Thomson (1700–1748) was a Scottish poet and playwright best known for his masterpiece, The
Seasons (1726–30), and the lyrics of Rule, Britannia! (1740).
1953–1958 407

Jane sends heaps of love (as well as a small gift). I hope I can induce her to
leave Saltwood and come out to see you in the spring. She is completely happy
in the country.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Nov. 25 54
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for the good letter that Irene brought and the pretty presents from you
and dear Jane – to whom my love.
Your observations on Americ. collections are interesting. I suspect the Freer
collection was made by continuous elimination. ‘Do you advise me to keep it or
part with it’? As for the Havemeyer it was made by Mary Cassatt.
Irene is still here, the most domesticated of guests, receptive, stimulating,
discreet, resourceful, no bother whatever, and a very good mixer. How she is
devoted to you both, and especially to Jane. If only you could hear how she talks
about Jane and yourself!
You will want to know what I am up to. Getting older and feebler. I have lost
faith in my body, and await nothing good. Yet I still enjoy people, reading, and
above all work.
That consists now of cataloguing the Venetians,72 and altho I seldom can do
more than one hour and a half a day I am making progress and the thing may go
to the printer early in the spring.
As you were leaving for N.Y. I wrote to ask what Venetian picture of yr. own
you would like me to catalogue. The Bellini lady with the starched coiff? And
what about a painting by G.B. with the portraits of one elderly and a younger
man of which I have a photo sent by you? Etc. etc.
The gates of I Tatti are always ready to be lifted high for Jane and yourself.
Ever affectionately
B.B.

72 In summer 1953, Bela Horowitz proposed that Phaidon Press publish a series of lavishly illustrated
catalogues based on the Lists of 1932. The first volume was to be the Venetian School. The project
was financially supported by the Kress Foundation.
1953–1958 408

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Sunday 26th December 54

My dearest BB,
Irene who is staying here told us about your dreadful accident and how you
took it with your usual philosophy and are now getting better and able to go on
dictating – but it must have been a great shock and I hope you will be persuaded
to stay in bed for some time so that you can recover properly. I meant to write
to you for Christmas but was very busy beforehand so you must forgive me.
Georges Salles was here till today and Maurice Bowra is still here with Irene and
last night we were all talking about you and Nicky with such affection that we
signed the enclosed card to remind you of a few of your devoted admirers. Irene
adored her visit to the Tatti and you did her great good. She is a dear and it was
lovely for her to be with you. I hope K and I may be able to pay you a visit in
the spring. His work should be less of a tie by then. Now he is here for a peaceful
week and hopes to finish the Nude.
Best love to you all dearest B.B. as ever
Jane

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
Dec. ’54

My dear BB,
We have just heard from Willie MO73 via Irene, about your accident. What a
horrifying affair – no younger man could have survived. Willie gave a cheering
account of your recovery, but all the same you must be feeling very shaken –
and we are all feeling thankful but alarmed. It is particularly bad luck that the
accident should have happened when according to Raymond74 and Irene, you
were exceedingly bright and well.
What angels you all were to our friend Irene – she has never been happier
– Raymond was also full of gratitude. How I wish I could have been there too
– but my new job requires hourly vigilance not only difficult problems, but

73 William Mostyn-Owen
74 Raymond Mortimer
1953–1958 409

determined and dishonest men to deal with, who naturally started by assuming
that I was to be no more than a figure head, and are hurt to find that I take the
work seriously.
The last sheet having been left in another briefcase, I take a new one and
a different pen, to say how glad I am that the last reports from i Tatti are still
reassuring.We are in the middle of a happy family Christmas, the pleasantest one
we have had for years, because in the country. In fact we have just come back
from Service in Canterbury Cathedral, which was beautiful and authentically
Anglican. Maurice Bowra always spends Christmas with us, and this year we also
have Georges Salles and Irene. Georges can’t make out more than a tenth of what
is said, but he is glad to find that an English family can make such a noise: [illeg]
said the only time in England he had heard as much noise as in Italy.
I am eagerly looking forward to your Lotto,75 and am delighted to think of
you revising the Venetian Painters. You ask what I have to include – the Bellini
Madonna,76 the little portrait77 and the Tintoretto of a man dressed as David: this
last the same personage as in a portrait by Paul Veronese. The double portrait I
have never owned. You are thinking of the Degas copy of the double portrait in
the Louvre.78 I sent you a photograph of the ? [sic] Bellini double portrait which
was in Legers – I will see what has happened to it, as it looked convincingly
G.B.79 I tried to persuade many people to buy it, but you know how fruitless
that is.
We have just bought a fascinating quattrocento work of art, an ivory plaque
depicting Petrarch’s Triumph of death, Florentine about 1460. It was offered
for sale at Christies80 where fortunately the dealers thought it a fake. But it is

75 Bernard Berenson, Lotto, 3rd rev. edn, Milan: Electa, 1955; in English, Lorenzo Lotto, London: Phaidon,
1956.
76 Circle of Bellini, Virgin and Child, late 1460s or early 1470s, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Accepted by the government in lieu of inheritance tax from Clark’s estate and allocated to the
Ashmolean Museum, 1987.
77 Bust of a Man with a Letter in his Hand, sold by Clark at Sotheby’s, London, 27 March 1968, Lot 16, as
a Giovanni Cariani.
78 Clark owned Degas, Portrait of Two Male Figures (1859–60), copied from a double portrait in the
Louvre which was then attributed to Gentile Bellini but now to Giovanni Cariani, and argued by
some to be portraits of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini.
79 See Ch. 7 n. 73.
80 Lot 144, Christie’s Sale of Objects of Art and Vertu, Tuesday December 14, 1954. Once belonging to
the collector Alfred Trapnell, it was sold by the executors of Mrs Mary Jane Trapnell. Measuring
23 cm x 24 cm x 2 cm, Christie’s catalogued it as ‘Florentine, second half of 15th century’ and
gave as its provenance ‘From the Meyrick Collection’ and ‘From the Collection of J. Malcolm., Esq
1913’. With a reserve of 100 guineas (£105), it failed to sell and was ‘bought in’ for 72 guineas. The
auctioneer’s book shows that it was sold to Clark shortly after the close of the sale (it was the final
lot) for £105. It had previously come up for sale at Christie’s on May 1st 1913 (Lot 23), when they
sold works of art from the ‘Famous Collection of that well-known Connoisseur the late J. Malcom
Esq. of Poltalloch’. In both sales the plaque was similarly catalogued. In the 1913 sale the reserve was
300 guineas ‘with wide discretion’, and it sold to Mallett for 150 guineas (£157.50).
1953–1958 410

remarkably unfaky, and in fact was in the Douce Collection,81 then Malcolm82
and Meyrick.83 I will send you photos of it, as it relates to Pesellino – also early
Agostino di Duccio.84
I wonder what your plans are for the spring. We should be able to get away
for a week or so in March, which is cold in Florence, but none too agreeable in
Kent. Alas, it is almost impossible for me to make plans until my television affairs
are a bit more stable.
Jane has written and sends her love, as do Colin and Colette. All my wishes
for you
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

Dec 31, 54
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
Many thanks for the Xmas card with the good wishes of so many friends, and
ever so much more to yourself for all the sympathetic and affectionate words
about my fall and miraculous escape.

81 Francis Douce (1757–1834) was a leading member of the Society of Antiquaries and Keeper of
Manuscripts at the British Museum. He bequeathed his books and manuscripts to the Bodleian
Library, Oxford, and his letters to the British Museum.
82 John Malcolm of Poltalloch (1805–1893), succeeded as 14th laird of Poltalloch in 1857. He inherited
a mansion and estate in Scotland, a London house off Park Lane, profitable sugar and rum plantations
in the West Indies and a successful cattle station in South Australia which was sold in 1873, for
£175,000. Widowed young, childless and with enormous wealth, he became one of the leading
collectors of his day, notably of old master drawings. Malcolm’s excellent connoisseurship was shaped
by his membership of the Burlington Fine Arts Club of which he was a founder member. He also
collected objets d’art with equal discrimination. The majority of his drawings were either given or
sold to the British Musuem and constitute one of its most signifcant acquisitions.
83 Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848) acquired a pioneering collection of arms and armour on
which he was the leading authority. His expertise was widely admired and he helped e.g. Sir Walter
Scott to decorate his new house at Abbotsford and advised him how to collect arms and armour. In
1824 he published a pioneering 3-volume work on arms and armour, and at the request of George iv
arranged the collection at Windsor Castle. In the 1820s, the dramatist, actor, producer and historian
of costume, James Robinson Planché (1796–1880) introduced him to Francis Douce. In 1834 Douce
bequeathed to him a part of his collection of antiquities.
84 The sculptor Agostino di Duccio (1418–1481) was born in Florence and influenced by Donatello.
He assisted Michelozzo with the sculptural decoration for the SS. Annunziata in Florence and later
worked on church facades in Rimini and Perugia.
1953–1958 411

I am improving, although ache of back and ribs can be very tiresome still. I
already go down to meals and take short walks in the garden.
I am delighted with the promise of yr. coming in the spring – not later
than April, when we ourselves decamp. I shall look forward to it during the
intervening months.
Every good wish for 1955
Love to you and yours
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
12 March 55

My dear BB,
It is a reviving thought that we shall be with you in a month. So much has
happened since Colette and I were with you last year. It is marvelous that you
have kept on writing (and walking) after your mishap – and I must thank you for
sending me the off print on the Oxford Madonna.85 Your suggestion of Cariani is
perfectly convincing – I don’t know if you have seen the original, but the colour
has just that touch of vulgarity which Cariani could never avoid – including
a garish saffron. In spite of all the obvious resemblances to the Castlefranco
Madonna86 I never could begin to swallow the Oxford picture. The Hermitage
Madonna looks far better, but it is so dirty and repainted that one can’t really
tell.87
I hope you haven’t had too many icy blasts. It has been unusually cold here,
and some days Saltwood has been cut off by 3ft. of snow – marvelously beautiful,
but alas, it has broken the boughs of the old yew planted in our courtyard by
Richard i.88

85 See Ch. 8 n. 112.

86 Giorgione, The Madonna and Child between St Francis and St Liberale (the Castelfranco Madonna), c.
1505, Cathedral of Castelfranco,Veneto.
87 Giorgione, The Virgin and the Child in a Landscape, c. 1503, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
88 From early January 1955 until early March there was severe and freezing weather across all regions
of the uk.
1953–1958 412

I promised to let you know where the Bellini double portrait had gone to. It
still belongs to the dealer named Leger, who is rightly waiting to see what will
turn up.
With love to dear Nick
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

B5
Albany
Sunday [April 1955]

B.B. dear
Thank you from my heart for our blissful time with you – I have never been so
happy with you at I Tatti and you were an angel of sweetness and sympathy and
wisdom. It was very sad to leave you and that our visit was so short but while
it lasted it was pure happiness and I shall never forget some of the moments of
vision! I couldn’t write till now on our return from Stratford and Birmingham.
We had only one night at home and I had to pay everyone apart from talking
to my brother and sister in law who were there – and Colin who has since gone
back to Oxford and sends you and Nicky his love and respects.
Birmingham was a bore and very ugly and we had to go to a boring banquet
of business men where K made a speech about Commercial Television. We also
visited his poor aunt in hospital and went back there again today after Stratford.
The latter was great fun and Larrie and Vivien send you much love and long to
see you. They both were marvellous – Larry as a very original but convincing
Malvolio and Vivien as Viola was exquisite and spoke the poetry so beautifully
and looked a dream in boys clothes.89 Before that K made a brilliant speech on
Shakespeare – it won’t read as well as it sounded but as you asked for it I am having
a copy typed for you and will send it to I Tatti where it can await your return
with the photographs I shall also send you as soon as possible. I have arranged for
a photographer to come to Saltwood on Tuesday. After lunch where I sat beside
the Lord Mayor of London who also shed a tear with me, K spoke so well! We all
processed with the Corps Diplomatique (including the Schwarzenbergs90) to the
church and on the way K unfurled the flag of St George so for once in our lives
we were placed top – even ahead of the Dozen of the Corps Diplomatique! – it

89 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night opened at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in 1955 with Olivier as
Malvolio and Vivien Leigh as Viola.
90 See n. 16.
1953–1958 413

was a lovely sunny day and the flag on the main sheet looked lovely and it was
great fun marching behind the band of the Royal Marines all carrying flowers –
us, not the band! – to Shakespeare’s tomb. I do hope this arrives before you leave
and that you have a good time in Tripoli and that the sea and the change to the
dryness of North Africa will cure your poor eyes.
My love and gratitude and looking forward so much to seeing you again and
thank you darling B.B. for everything
Jane

B5 Albany
Piccadilly W1
Regent 0458
24 April.

My dear BB,
The worst of my trials being over for the moment, I can write with a freer mind
to thank you for our wonderfully happy week end at i Tatti. I really don’t think
I have ever enjoyed it more: it was such a delight and relief to find that in spite
of your accident and the other inflictions you were as little changed as anyone
I know. Coming to i Tatti from my troublesome active life, it seems like an
earthly paradise, and when I left I felt a perfect donkey to have taken on so many
talks when I could have spent most of my time enjoying the pleasures of your
conversation and of the library. It was lovely to have Jane with me, and so much
better that she could enjoy i Tatti as much as I do. Indeed, dear BB, I owe you a
debt beyond all expression or repayment, and although you say that expressions
of gratitude embarrass you, you must allow me to say so.
Since leaving you I seem to have spent most of my time in trains. If only they
wobbled just a fraction less, so that I could count on writing in them I shouldn’t
complain.
We shall be thinking of you on the 30th and praying that all goes well on your
journey. I will write again nearer your birthday. With much love,
Yours ever
Kenneth
1953–1958 414

[Written on unheaded paper, undated but must be May 1955]

Saniet
Volpi,
Tripoly,
Libia91

Dear Kenneth.
Thanks for yr. delightful article lecture, on the acting of Shakespeare.92 You
present brilliantly and accurately every facet of the subject. I admire your acumen
and your dialectic. I remain more than ever of my life-long opinion, conviction
even, that to act tragedy, to recite great literature is to degrade it. ‘A voce’. I am
ready to defend this view. Writing would require a book.
Alan, whom I saw for a few minutes at I Tatti was a surprise. He was so
responsive, so alert, that I felt drawn to him and urged him to return and stay.
Stopped over at Malta to see the Caravaggio. After the Calling of Matthew
the Decapitation of the Baptist is by far his greatest work.93
We expect to stay here till 25, and what follows will depend on my strength.
Love to you both
B.B.

91 Berenson was staying with Anna Maria Cicogna (1913–2004) the younger sister of Marina Volpi, the
owner of the Villa Maser (see n. 197). She had married Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and owned
an 18th-century Turkish villa in an oasis on the outskirts of Tripoli. She arranged, on this last trip
abroad by Berenson, for him to spend two days in the superintendent’s house at Leptis Magna.
92 On Sunday 24 April 1955, Clark spoke at a luncheon in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the
391st anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. He reflected on the difficult but not impossible task of
performing Shakespeare’s plays on television, and on the qualities needed by directors and actors
to accomplish this task in a medium whose essence was intimacy and a small screen, and whose
audience was necessarily distant and possibly restless. In the circumstances, he thought that the way
that actors spoke was all-important. His speech was summarised in a long article in The Times, 25
April 1955.
93 An entry in Berenson’s diary for 3 May 1955 uses exactly these words. Caravaggio fled to Malta after
murdering a young man in Rome, believing that membership of the Knights of Malta would lead to
a pardon. He was inducted into the Order and, in exchange, was commissioned to paint an altarpiece
for St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta: this was the Beheading of St John the Baptist (The Decollation of
the Baptist), 1608, which still hangs in the Cathedral. Caravaggio’s connection with the Knights of
Malta was severed several months later, following another brawl.
1953–1958 415

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
21 June ’55

My Dear BB,
Of the many friends who will write to you on your birthday, very few can draw
on so large a store of gratitude and affection as I can.
I have thought a lot, in the last years, of all that I owe you, and find that the
first and greatest debt is emancipation from the various intellectual fashions
of the time. If I had never gone to i Tatti I should certainly have been bound
apprentice to Bloomsbury – or perhaps never moved beyond Oxford. But thanks
to your Petrarchian characteristic of metropolitan isolation (I see Metropolitan
as the opposite of provincial) I came to look with sceptism at all dogmas and
tabernacles. In fact, dear BB, you made me a Catholic in the Arts, which although
it involves a temporary isolation in Salvationist Society, gives one a humbler
place [in the] apostolic succession.
From the chief benefit flowed countless others. It delights me how often the
children, after meeting you, tell me that they have discovered the origin of this
or that turn of thought or behaviour which I had supposed to be my own. In all
these ways I am truly your son.
I will say nothing of all the happiness you have given me when I am at i Tatti,
for many others could say the same. And a letter is not the place to write about
the influence of your critical ideas. I should like to have written an article about
that to offset all the accounts of your train de vie and conversation which will be
appearing. But it would mean carefully re-reading those essays which contain
the basis of your thought – and I can’t do that for a month or two.
There is another thing I should have liked to send you as a birthday present –
a scheme by which your English friends and admirers could pay for a studentship
at i Tatti. But that, too, takes a lot of work and organization. However, you will
live to see both these tributes of my gratitude and perhaps have more peace of
mind to consider them when the present celebrations are over.
One of the many things I share with you is embarrassment in the face of
expressions of gratitude or collective admiration. But I know that you don’t
mind the expression of affection, and so I send you my love as a son and a dear
friend.
Kenneth
1953–1958 416

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Thursday June 26 55

My Dearest BB,
Many many happy returns for your birthday. You will have hundreds and
thousands of letters and telegrams but when you have time to read this one I
would like it to be a tribute from the poor little plain ignorant girl to whom
you were so angelic when unaccountably your pupil married her – against your
unspoken advice. You could not have been kinder to me in the most civilised
sense of the word kind. K owes you more than you will ever know but so do I in
a quite different way – for you gave me my first knowledge of the international
world of the mind and taught me how to inhabit it or at least be on the outskirts,
understanding what was going on even though I could never have taken part.
And from your benevolence and affection I have learnt the great importance and
value of tolerance – because you were uniformly understanding, where you had
every reason not to bother. So darling B.B. love and gratitude always and again
very many happy returns.
Jane

July 3, 55
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane.
Ever since yr. last visit, we have been looking forward to yr. return July 4. We
were expecting you when Luisa brought us the news that you could not come.
Your dear note helps me over my disappointment. It is sweet of you to recall our
past together in words transfigured by memory. Both of you have counted in my
own life, helping me to enrich its texture, and to shape it. –
Home-coming after two months is a mixed delight. Such piles and piles of
arrears to attend to. The very sight of them drives me to the point of complete
exhaustion.
Dearest love to each and all of you.
B.B.
1953–1958 417

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
3 Sept, ’55

My dear BB,
Although I hope to be seeing you in a few days I must write now to thank you
for two additions to my library of Berensoniana – the Bibliography94 and the
Sicilian diary.95 The former is most impressive and fascinating.What an immense
amount you have initiated and discovered. No wonder you sometimes grow
impatient at the claims of your juniors, for you have been ahead of them at
almost every point – both in connoisseurship and taste.
It was a delightful idea to let us all visit Sicily in your company, and listen to
your reminiscences and reflections.These little Electa books are an excellent way
of perpetuating your talk.
My last weeks have been spent in preparing for the opening of the independent
television service. It went off well, but has left me feeling rather gloomy – I am
like an architect who has built a fine town, and now sees it inhabited by Yahoos.96
Of course I knew all along that they were the only possible inhabitants, simply
because anything beginning with the word ‘mass’ is inherently low – and this
involves mass entertainment, mass appeal, mass persuasion, etc. However, the
structure into which the Yahoos are fitted is a good one, and may have some
influence on their filthy habits.
We had a week in Edinburgh and saw some good drama and opera. Irene’s
Thornton Wilder play was not a complete success – too much dubious
philosophy.97 And to be perfectly truthful Irene was not at her best: she looked
wrong – so fundamentally un-Greek – concave, like Aegean sculpture, instead of
convex. Alcestis must radiate from a solid core of health, if only to bring Admetus
back to life, and Irene looked ill and rather uneasy – a child of our time.
Visually, there was a good Gauguin show, of which I will bring you a catalogue,
as it contains some new material;98 but the great experience was to see Poussin’s

94 William Mostyn-Owen compiled a Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson, Milan: Electa, 1955, listing all his
published books and articles.
95 Bernard Berenson, Viaggio in Sicilia, Milan: Electa, 1955, 70 pp., 120 pls.
96 Yahoos are legendary beings, invented by Jonathan Swift for his novel Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. He
describes them as filthy, with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings, but primitive creatures
obsessed with ‘pretty stones’ they find by digging in mud: thus Swift created them to represent what
he saw as the base materialism and ignorant elitism that he observed in early 18th-century England.
97 Thornton Wilder’s The Alcestiad performed at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival with Irene Worth.
98 The exhibition, Paul Gauguin: Paintings, Sculpture and Engravings, was shown at the 1955 Edinburgh
Festival, catalogue by Ian Hunter and Douglas Cooper.
1953–1958 418

Seven Sacraments (the Ellesmere series) cleaned and hung together alone in a
room.99 I wish you could have seen them. His conception of antique Christianity
– of Christian peace100 as an extension of pax Romana – was most impressive,
and although I had often seen the pictures at Bridgewater House, I had never
felt their full impact before.
Alda101 is coming to see us today. Alas, it is raining – the first wet day for weeks
– so she will not be able to enjoy the place; and owing to frequent changes of
plan her visit has been cut down to two days. Apparently she had thought of
going to see Derek in Ireland, believing that it could be done in a day or two
– whereas we feel it takes two days each way. Also, I think she is finding the see
busyness [sic] of London rather bewildering, as Jacob Burckhardt did.102 I must
go now and meet her train. It is really a great joy and refreshment of spirit to me
to think that I shall be seeing you soon.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth
We arrive at lunch time on Saturday – at the Monaco.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
21 Oct. ’55

My dear BB,
I promised to send you the title of a book on the antiques in the Villa Medici –
here it is on a separate card, so that you can give it to Alda.103 I expect you have
it in the Library already. Actually the Raphael-Marcantonio Judgement of Paris

99 Poussin painted two series of the Seven Sacraments.The first was commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo
in the second half of the 1630s and sold to the Duke of Rutland in 1784. The second series was
painted later for Paul Fréart de Chantelou and was acquired by the Duke of Bridgewater in 1798,
passing by descent to the Earls of Ellesmere and placed on loan in the National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh, in 1946.
100 Clark added as his own footnote “or Christian piety as an extension of pietas.”
101 Alda von Anrep
102 Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), Swiss-born, was one of the first significant historians of art and
culture. His Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860 (translated as The Civilization of the Renaissance
in Italy, 1878) became a model for the treatment of cultural history. Burckhardt visited England for
the first time in early autumn 1860. Of his visit to London, he wrote to a friend advising him not
to go there unless he could afford to take taxis everywhere as the buses were not helpful, and he
remarked that he would not pay a return visit.
103 Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo, Le antichità di Villa Medici, Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1951.
1953–1958 419

is only loosely related to the Villa Medici relief, and the beautiful pose of the
woman in the Raphael is quite different – I hope he may be allowed to have
made it up for himself.104
We so much enjoyed seeing you in Venice. It was our only holiday this year
and the nicest possible. We had two rather drear days in Paris on the way back.
The poor French are depressing company. Their misfortunes have exaggerated
all their least pleasant characteristics. In fact the only thing I enjoyed was the
Titians in the Louvre, which, after Venice, looked more beautiful than ever. Since
then I have been plunged in my work, which I enjoy. If it is true that the test
of civilization be how much one talks and reads it is not a civilized life, for I do
neither. But action is an irresistible stimulant to me and I approach my office
with the rapture of a drunk approaching the sideboard.
Much love from Jane
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth C

Villa Mauresque
St Jean
Cap Ferrat
c/o W.S.M105
28th December [1955]

My dearest BB,
A very happy new year from us both and I do hope poor Nicky’s leg will soon
be out of plaster and quite strong. It must have been a most dreadful shock for
you both. We had a series of illnesses amongst the servants the month before
Christmas then I got a sort of ’flu and K got very overworked and tired and
at Christmas had a temperature and Maurice Bowra fell downstairs so we had
rather a depressing and exhausting Christmas and were glad to escape here on
the Tuesday i.e. yesterday. Poor Irene could only take 36 hours off and arrived at
1 am Christmas morning – however the play is very good and her acting is really
marvellous.106 I wish you could see her in it.
We went to Larry’s film Richard iii with the Waltons (he did the music) and

104 See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of
Sources, London: Harvey Miller, 1986, pp. 149–50, no. 119.
105 Somerset Maugham
106 The play was The Queen and the Rebels by Ugo Betti (1892–1953), an Italian playwright and judge, at
the Haymarket, December 1955, and also starred John Gielgud.
1953–1958 420

Vivien looked simply beautiful107 – they are all on [illeg] for Christmas so I
expect you will see Willie and Sue soon.
His opera Troilus opens at Milan – Scala – on Jan 12th108 – I wish we could
be there but poor K has too much work to do – he is giving the annual lecture
at the Historical Society on Wed. Jan 4th.109 It is on Art History in the last 200
years – not Art Criticism but all the same it might amuse you to glance at it and
I’ll send you a copy end of next week. It is not open to the public but I shall
bring Colette and Luisa and the latter will doubtless report as well. She spent
Christmas Eve with us – glad to leave her parents in law and Ben was still in
hospital which was bad luck as they have hardly met so far!
We go to America early in March as you know for Johnnie’s celebrations –
K is not lecturing except twice in the small Duncan Philips110 gallery (and we
are staying with them) – once on Millet and once on Rodin. But these aren’t
written yet! At any moment the page proofs of the Nude should arrive and as
soon as possible we shall send you a corrected set for your approval.
Our host is busy both resting and writing before he goes to Egypt to stay
with the Aga Khan – we are very happy doing the same and go home Monday.
Meantime the sea is blue and mimosa and carnations everywhere.
Best love
Jane

Jan. 5. 56
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
Yr. good letter fr. Cap Ferrat took some days to reach me. I am delighted to
hear from you, and of all yr. and K’s activities. They are beyond me. I cannot
understand how he manages to do so much in each field, enough each one
for one average persons entire career. Do send me all his lectures, or whatever
output including what he wrote say on Millet and Rodin.111

107 Olivier’s Richard III was released in the uk on 16 April 1955. The première was attended by the
Queen. It received many awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.Vivien Leigh did not star
in the film.
108 William Walton’s opera Troilus and Cressida was first performed at Covent Garden in 1954.
109 Kenneth Clark, ‘The Study of Art History’, Universities Quarterly, May 1956, pp. 223–38.
110 Duncan and Marjorie Phillips
111 See next letter.
1953–1958 421

Nicky is at last out of plaster and hobbling about, stays in what used to be
Mary’s room and was (when not more than five) having our meals with her. A
quiet Xmas with those [illeg] friends staying, and few from the outskirts.
I am already at work on the Florentine volumes of my catalogue of Italian
paintings from 1300 to 1600. I enjoy the work, but I can do little at a time, an
hour a day at most. And I vividly recall working ten hours a day.112
Our best to you all for 1956 and ever so many future years.
Affectionately
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
24 Feb. [‘56’ added, probably in another hand]

My dear BB,
We have thought of you often during this cold weather.113 I am afraid it will have
made you feel very miserable, for however warm the house the cold seems to
creep in. It has been a nuisance here, and with villages cut off & so forth, but I
can’t say we have suffered much, & I have suffered less than most because I have
spent the last week in bed with a bad attack of influenza – the worst I remember
since we lived in S. Martino. Of course for a man of action sickness is always a
luxury, & even when I felt too feverish to read or write it was a pleasure to have
time to notice & remember feelings which usually have to be pushed on one side.
Since I became normal I have amused myself by writing a lecture on Rodin
to follow the one on Millet in the Duncan Philips Gallery next month. It’s a
good subject because the great works are really great, & the unedifying last years
of his life are marvellously dramatic – not unlike the last years of Rossetti, altho’
poor Rossetti never became as odious. I have often wondered how well you
knew Rodin – also if you knew the Duchesse de Choiseul.114 What a subject – if
only Balzac by Rodin could have been followed by Rodin by Balzac (someone

112 Berenson continued to work on revisions to his ‘Florentine Painters’ almost to his dying day. During
the last summer at Casa al Dono in 1959, he poured over the photographic material he had with
him, making small corrections to the Lists.
113 February 1956 was exceptionally cold with mean average temperatures below freezing.The sea froze
along the south coast of England.
114 Rodin made several busts of the Duchesse de Choiseul. She was an American of French descent
who married the Duc de Choiseul in 1891. She enjoyed an intimate friendship with Rodin from
about 1904 until he ended their relationship in 1912.
1953–1958 422

must have made that joke before). In the Millet lecture I thought of quoting
your words of admiration which occur (of all unlikely places) in the famous
defence of Mattisse [sic]. I hope you still feel the same.115
I fished the Glaneuses out of the deposito when we were last in Paris: it
really is a great picture. But many of the others are disappointing compared
to the drawings, & the Angelus116 is really rather disgusting – as if painted in
blackcurrant syrup. The drawings in the Cabinet des Dessins are superb. (The
said Cabinet as you know, is now beautifully installed in the old Salles Camondo
– its administration is as ignorant as ever).
We go to the usa on March 10th, and will spend most of the time in Washington
with the Duncan Philips. I shall be interested to know what has been happening
at the National Gallery. It will be interesting also to see their new acquisitions,
altho’ for some mysterious reason I never feel I can get acquainted with the
picture when it is hanging on those too, too [illeg] walls. It is like meeting
people, including some quite horrible people at an extremely formal dinner
party. We hope to get to Boston for a day or two – we haven’t been there since
1935. Otherwise no more travelling, & home before Easter.
In my moments of enforced reflection I thought a great deal of i Tatti, & all it
had meant to me. It is extraordinary how consistently you pursued your ideal of
civilization from the days of Altamura117 onwards. If Altamura seemed necessary
in the 90s, good Heavens, how much more is it necessary today. Your disciples
will have a hard task to maintain it. Much love from us both, dear BB.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

March 1st 1956 [no address]

My Dear Kenneth
Thanks for a dear and most interesting letter. I wish you buon viaggio, buon
permanenza and buon ritornare. How glad you will be to get back, far from [illeg]
and forced conviviality.

115 In 1908 Berenson had written a letter to The Nation, the usa’s oldest continuously published weekly
magazine, in defence of Matisse’s art. In his concluding paragraph he wrote: ‘50 years ago, Mr
Quincy Shaw and other countrymen of ours were the first to appreciate and patronise Corot,
Rousseau, and the stupendous Millet. Quantum mutatus ab illo! It is now the Russians and to a
lesser extent, the Germans, who are buying the work of the worthiest successor of those mighty
ones.’ [‘How changed things are from what they were!’Virgil, Aeneid ii, 274].
116 J.-F. Millet, Des Glaneuses (The Gleaners), 1857, and L’Angélus, 1857/9, both Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
117 See Introduction above.
1953–1958 423

No, I have not changed my mind about Millet as a draughtsman. I admire his
drawings more and more, and believe that they have had a real effect on the art
that surrounded him. Of Van Gogh for instance, and in particular. I envy your
seeing so many of them. I could do now without his paintings.You can’t imagine
how they were admired 70 years ago when I first saw any of them. I partook of
course but, even then, in moderation.
Rodin was when I knew him far too surrounded by 2nd and 3rd rate men
of letters for me to approach him. They made him believe that he really was a
Michaelangelo [illeg] & not only to pose as one, but to inject tragic sentiment
hypodermically into his work. Even Rilke118 was poison to him.
But I admire his marbles as a whole. Nobody, not even what remains of Greek
sculpture has given a young woman’s back as he has, and not even Bernini.
I get all sort of rumours about the Washington N.G. but confusing. Johnnie
refuses to write about it, and Davis119 does not hide his disappointment, etc.
putting up a good show of having plenty of Ersatz.
Dear K, yr. and Jane’s love means a great deal to me, and I need it. I feel like a
stranded whale on top of Ararat.
Do write if you can fr. Washington.
Dearest love to you both
B.B.

123 East 79th Street

New York City
Rhinelander 4-3386
24 March [1956]

My dear BB,
As Jane will have told you, I put off writing until my lectures were over, as I
had my hands full trying to amplify & polish them over here. However, the
last has been delivered, & my mind is at rest.

118 Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the great German lyric poet, married Klara Westhoff, one of
Auguste Rodin’s pupils, in 1901. They had a daughter, Ruth, who was born seven months after the
marriage which lasted only one year. In the summer of 1902, Rilke left his new family and travelled
to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin. After an initial, difficult period, Rilke became deeply
involved with Rodin’s work and then with Cézanne’s. For a time he acted as Rodin’s amanuensis,
eventually writing a long essay abut him. In spring 1906 Rilke suddenly abandoned Rodin.
119 Robert Tyler Davis (1904–1978) was a museum administrator and an educator in art and art history.
A Harvard graduate, he held a variety of museum directorships and professorships in the usa and
Canada. In 1968 he became the Assistant Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts and
Acting Director in 1969–70.
1953–1958 424

Before I try to give you some account of Washington, I must say how happy
your last letter made me – not only because of all that it contained, but also
because it seemed to show that you were feeling stronger. Even more was I
rejoiced & inspired by your expression of wishes for i Tatti, which Nicky sent.120
It is really a most moving declaration of faith, & expresses exactly what all your
friends believe & would want to see put into effect. We shall all do what we
can to see if we can prevent i Tatti becoming an institution – although I do not
underrate the difficulties. Of course a great deal depends on the director, & if
you could be sure of Johnnie all would be well, for he not only knows how it
should be run, but has the diplomatic skill to achieve it.
This leads to the burning question of the directorship of the National
Gallery. On the whole people were sick of the subject and wouldn’t talk about it.
But I think Johnnie will get the job, simply because he has David Findly121 [sic]
behind him – whatever else can be said about David, he is the most dictatorial
and ruthless fighter, and he will stick at nothing to get Johnnie in. He is perfectly
right, because to put in a man who knows nothing about art & cares less would
be to place the Gallery at the mercy of those millionaires who want to use it
for self-expression. They are already in trouble of this sort, as Chester Dale has
insisted on their exhibiting a Last Supper by Dali122 of a vulgarity compared to
which Madame de Behagues’ Cene Inferieur123 was a Leonardo. This old system
of blackmailing museums by dangling Collections over their heads is peculiar to
this country, as no Englishman ever gave away a picture he could sell – or Italian
citizen, I suppose*. [Written down the left-hand margin: *In the end I suppose
this millionaire blackmail doesn’t matter so much as things settle down to their
own levels – like Birbo Morgo124 in the Metropolitan.]
Which leads me to the new Kress pictures.125 They are really very good –
much the highest level of any of his gifts.The exceptions were almost all Contini
pictures, like the Eleonora of Toledo.126 What a mercy he is out of the way! The

120 See Appendix 2.

121 David Finley
122 Salvador Dalí’s (1904–1989) The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955, was purchased by Chester Dale
in 1956 and loaned to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. Dale (1883–1962), from lowly
origins, made a fortune as a financier. He was the President of the National Gallery in 1955–
62, bequeathing to it the bulk of his collection. Uneven in quality, his highly personal collection
contains works by earlier painters, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and leading American artists.
123 Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague owned several supposed Leonardo da Vincis, including a Salvator
Mundi.
124 See n. 64 above.
125 Samuel H. Kress
126 Eleonora di Toledo, c. 1560, by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572). Once belonging to William Beckford,
it was sold in 1926 to Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi who sold it in 1954 to the Samuel H.
Kress Foundation.
1953–1958 425

Botticelli of Giuliano is a wonderful discovery127 – if all the fuss made over the
exportation of the Met-Castagno head has made over that, there would have
been some justification.128 The festivities passed off without disaster, as far as I
could see. But we led a sheltered life with the sweet Philipses – the nicest host &
hostess imaginable, who ‘came out’ in the course of the week we were there. At
first they are sunk in shyness, & anxieties for the poodles, but after a time they
become perceptive humorous & highly individual.
I mustn’t start another page, or it won’t go air mail. I shall write another letter
with news of New York.
Ever yours affectionately.
Kenneth.

[Undated letter]
c/o Duncan Phillips
2101 Foxhall Road
Washington

My dearest BB,
We are having great fun in Washington and everyone asks for news of you and
Nicky. It is just like a village where the same people gather in one or other
pub each night, tho’ perhaps houses like Marie Beale’s aren’t awful like pubs.
One of the few new friends we have made has been Jayne Wrightsman129 very
beautifully dressed in dresses I would have loved for Colette – especially a short
white Dior – one of the most beautiful dresses I have ever seen.
The Nat. Gallery celebrations went off very well and David should be feeling
proud – everyone made deservedly nice speeches about him and everyone gave
parties for him and Margery.
Feeling runs very high over the N.G. appointment. Duncan our host and
David are determined to have Johnnie and as David is a man of steel I feel
inclined to back him to win.

127 Sandro Botticelli (1446–1510), Giuliano de’ Medici, c. 1478/80. Purchased by Wildenstein’s in 1948,
who sold it in 1949 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
128 The Metropolitan Museum’s Saint Sebastian (accession no. 48.78), now attributed to Botticini, was
purchased in 1948 as a work by Andrea del Castagno and exhibited as such in New York at Art
Treasures of the Metropolitan, 1952. The picture had suffered considerable damage and over-cleaning.
129 Jayne Wrightsman (b. 1919) married Charles B. Wrightsman (1895–1986) who was the president
of Standard oil and who made a fortune when its assets were liquidated in 1953. The Wrightsmans
acquired notable old master paintings and a fine collection of the decorative arts of the French
ancien regime. They donated much of their collection and funded the Wrightsman Galleries for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1953–1958 426

The other subject of discussion is the negroes.130 Senator Fulbright explained

to me at length that the Supreme Court decision was 50 years too early – next
evening I sat beside the Chief Justice Governor Warren131 who described very
movingly how important it was for the United States to take this stand in the
state of the world today and the troubles in Africa and the East generally – so
there you are. It is almost Johnnie versus K.C.! K’s lecture on Millet was a wow
– Rodin is on Thursday, then back to N.Y. Will write again from there. May we
come to I Tatti second half of Sept. and visit you at Consuma. K wants to work
in the library. Don’t bother to answer as will write from N.Y.
Best love to you both
Jane

Saltwood Castle,
Kent.
Hythe 67190
22 April [1956]

My dear BB.,
In my last letter I promised to let you have more comments on the usa. Now
we have been back for three weeks, so my news is stale. I gather that even the
great Director question is practically settled, as the appropriate committee has
recommended Johnnie. Everyone will be pleased – but I confess I should have
liked him to be free in order to fulfill your wish & look after i Tatti – perhaps he
will do so yet. I should hate to be director of the Washington N. G. myself – too
much politics and toadying to the rich.
We much enjoyed New York. I wish you could see the Metropolitan in its
new shape – metropolitan no longer – in fact more human and alive than the
National Gallery.The level of intelligence in New York is high, I suppose because
it is a judenstadt; & the crowds in the museum on a Sunday afternoon seem to
me to be the best informed & most responsive I have ever listened to in a Gallery.
We saw one really admirable collection which was new to me, that of Harold
Baker.132 As you know, it consists chiefly of great bronzes & terracottas, very well

130 In early March 1956 the United States Supreme Court upheld a ban on racial segregation in state
schools, colleges and universities.
131 James Fulbright was the Democrat Senator representing Arkansas between 1945–75, and was
a segregationist. Earl Warren served as 14th Chief Justice of the United States (1953–69) and is
remembered for the decisions which ended school segregation, upheld the rights of an accused, and
ended sponsored prayer in state schools.
132 This is probably a reference to Walter C. Baker, who had begun to collect old master and 19th-
1953–1958 427

chosen (almost all from Brummer133) & a few fine drawings – the whole done
with real intelligence & what looks like taste, & a nice change after the usual
apartments full of Matisse, Renoir and van Gogh Irises. Actually n. yk. would
be paradise for a collector. It is full of forgotten works of art which if they don’t
qualify as ‘important’ & are out of the prescribed scheme of interior decoration,
are sold for nothing. I bought a very nice 4thc. stele for $150! One might find
anything – sometimes only just unpacked from the case in which it was shipped
to Mr Hearst134 or Senator Clark.135
I had long talks with my publisher, & to my astonishment the book is nearly
finished & will come out in October.136 I ought to be able to send you the page
proofs in May. The us edition is fatter and more pretentious than the English
one, & will be too heavy to take on a train or read in bed – so as far as I am
concerned cannot be read.
It seems that Jane promised to send you a lecture I gave on art historians:137
so I am sending it, though it was intended for an audience who had never heard
of them (except Ruskin), &, as discovered, couldn’t read a word of German. As
you will see I had to make a rule not to mention any living writer: also I had to
bring in Aby Warburg, as the Warburg is part of London University, where the
lecture was given.
Now I am about to amuse myself compiling an anthology of drawings for
Phaidon, with a general introduction on the art – a pleasant holiday task.
Saltwood looks enchanting. We lost a few shrubs in the cold weather, but
nothing to your losses in Italy. It must look very sad where the olives have died.
Much love from Jane
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

century drawings in 1950, having previously acquired a notable collection of antiquities. His
collection was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1972.
133 Joseph Brummer
134 William Randolph Hearst
135 William Clark
136 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, London: John Murray, and New York: Pantheon
Books, 1956.
137 See n. 109.
1953–1958 428

1956, June 19 Telegram stamped ‘Reading, Berks’

= elt = kenneth clark wardens londings [sic] wadham college oxford =138
heartfelt congratulations from three old friends and best love = bb
alda nicky

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
2 Nov, ’56

My dear BB,
I am supposed to be leaving for India tomorrow, and must write to you before
I go – if I go, which seems doubtful. The purpose of my journey is to persuade
the Indians that we are a peaceful & civilised country, & this seems a foolish
moment at which to attempt it.139 I can’t imagine that anyone will listen. I am
very disappointed, as it is probably my last chance of visiting the East, & I had
been preparing my mind for it.
I wonder how you have survived the summer & the royal visit.140 It is sad for
us not to have seen you. Alan enjoyed his visits enormously & came home full
of enthusiasm. I am so glad that you have got to know him, as he is usually the
under-rated member of the family.
Before I see you again you will have received a copy of my book on the Nude
which you kindly allowed me to dedicate to you. You will see how much it
owes to you on almost every page. It was conceived on walks in the hills behind

138 On 21 June 1956, Clark received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature from the University
of Oxford in a ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre. The University Public Orator, in presenting
Clark, spoke (as was the tradition) in Latin and, referring to his office as Chairman of the ita, quoted
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book xii, ‘the House of Rumour’: ‘There is a place at the centre of
the World, between three zones of earth, sea and sky, at the boundary of the three worlds. From
here, whatever exists is seen, however far away, and every voice reaches listening ears.’ The former
President Truman received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law on the same occasion. The
Clarks stayed at Wadham College where his old friend Maurice Bowra was the Warden.
139 November 1956 saw the introduction of the States Reorganisation Act, a major reform of the
boundaries of India’s states and territories, which organised them along linguistic lines. The Act
came into effect at the same time as the restructuring of the constitutional framework for India’s
existing states.The Commission, appointed in 1953 to make recommendations for change, was faced
with demonstrations, agitations and hunger strikes, and, in a riot in Bombay in January 1956, 80
people were killed by the police and a further 200 were killed or injured in June. The events of the
Suez Crisis in 1956 had also not played well in India.
140 King Gustaf of Sweden, formerly Prince Gustaf of Sweden, was a regular visitor to I Tatti in the
1950s.
1953–1958 429

i Tatti, during one of those blissful periods when you let me stay there. I have
had it about the place for so long that I have no idea what it is like. Some of my
friends who have seen it seemed to be pleased, but I fear it will fall between two,
or three, stools. However I have got so used to attacks in the last few years that I
am quite resigned to disobliging reviews.
We had rather a disagreeable summer, partly owing to the rain, & partly to
the troubles with my television job, which however I got under control in the
end.141 The last part was a trip in the car down to Albi & Toulouse. You know
how reviving such escapades are – & how horrible it is to get back.
I was sorry not to see the ivories at Ravenna.142 As for the Caracci – I have
seen the catalogue & am confirmed in my dislike of Anibale, though I admit that
Agostino was a minor poet.143 I find it hard to believe that the exhibition would
have made me change my mind. I wonder if you got there, & what you thought.
Jane sends her love. She has been very well (except for lumbago) & we both
love Saltwood more than ever – tho’ heaven knows how long the Welfare State
will allow us to live here.
Love to Nicky.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

[Airmail letter posted on 13 November 1956 from Ajanta, Decca]

Airungobad

How I wish you could be here, dear BB. It is really one of the most enchanting
places I have ever visited, a perfect climate, an excellent hotel (the only one, I
must confess, that I have discovered in India) and within easy reach of Ellora, &
a possible drive to Ajanta.144 I have been at Ellora all day, & there are some works
of great beauty, but much of it is second hand – from pattern books – about the
level of a second rate Romanesque tympanum like Cahors.145 Very little equal to

141 The ita had had a troublesome few months. In January 1956 Aiden Crawley resigned as the editor-
in-chief of itn (see Introduction). An announcement was made in March that the New Zealander
Geoffrey Cox would be appointed as his successor, but Cox did not take up his post until July.
142 An exhibition, Early Christian, Byzantine and Medieval Ivories was held in Ravenna in January–
December 1956.
143 There was a major and ground-breaking exhibition of the Carracci in Bologna in 1956 which
was a turning point in the rehabilitation of their reputation: Mostra dei Carracci: Disegni, Palazzo
dell’Archiginnasio, catalogue by Denis Mahon.
144 See Ch. 5 n. 58.
145 The Cathedral of St-Étienne at Cahors in south-west France is late Romanesque. On the cathedral’s
north facade is a carved tympanum depicting Christ surrounded by saints and angels.The Clarks had
recently returned from a visit to this area of France.
1953–1958 430

Moissac!146 Elephanta was far fairer before the Portuguese destroyed it.147 Much
of this you can tell from photos, but what you can’t tell, & I hadn’t anticipated,
is the ravishing beauty of the Country. It is not at all arid & burnt up, but like a
combination of Provence with English park scenery. Green fields & magnificent
trees. All the caves are in perfect sites. Sanchi148 is also beautifully set on a hill
overlooking a plain with gentle round hills on one side & a mountain the other
– an Umbrian landscape which seems to confirm the likeness of St. Francis to
the Buddha. Incidentally, tho’ some of the figures at Sanchi are really fine, much
of it anticipates all that is most disastrous in 19th century Indian Art. I have only
two more days here, & long to come back to visit the other great monuments
Bhubaneswar, Konarka etc. There is not much to be said for Delhi after one’s
first shock at its extent size [sic] & close resemblance to Washington dc. Bombay
is really rather revolting, tho’, fascinating too – like a very large and squalid
edition of Nice. Indians have no taste, & the vulgarity of their Riviera-style
houses is ‘beyond good & evil’.149
I have now been to Ajanta, which is as much beyond expectations as Ellora
falls short of them.150 The paintings are unequal and terribly damaged – in most
cases just a jigsaw puzzle of small pieces. But the best are really admirable –
comparable to Simone and declining to Bartoldo di Fredi – never any lower
than Andrea Vanni. And there are so many! 30 caves of which quite half a dozen
have first-rate paintings. The site is also most impressive – a gigantic horseshoe
of rock, like Cheddar Gorge, with a river at the bottom. Dear me, I wish you
could see it. I am afraid it will soon become a tourist centre – they have made
all preparations for this, but so far the tourists are chiefly Indian schoolchildren –
who look enchanting, & Tibetans, who are the least shampooed indigenes [sic] I

146 The Abbey of St Pierre at Moissac, near Cahors, is an outstanding example of Romanesque art and
architecture with an especially fine tympanum and cloisters.
147 The Elephanta Caves are a network of sculpted architectural caves located on Elephanta Island in
Mumbai Harbour and date to between the 5th and 8th centuries. The caves are hewn from solid
basalt rock and were originally painted, although only traces now remain. During the period of
Portuguese rule in the 16th and 17th centuries, soldiers used the reliefs of the main cave as target
practice and removed an inscription relating to the creation of the caves.
148 Sanchi is a small village in Madhya Pradesh. It is one of the important places of Buddhist pilgrimage
with several monuments dating from the 3rd to the 12th centuries. The Great Stupa at Sanchi is
the oldest stone edifice in India, a simple hemispherical brick structure built over the relics of the
Buddha, crowned by a parasol-like monument symbolising high rank and encircled by four carved
ornamental gateways and a balustrade.
149 A reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
(Jenseits von Gut und Böse:Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), 1886, in which Nietzsche accuses past
philosophers of uncritically accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality.
150 The 34 Ellora Caves, north-west of Aurangabad, are the finest examples of Indian rock-cut
architecture. Excavated out of the vertical face of the Charanandri hills, it is an entire mountain, cut
by hand into palaces of worship, supported by elaborately carved columns and decorated with colossal
statues from India’s three major religions. They were built between the 5th and 10th centuries.
1953–1958 431

have ever seen – or smelt. I suppose they are here for the gigantic Jayanti151 – I’m
sorry to have missed the Dalai Lama in Delhi.152 By & large, Buddhist imagery is
less rewarding than Hindu, and has some doleful eccentricities, like the thousand
appearances – whereas the adventures of Shiva are full of romantic poetry – &
humanity. By now you will have received the Nude. I wish I could have added an
Indian section – but it is incomplete in so many ways. However I hope that parts
of it will please you, as it certainly owes its existence to you.
Heaps of love to Nicky.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth

[On the back is written in what appears to be BB’s handwriting: ‘Indian art
much better understanding of Nude than late Gothic or Chinese’]

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Sunday 18th November [1956]

Dearest B.B.
Your very sweet letter to K153 arrived after he had left for India. I hope by the
time this reaches you, you will have had the Nude. Sent it to Umberto154 as he
said he would arrange it to reach you quickly thro’ the bag. It isn’t available to
the public till Nov 30th and we are arranging for a specially bound copy to reach
you later.When the latter does arrive will you give your immediate copy to dear
Nicky with our love.
The Nude is dedicated to you because as you know this is the first time K has
written something which he feels shows in some small way all he has owed to
you and your inspiration and teaching for so long. I hope you will feel this too?
I don’t suppose it will be popular or have a success with the art critics because
they are mostly such dreary specialists and won’t know enough to understand
the point of the book – each one I fear will pick holes in his field of so called
scholarship and distrust the rest. Anyway the book is your fault!

151 Jayantis are religious holidays and festivals.

152 In 1956 the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama visited India at the invitation of the Mahabodhi
Society to attend the 2500th Birth Anniversary Celebrations of the Buddha, arriving in Delhi on 27
November.
153 Letter missing.
154 Umberto Morra
1953–1958 432

K will see your letter and the press cuttings you enclosed on his return – I
hope early in December. Willie Mostyn Owen is here for the weekend and I
am enjoying his company. Colette and Alan are here and send their best love to
you and Nicky – so does Willy. All three have gone to see Graham Sutherland.
Love again
Jane

Nov. 30 56
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Dearest Jane
The book155 reached me yesterday evening. All I can say as yet is that it is
beautifully and attractively got up. Needless to say that I shall read it as soon as I
can.You shall hear from me about it. Meanwhile need I say how gratified I am
by the dedication!
The dedication will infuriate the reviewers, for they flatter my conceit by
treating me as Enemy No. 1, of their way of – boozing, shall we say?
When does K return? I wish he had the leisure to give us his impressions of
India.156 Do urge him to it. I should be ever so grateful.
We are having weather so draughty, so damp, so snowy that I am not allowed
to leave the house, which then becomes for me a sort of palazzo tomb like those
of the early Pharonic priests.
Love to you, dearest Jane and to all your offspring.
Devotedly, B.B.

Settignano
Dec. 5, 56

Dear Kenneth
This morning came your letter from India. Delighted to read of all you have
been seeing and visiting there. Would I could have been with you. I know

155 Clark’s The Nude.

156 Clark’s letter from India cannot yet have arrived.
1953–1958 433

all the sights you have enjoyed – that is to say I know them in reproduction.
How often I have longed to see them! I never found the time, but we look
forward to seeing you soon and getting your so-vivid impressions while they
still are so vivid. I like your comparison of the Ajanta frescoes with Sienese
painters from Simone to Andrea Vanni.
I hope to begin to read your book on the Nude in a day or two. I like its
material aspect, and am deeply touched by the dedication. Nicky is helping
H. Kiel157 over snags in translation. She already has read the introduction and
finds its clarity and completeness beyond praise. I cannot imagine being less
enthusiastic over it. I shall be honest with you.
I am distressed by the world situation and very unhappy over (u.s.a.) the
humiliating, bullying, hectoring way ‘Ike’ is dealing with it.158
Every affectionately
B.B.

Settignano
Florence
Dec. 9. 56

Dear Kenneth
Let me congratulate you on surpassing even yourself in ‘the Nude’. Much as
I always have expected from you this achievement goes beyond expectation.
You unfurl the subject to its vastest horizons and fill it with details so perfectly
communicated, such precise epithets, such illuminating evocative phrases,
such rhythmic sentences that it is a delight to read and read and read.
I admire your scholarship and the way you have assimilated it. Wonderful
your analysis of the Apollonian nude.You end by constructing a scheme of such
authenticity regarding the figure work. No province or representation that you
fail to illumine.
If you were here now that I am full of your book we could discuss details and
convey matters further even than have yet been done by either of us. If only I
was not reduced as I am by the burden of my piled up years I could be tempted
to write of Pisgah sights that open or shut down when I doze.

157 Hannah Kiel was an art historian who worked with Berenson and, inter alia, translated his writings
into German.
158 President Eisenhower (‘Ike’) and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had their hands full in 1956
with the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
1953–1958 434

All the reviews of the book that have reached me are generous, if not
always intelligent. None by those cheres collegues have reached me yet. I wonder
whether the British Academy would admit it (the book) to be ‘the right kind of
learning’.159
x
As you may see from my handwriting I still am feeble and shaky. I scarcely
ever enjoy a moment of relief from some kind of ache, pain, nausea or vague
discomfort. Only the half hour at noon when we drive high up and I walk
do I feel as if still alive.
The thought of all the publications we have undertaken weights [sic]on me
like an Alp. I have no satisfactory aids. Luisa gone and Willy coming and going
at his pleasure. If only Nicky did not do the work of ten others in running this
establishment and could devote herself to searching for me much could still be
done.
Much love to you all and good hunting for many years.
Yours
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
15 Dec ’56

My dear BB.
Thank you for your letter. I am glad that both the book & the letter from India
reached you safely. Before saying anything else I must enter into a very boring
explanation. As a rule the Phaidon send me their new publications, so that I was
rather surprised to find that, months after it had appeared, they had not sent to

159 The concept of culture was a hot topic for debate among members of the British Academy in the
1950s and climaxed in C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959 in which he argued that Western society
was split into two different cultures, science and the humanities, from which many of its problems
derived, a view which was shortly afterwards vigorously attacked by F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), the
acerbic literary critic, who was a don at Downing College, Cambridge.The Rede Lecture is a public
lecture at the University of Cambridge, named after Sir Robert Rede, who was the Chief Justice of
the Common Pleas in the 16th century.
1953–1958 435

me your Lorenzo Lotto.160 Just before leaving to India I wrote to them asking if
I could buy a copy, & received an ajitated [sic] reply that they had duly sent one
at your request. It certainly never arrived.When we first moved here some things
went astray, but we are more orderly now & it is quite impossible that a book
of that size, & one which I was waiting so eagerly, should have come without
my knowledge. However, they have sent it now & I hasten to thank you for it,
& to say how greatly I am enjoying it. I had no idea you had spent so much
labour in transforming it – & you have added some fascinating pages of criticism.
Altogether the book is very nostalgic for me, as our expeditions to see the Lottos,
with you & Nicky, are amongst my most vivid and valued memories.161 I think
Asolo &Trescore stand out the clearest. What did we look for in those tours
in the Veronese [sic] Valleys, I wonder – Zogno and Scrimalta. I remember the
chase, but have completely forgotten the quarry – except for a Cariani – which
is about the equivalent of one of Isaac Walton’s day fishing162 – a dace or a chub.
(both of which are uneatable).
I feel thoroughly vexed at being back in the active life, and shocked by the
ugliness of my countrymen. Eastern faces are stylised, but cabbagey English faces
all look like English cooking – meat & two veg. – or as Virginia Woolf described
Oxford Street shoppers – ‘like soup plates washed up by dirty scallions.’ (By the
way don’t – but you never would – buy Clive’s book on his old friends.163 It is
as flat as the Duke of Portland memoirs,164 but not as good natured.) However,
even at this season there are beautiful moments at Saltwood.
Love & Christmas wishes to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

160 See n. 75.

161 See Ch. 1 above. Clark went to the Veneto and Bergamo with Berenson and Nicky soon after they
met, in autumn 1926. See also Ch. 8 n. 94.
162 Izaak Walton (1594–1683) was a writer and biographer who is best remembered for his book The
Compleat Angler which is a celebration of the art of fishing in prose and verse.
163 Clive Bell, Old Friends, Personal Recollections, London: Chatto and Windus, 1956.
164 William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, Men,Women and Things, London: Faber & Faber,
1937.
1953–1958 436

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Dec. 23 56

Dear Kenneth
Thank you for your kind words about my ‘Lotto’. The Ven. exhib. of all his work
finished him – for me.165 I was sipping voluptuously rapturously & with no-end
of wonder fr. ‘Nude’. From one second to another I was struck down with a
bronchitial fever of a most virulent kind. I am over it but has left me exhausted
as never before. When I recover I shall turn again to ‘the Nude’ and after many
days shall write to you about it and already congratulate you on the way it has
been produced. No book of mine was like it.
To each and all of you mine and Nicky’s fervent wishes that yr. 195 [sic] may
be satisfactory.
Affectionately
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Jan 17th [1957]
Darling BB,
Your angelic and most generous letter to K about the Nude has given him
more pleasure than you can ever know. We shall keep it for ever. He has
written to you but I want to thank you from my heart. He owes everything
to you and it is so sweet of you to write about his book as you did.
Willie M-Owen who is here on his way to you will give you enclosed
Christmas card from me with my love. Colette is only just convalescent after
pneumonia – when we know where she goes for a holiday, we hope to come to
see you – middle February if you are at I Tatti. But we will write to propose a
date when we know how she is. If I Tatti is full or you are tired we can stay at a
hotel but we want to see you as soon as possible.
Best love
Jane

165 See n. 19.

1953–1958 437

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
19 Jan 57

My dear BB,
I needn’t tell you what your letter means to me. I literally wept with joy when
I read it. That it should please you was the first & chief hope I had in mind
all the time I was writing my book.You can see this, for the influence of your
ideas is evident on every page – almost in every sentence. But in spite of this
there is much to criticise in the book, & it is most gracious of you to pass
over these faults, & dwell on its merits. What more could your pupil ask for.
The only merit that I would claim for the book is that it sticks to the point
& is made up of solid blocks. I have just been reading Malraux on Goya – a
succession of brilliant sentences, but they could have been rearranged ad lib. &
been equally effective.166
Yes, I would dearly love to hear what you have to say on many points in the
book, & would like to come out while it is still in your mind.We would propose
ourselves for a few days next month – but I expect you are full up, and it is
difficult for us to give an exact date until we know what Colette can do. She has
had a long illness – a kind of pneumonia – & it is not yet quite certain when
she will be able to travel. She will want to have a change from her family but
unfortunately her friend Anna Rasponi167 is going to Chile, & the Waltons are
supposed to be coming to England. I have a Louvre meeting on Feb. 14th, but
could be in Italy for a few days either side of that date. I confess I would love a
change, for India, although exciting, was hard work.
I must tell you how much I have enjoyed your musings on revisiting
Florence.168 It was good of you to send them – indeed it was good of you to
write them, so that your friends might enjoy the pleasure of your company at
such an interesting moment. I realised how many things in Florence I myself had
not seen for 30 years, if not for 50!
Willie Mostyn-Owen is spending the week end with us – a very comfortable
companion; & last week I had dinner with Ben169 & Louisa [sic], who are well
installed in a pleasant house – not at all Bloomsbury. So I have heard a lot about
the progress of your illustrated lists, which will be a real blessing to us all. But I
wish you could find a way of starting on the writing more of the thoughts which

166 André Malraux, Saturne: Essai sur Goya, Paris: Pléiade, 1950; English trans. London: Phaidon, 1957.
167 Contessa Anna Rasponi dalle Teste. See Ch. 8 n. 260.
168 Bernard Berenson, ‘Paesaggi e musei’, Corriere della Sera, 22 December 1956.
169 Benedict Nicolson
1953–1958 438

pass through your mind. Alas but Boswell & Eckermanns are so rare – as rare as
Johnson & Goethe. I have met a number of the great and the talkative, & I can’t
remember two words that they said.
Yes, the reviews of my book have been astonishingly friendly. It seems to
have whizzed past the cheres collegues before they were aware of it. The review
in the Times Lit. Sup. is by old Clive Bell170 – he has lost his facilities as a
writer. I expected more attacks from the old adherents of the ‘pure aesthetic
sensation’ but perhaps they are dying out. The Catholics have written to say that
the Greeks were not really homosexual, & the homosexuals to say that I am not
sufficiently conscious of the beauty of the male body – which I think is true.
My undisguised admiration of the girls has given some mild offence. But on
the whole, considering the explosive material I deal with, I have got off lightly.
However, nothing that was said, one way or the other, could matter to me, dear
BB, compared with your opinion.
With love from us both, and my deepest gratitude.
Yours ever
Kenneth.

Hotel De Crillon
R.C Seine 27.162
Place De La Concorde
Ad. Teleg ‘Crilonotel’
Tel: Anjou 24-10
Paris le 15 Feb. 1957

My dear BB,
A peaceful evening away from responsibility gives me the chance of writing to
say how happy I was to spend a day or two at i Tatti. It is my spiritual home, &
every minute there is precious to me. It was sad that you had a reverse just as
we arrived, but although you yourself feel everything to be a pain & an effort,
it doesn’t show to your friends, who find your company as enchanting as ever.
I wonder if you will still be at i Tatti in June. We have it in mind to visit Ashley
Clarke at Whitsun, as our friends the Moncktons171 will be there then, & risk
removed of striking a diplomatic bore. Perhaps we could come to the Tatti on
the way out.

170 Clive Bell’s review, TLS, Friday, 11 January 1957.

171 Walter Monckton
1953–1958 439

Well, I have seen the Sassetta Madonna & Angels.172 It is chiefly shop work,
some of the angels very silly, & the Virgin’s drapery quite mechanical. It is in a
fairly good state, & the gold admirable. The two Saints seem to be of about the
same quality as your Beato Raineri, but less good than the Baptist. I wasn’t present
at the Conseil when it was bought – I should have felt doubtful about paying
such a price, but on the whole in favour as it is such a famous object. Anyway,
the price is not high compared to a very feeble sketch by Matisse for which we
were asked, yesterday, to pay 20 million francs! I am no longer competent to
serve on the Councils of Museums & Galleries, as all modern prices seem to
me wicked, & then there is far too much in all of them (I mean the Galleries)
already. What a farce buying more pictures for the Louvre & National Gallery,
when a third of them aren’t exhibited – & people don’t stop to look at the ones
that are. However we did buy one interesting object – a marble head of a man
of the late IVc. a.d. vaguely like a Constantine head, but far more Hellenising,
and really very subtle (I remember one like it in Istanbul).173 I have asked for a
photograph to send you. Our Conseil of the Louvre is in poor shape. Everyone
of authority has died, the Conservateurs are therefore free to talk for hours about
every proposition, with the result that the members grow bored & set up private
conversations, & it ends as bedlam. Fortunately the works of art are unaffected, &
I don’t think I have ever enjoyed them more. It reminded me of my visits from
school to the National Gallery.
You will have heard from Jane that we found Colette in poor shape. The
doctors said cheerfully that she may remain like this for months. I am not quite
happy about a disease for which there is no evidence at all, & scarcely any
precedent. Please give my love to Nicky, and my best thanks for our happy hours
at i Tatti.
Ever your affectionate.
Kenneth.

172 Sassetta, Madonna and Child surrounded by Six Angels with St Anthony of Padua and St John the Evangelist,
1444, acquired by the Louvre in 1956.
173 In 1957 the Louvre acquired a marble bust of the Emperor Caracalla (No. d’entrée MND 2118, no.
usuel Ma 3551).
1953–1958 440

[Undated but after the death of Loria in February 1957]

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190

My dear BB.
We were so glad to get your letter to Jane in which you sounded as full of life
& affection as ever. We had heard that one of your eyes had given new trouble,
& were distressed that this should be added to all the other misfortunes which
the body afflicts on those who inhabit it so long. What a lot of other miseries
have befallen you this year, including the death of Loria.174 We do sympathise
most deeply.
We have been working away as usual. My television job comes to an end in
August & much to everyone’s annoyance I am not offering to be re-appointed.
I am very sorry in some ways, as I enjoy active work. But I had taken on too
much, & a good deal was being neglected. This place requires more attention
than I have been able to give, & it has become too much for Jane to do alone.
Our poor Colette was feeling far from well when she came to see you: the
germ seems to have made a fresh assault on her. I am sorry, for when she is well
she is enchanting gay & responsive.
Please forgive my mouldy little letter, dear BB., but I don’t seem to do
anything which could interest you – & yet I want to write & tell you that we are
thinking of you with sympathy & love.
Yours ever
Kenneth.

Hotel de Crillon
Place de la Concorde
Paris, le 13 March 1957

Darling BB,
I do hope you continue to get stronger daily and are able to get outside to the
flowers in this lovely weather. I enclose some photos to amuse you also a blue
tie like Goethe’s – I couldn’t find the right colour in London. We are here for
the Louvre meeting tomorrow and a few days holiday.We went to Versailles with

174 Arturo Loria (1902–1957), who was the same age as Clark, died on 15 February 1957.
1953–1958 441

Georges Salles today to see the newly restored theatre at Versailles which is lovely
and which the Queen will open in April.175 Georges has decided to leave the
Louvre and is to go in May. He seemed rather depressed and we are not sure that
though he wanted to retire he wanted to go so soon. Rene Massigli176 came in
for tea but is very depressed about the state of the world. Gladwyn Jebb177 also
came – jollier than we had seen him in America. They were both going to an
Anglo-French dinner in a club called appropriately ‘Les Miserables’!
Paris is lovely – warm as June and the chestnut leaves are out. We go to the
Besancon exhibition178 tomorrow but you will have the catalogue.
Much love and sympathy to you and our daily thoughts and wishes and much
love to Nicky.
Ever affect
Jane
Colette is now well again and I hope will go away in April. We saw the
Waltons several times before leaving London – both on crutches but still
very uncomplaining. Colin is again working for Laurence Olivier and very
happy.179 Alan just back from Switzerland – pretty brown and as eccentric as
ever

March 18 57
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

Darling Jane
Thanks for yours of 13th and enclosures just arrived. Thanks for family news,
on the whole satisfactory. Thanks for tie and photos of Saltwood, portrait of K,

175 Queen Elizabeth made a state visit to France in April 1957 at the invitation of President Coty. With
the Duke of Edinburgh, she visited Versailles on 9 April 1957.
176 See Ch. 8 n. 49.
177 Gladwyn Jebb (1900–1996) was Acting Secretary-General of the un, 1945–6, until the appointment
of the first Secretary-General. He was the uk ambassador to the un in 1950–54 and ambassador in
Paris in 1954–60.
178 There was an exhibition of works by Fragonard in 1956 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon.
179 Colin Clark became a ‘gofer’ on the film The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), directed by Laurence
Olivier and starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. In 1995 Colin published The Prince, the Showgirl,
and Me:The Colin Clark Diaries, an account that included no story of a romance. In 2000 he published
My Week With Marilyn, an account which included a dalliance with Monroe.
1953–1958 442

and photo of the Bellini grisaille.180 I want more of the pictures of all kinds and
other works of art.
It is unexpected news and bad that Salles is leaving.181 Are they foolish enough
to want him to go, and whom, I wonder, have they in mind to replace him. I do
not envy his successor.
I do not wonder Paris looks upon the world-political horizon gloomily. I feel
in my bones that these very nearest weeks may determine events for many a day
– and not to our liking.182
I am better, pourvue que cela dure,183 but feeble, jumpy, nervous. Yet we can
not exclude people altogether. I crawl down to see them, but after half an hour
collapse. I long to see real friends, and them only – you or K. and the so few
your like.
Ever so much love
B.B.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Thursday 18th April 57

Darling BB,
I do hope you are now feeling less tired and are having better nights and able to
go outside and enjoy the sun and the flowers and the hills. We sent you our love
by the Lippmanns184 and I have been meaning to write ever since to send you
enclosed catalogue of the Stubbs exhibition185 which K thought would interest
you. He is so good and such an underrated artist?

180 Giovanni Bellini, Pagan Rite, then owned by the Clarks. It had been in the J. C. Robinson sale at
Christie’s, London, in 1902, catalogued as Antonio Pollajuolo (Lot 14). The attribution to Bellini is
now questioned and current wisdom ascribes it to Jacopo de’ Barbari. It is not actually a grisaille but
in two colours.
181 Salles retired as the Director of the Museums of France in 1957, a post he had held since 1945.
182 In July 1956 Colonel Nasser had occupied the Suez Canal and in late October Israel invaded and
occupied Sinai, events which led to the Suez Crisis, a political turning point for Britain and France.
In March 1957 Israeli troops left Egypt and the Suez Canal was re-opened. Berenson was horrified
when the usa voted alongside the ussr in the un Security Council to condemn the British and
French action.
183 French for ‘let’s hope it stays that way’.
184 Walter Lippmann
185 There was a major Stubbs exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1957, catalogue by Basil
Taylor.
1953–1958 443

Soon I hope you will see Colette or rather allow her to visit you and Nicky.
She is very well again but needs some sun not that it isn’t lovely here now – in
fact we have a drought! The lawns are bright with daisies as it is too dry to mow!
But when one is young home isn’t a holiday or a relaxation. She will stay with
the Rasponis on her way to Ischia where the Waltons are going to have her to
stay and she looks forward very much to seeing you if you and Nicky haven’t
too many people.
Queen Elizabeth the q.m. is coming to stay here end of June. She leaves us for a
destroyer to sail to Dunkirk to unveil the Guards Memorial.This means bringing
Lady Spencer, an equerry 2 maids, 2 chauffeurs a footman and a detective so I am
slightly panicked. However David and Mary Crawford are coming to stay and
will be a great help. I’ll write and describe it to you afterwards!
We lunched with your old friend the Majesty of Sweden today before leaving
London. He is already looking forward to his visit to you in the autumn and as
you can imagine we all talked about you with the greatest love and admiration.
We shall be alone here for Eas[t]er as K is tired and also wants to write. Alan and
Colin will I hope come over for a night. The latter very busy working for Larry.
Colette will tell you about the new play. Colin then goes round Europe with
Larry with Titus.186 He is very lucky and very happy.
Best love from us both dear B.B. to you and Nicky
Ever affec
Jane

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Apr. 27, 57

Dearest Jane
Thanks for the dear, newsy letter of 18th. It reached me yesterday. Also for
catalogue of Stubbs show.
Colette dined a few days ago and was charming. She is truly now une jeune
fille en fleur187 – such exquisite throat, neck and arms. Face shaped like yours but

186 Peter Brook’s production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien
Leigh, had opened in London in 1955 and a touring production went to Paris, Venice, Belgrade,
Vienna and Warsaw in May–June 1957.
187 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is the title of the second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du
temps perdu.
1953–1958 444

with expressions of K. Talked easily, no juvenile aggressiveness, or inhibitions. I

envy her going & staying in Ischia with the Waltons.They live in one of the most
[illeg] spots I have ever seen & felt.
Spring has never been so wonderful, such tulips, irises, lilies, wisteria as never
before. Sun very warm, but high up when I take my noonday walk le fond de l’air
is still nippy. That half hour I enjoy being alive. The rest of the day is full of woes
altho’ I forget them when talk is stimulating, or when I listen to music.
The re-discovery of Stubbs may be a change a big one, of a return to what a
gifted and trained eye can see, and paint. Therefore I welcome it.
I wish I could see Allan [sic] or what he is writing. Glad that Colin has found
a job that suits him.
Dearest love to yr.self, to K and best wishes fr. [illeg] this visit.
B.B.

B5
Albany
Tuesday 26th May [1957?]

Darling B.B.,
Colette got back on Sunday looking very gay and well in spite of the worst
crossing for years on the Channel. There were no seats much less a cabin
so the sailors tucked her up amongst the luggage where the spray didn’t
penetrate.
Jock Murray188 spent last weekend with us – poor K had ’flu so was in bed.
He says you are going to Mollie Berkeley again for your birthday. I wish we
could be there. Colette says you were very well and looked it when she saw
you and Nicky. She couldn’t have enjoyed that more. Colin is on tour with the
Oliviers – Paris with Titus was a triumph. We saw Rene Massigli last week after
he had given Colin and the Oliviers supper at Meurice!189 I also had a letter from
Georges about the success they had. They are now in Venice at La Fenice. Then
Belgrade. Colin is v. happy and v. lucky to have found his metier. Do you get the

188 John (Jock) Murray (1908–1993) was Clark’s publisher and the driving force behind the family firm
of John Murray, whose origins and roots were in the 18th century. Believing in the importance of
a personal relationship between publisher and author, he took infinite care of them and was much
loved and respected in return.
189 Le Meurice is one of the highly luxurious and expensive hotels and restaurants in Paris.
1953–1958 445

Sunday Times? K is doing six articles for them on pictures. If you don’t get it I
will send them to you.190
He gives up the i.t.a. in August – till then he is overworked and tired. We fly
to Rome for Whitsun to stay with the Ashley Clarkes. I wish we could take an
aeroplane to Florence. But please may we come back to stay with you in the
autumn.
Our very best love to you and Nicky darling B.B.
Ever affectionately
Jane

[Postmarked 1957–vi (i.e. June)]

Postcard of Hotel Excelsior, NAPOLI.
[addressed by BB to:] Sir K Clark.
Saltwood Castle

Congratulations on ‘Meninas’. To my mind better than anything you have

written before. I affectionately envy you. Here to compose rest – till 13?
B.B.

190 Clark wrote three separate series of articles for the Sunday Times, each prominently featured
article being on an individual painting. First series: On Looking at Pictures 12 May 1957; Titian: The
Entombment (Louvre) 19 May 1957; Leonardo: Virgin with St Anne (then at the Royal Academy, now
at the National Gallery, London) 26 May 1957; Velásquez: Las Meninas (Prado, Madrid) 2 June 1957;
Delacroix: Crusaders Entering Constantinople (Louvre, Paris) 9 June 1957; Seurat: Une Baignade (then
at the Tate, now at the National Gallery, London) 16 June 1957; Rembrandt: Self-Portrait (Kenwood
House, London) 23 June 1957. Second series: Courbet: Painter’s Studio (then at the Louvre, now
at Musée d’Orsay, Paris) 28 September 1958; Raphael: Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Victoria and
Albert Museum, London) 5 October 1958; Constable: Study for the Leaping Horse (Victoria and Albert
Museum, London) 12 October 1958; Botticelli: Nativity ( National Gallery, London) 19 October
1958; Watteau: L’Enseigne de Gersaint (then Dahlem Museum, now Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin)
26 October 1958. Third series: El Greco: Espolio (Toledo, Spain) 27 September 1959; Vermeer: Painter’s
Studio (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 4 October 1959; van der Weyden: Descent from the Cross
(Prado, Madrid) 18 October 1959; Turner: Snowstorm (then National Gallery, now Tate Britain,
London) 25 October 1959. All the articles, expanded and edited, and with an extra article on Goya’s
The Third of May, 1808, were issued as Looking at Pictures, London: John Murray, 1960.
1953–1958 446

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
7 Sept ’57

My dear BB,
It was so good of you to send me the article on the art of seeing,191 and I have
read it several times with great enjoyment & admiration. In fact it seems to me
one of the most beautiful & valuable things you have written both as a revelation
of your own responses to art & nature as a reasonable objection to modern art.
This question how much we enjoy what we see as a result of some painter having
taught us how to look is a delicate one, worth investigating. One grand exception
is the beauty of industrial towns – perhaps more sublime than beautiful, but what
ever word one selects, Sheffield & Newcastle can look absolutely stunning.Yet no
painter has ever tackled them – nor even tried. Thames Monets are completely
transformed & Whistlers warehouses are a different effect. Turner could have
done it – if the scenes had existed then.
Then I am not sure how far the ability to see mountains as beautiful did
not precede rather than follow the artists vision – also snow, which was much
enjoyed, but was practically a forbidden subject before Courbet.
Talking of snow, we have just come back from a large exhibition of Monet
in Edinburgh, & I must say it was an eye opener.192 He gained greatly by being
seen as a whole, & the years 1878 to 1884 when everyone else was stuck are really
marvellous. I will bring you out one of the Catalogues in hopes that we may
meet in Venice – although I expect that Cooper will have sent you one. As usual
with Cooper it is a masterly performance. His energy & ability have no limit –
would that he was a more lovable character.
We are off to Abano on Monday, & I hope it may cure Jane’s lumbago or
whatever it is, which quite spoils her pleasure in gardening – & gardening is
really the only thing she enjoys. I am given fearful warnings about the exhausting
effects of the cure & am rather worried for her. I shall have lots of time to read
& am lugging out Krautheimer’s immense volume on Ghiberti193 which looks
very good in its New Yorkish way – also many small volumes of Ruskin as I am
at last free to follow your advice & attempt to make a selection of his work with

191 Bernard Berenson, Iterum Censeo, 1957.

192 The Edinburgh International Festival, August–September 1957, featured Claude Monet: An Exhibition
of Paintings, catalogue by Douglas Cooper.
193 Richard Krautheimer, Ghiberti, co-authored with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Princeton University
Press and Oxford University Press, 1956.
1953–1958 447

an introduction.194 I returned to the task this week – god, what pages of rant one
has to struggle through! But I have fished up some genuine pearls.
I had a message from Jock Murray that you liked my attempt at journalism –
all but the last sentences in Rembrandt, which of course was what some people
liked best!195 I tried to make them various & to keep a drowsy senator awake
after his Sunday lunch,196 & some people did need them who had certainly never
thought about a work of art before. But I am always worried by the plaudits of
the bien pensants, which are never [illeg] unless they detect some compromise
with their own conventional values. I dread trying another six, but curiously
agreed to do so when I did the first, never thinking that they would be required.
My television years are over. I was a great success and beloved by all! An
experience I never had in the art world, so I am sorry to leave. I suppose some
inherited commercial instinct & a slight trace of vulgarity made me more
successful with music hall proprietors than I ever was with museum directors.
From all I have heard this summer has not gone too badly for you. I shall try
to come and see you wherever you are during the next fortnight – if at i Tatti
I could leave Jane for a night at Abano. Could Nicky send us a postcard to the
Hotel Orologio, Abano Terme, Padova, to tell us where you will be? I long for
the pleasure of your company.
Heaps of love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate,
Kenneth.

Grand Hotel Royal Orologio

Abano Terme
21st [September 1957]

Darling B.B.,
How lovely to hear from K how quickly you have recovered – talking
beautiful philosophy and walking miles in the country as usual! K couldn’t

194 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, London: John Murray, 1964.

195 The Sunday Times article on Rembrandt ended ‘I suddenly recognise the shallowness of my
mortality, the narrowness of my sympathies and the trivial nature of my occupation.The humility of
Rembrandt’s colossal genius warns the art historian to shut up.’
196 Probably a cryptic reference to a misremembered anecdote from his schoolboy Latin lessons. The
Roman historian Suetonius narrated thus: ‘A noted incident concerns Aponius Saturninus who
was nodding off on the benches. The auctioneer had been instructed by Caligula not to overlook
the praetorian gentleman [KC’s drowsy senator?] who was nodding with frequent movements of
his head. The bidding was not concluded until thirteen gladiators had been knocked down to the
unconscious sleeper for nine million sesterces.’
1953–1958 448

have enjoyed seeing you and darling Nicky more or been happier with you
now that B.B. was feeling better again.
I wish I could have come but as we have to go home tomorrow (as K has a
meeting of the Arts Council which is very important and there is no money and
the operas are going bankrupt) the doctor wanted me to stay.
But it was very disappointing. However I look forward to seeing you in the
spring if not sooner.
We lunched at Villa Maser197 yesterday and everyone was very kind and of
course were missing your visit very much and in your honour we lunched
upstairs among those marvellous Veroneses. But there were 20 people at lunch
and ten children staying in the house and a birthday so I really don’t think it
would have done you much good to be there! By three o’clock another 15
people had arrived and our hostess hadn’t a clue who some were. K was very
happy he had had the enchanting experience of again being alone with you and
you were sweet to him.
Best love to you and Nicky and Alda
Jane

Grand Hotel Royal Orologio

Abano Terme (Italia)
90-111
22 Sept ’57

My dear BB.,
It was such a joy to see you & Nicky. I have never enjoyed a short visit more,
or felt more completely in my old home; & the greatest treat was to go once
more on that beautiful walk. Thank you again, dear BB., for all you have
taught me of what is really valuable in Civilised life.
We went to Maser yesterday & of course our hostess loudly lamented your
absence, & still seems determined that you should go there. But I must say I

197 The Villa Barbaro, also known as the Villa di Maser, is a celebrated villa in the Veneto, designed by
Palladio with frescoes by Veronese and sculptures by Alessandro Vittoria. It was built between 1560
and 1570 for Daniele Barbaro (who was the ambassador to Elizabeth i of England) and his brother
Marcantonio (who was an ambassador to Charles ix of France). In 1934, Count Giuseppe Volpi
di Misurata (1877–1947), a businessman and politician who had been the minister of finance for
Mussolini in 1925–8 and who founded the Venice Film Festival, acquired the villa for his daughter
Marina (1908–1977), who carried out extensive restoration.
1953–1958 449

think you would find it very tiring. This jolly prosperous goodhearted Italian
society makes such a noise. I was deafened & exhausted by the end of luncheon.
However, they were very kind & considerate, & let us slip away to visit Palladian
tempietto, which I had never seen, & which is enchanting.
Jane is very sad to have missed seeing you both – she is writing to tell you so
herself.
If we may, we shall come back in the Spring, & hope for more walks and talks.
With much love to Nicky
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth Clark

4 St James’s Square198
London, s.w.1.
Whitehall 9737
14 Oct ’57

My dear BB.
Here are very few photographs which I promised you – the Pollajuolo workshop
fragment from the de Pass Collection & the Jacopo da Empoli from the same
source;199 the Raphael recently acquired by the Ashmolean;200 & a drawing of
ours, which I bought 30 years ago, so you may have had it already – but I have
just come on the photo & thought it rather attractive. I don’t know what it is. I
have a few rather more worthy offerings, but they are down in Saltwood, & we
are spending a week in London to clear up a few of the Augean stables which I
seem to create all round me.
We have just been lunching with Ben & Luisa – they seem very peaceful &
happy, & their little daughter is like an infant Virgin in a Spanish picture.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

198 The Headquarters of the Arts Council. Clark was the Chairman in 1953–60.
199 See Marianne Joannides, Exhibition Catalogue of Master Drawings from the De Pass Collection, Royal
Cornwall Museum, Truro, 1994, pp. 12–13, no. 1: Youth brandishing a Cutlass (catalogued as by Maso de
Finiguerra, 1426–64); pp. 36–7, no. 13: Lady kneeling in Profile to the Right (catalogued as by Jacopo da
Empoli, c. 1554–1640).
200 Probably Raphael, Allegorical Female Figure, c. 1514–15, red chalk, purchased (Eldon Fund) 1956.
1953–1958 450

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
16 Nov. ’57

My dear BB.,
The illustrated ‘lists’ had just arrived & are in every way beyond my expectations.201
They are admirably produced, & the selection of illustrations exactly what
was needed, that is to say lots of obscure painters represented by signed or
documented pictures. What a marvellous basis for the study of Italian painting!
The effect is to make your work far more impressive than before. Critics have
naturally concentrated on the great names, & forgotten the huge substructure of
knowledge of minor painters on which all your judgements rested. It is moving
to see a work begun so long ago brought fulfilment &, as far as is humanly
possible, perfection. All future scholars will be grateful to you, and I have reason
to be more grateful than most.
I hear from Colette that you had an exquisite autumn, sunny and warm, & I
hope that you were able to enjoy it. She is still in Copenhagen, where we went
to see her. I think she has got rid of her virus infection at last.
I struggle away happily with dozen different tasks – lectures, broadcasts, my
selection of Ruskin & of course my work at the Arts Council. All goes well as
long as I can be at Saltwood from Friday to Monday – without that I degenerate.
My whole aim is not to have guests. I love seeing friends, but for meals only:
if I feel that they are keeping me from my work or the garden my love turns
instantly to loathing.
I know I promised to send you some photographs – they are ready & you
shall have them almost as soon as you receive this letter. The only old picture
of note which I have seen lately for the first time is the Dürer St. Jerome in the
Wilderness, which is exhibited in the Ashmolean.202 It is what used to be called
a gem – for once it is a painting and not a coloured drawing & the landscape is

201 Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with
an Index of Places,Venetian School, 2 vols, London: Phaidon, c. 1957.
202 This small panel, c. 1496, which had been in the collection of Sir Francis Bacon at Raveningham
Hall, was rediscovered by David Carritt in 1957 who recognised it as by Dürer. It was previously
attributed to the Veronese painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto (1488–1555). Now in the National
Gallery, London, (NG 6563), bought with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund
and Mr J. Paul Getty Jr through the American Friends of the National Gallery in 1996.
1953–1958 451

as rich as Altdorfer. I was looking at the marvellous landscape of the Mantegna at

Copenhagen, as micromosaically perfect as the Madonna of the Quarries,203 &
thinking how much Durer owed to him as well as to Bellini.You will have read
about the exhibition at Manchester.204 Nothing new, except in the 17th century
where the indefatigable Mahon has furnished two rooms with his favourites.205
Mahon is like the fable of the dumb wife – when I knew him first he never
spoke; now he never stops & has become a terrible bore. Like all monomaniacs,
he has irresistible powers of persuasion, & I foresee the National Gallery buying
nothing but seicento for years to come.You know that they gave a stiff price for
the enormous Guido from the Lichtenstein, which a few years ago one could
have paid a firm of contractors to take away.206
Jane sends her love to you & Nicky. She is well and happy and seems to be the
better for Abano, so I expect we shall go there again.
We saw Willie Mostyn Owen last week – debonair & well-informed and
genuinely friendly. He seems to have great embattlements which prevent him
having his mother for a month or two more.
With heaps of love to Nicky,
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

203 Mantegna’s Christ as the Suffering Redeemer, 1495–1500, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen,
Denmark, is stylistically related to his La Madonna delle Cave, 1488–90, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
204 The City of Manchester Art Gallery organised an exhibition of European paintings in October–
December 1957 to commemorate the famous Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition which had
been held in Manchester in 1857. That exhibition had been one of the outstanding art events of
the 19th century. Drawn entirely from private collections, it assembled some 16,000 objects: more
than 2000 paintings, 1000 watercolours and sections devoted to drawings, engravings, photographs,
architectural drawings, furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, ivories, enamels and arms and armour.
The 1957 exhibition was a much more modest affair: just 250 European paintings were exhibited,
many from private collections, and as many as possible of those which had featured in the 1857
exhibition.
205 Denis Mahon
206 As a newly appointed trustee, Mahon persuaded his fellow trustees of the National Gallery to
purchase an enormous painting by Guido Reni, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1640 (NG 6270), from
the Prince of Lichtenstein. According to Peter Cannon-Brookes, Mahon would tell with relish
how, because the picture was too large for him to study in the Schloss Vaduz, it was taken outside
by two stalwart lederhosen-clad retainers, but the wind caught it and it was blown into the valley
below with the two retainers still hanging onto it.There are other versions of the story, including an
impaling on a fence.
1953–1958 452

Dec 27, 57
I Tatti
Settignano
Florence

My Dear K.
Thanks for all your and Jane’s missives and now for the photos and for promise
of more.
I want news of each member of your family, particularly of the ‘problem-
child’ Alan. He fascinates me.
John Pope-Hennessy is spending ten days with us. Of course we talk endless
shop about the Florentines and my next task. I really do not know how I shall
go on with it. Eyes, hearing, stamina so reduced!
I do not [illeg] words of comfort from America either. Things there are going
in a way more and more estranging.
Every possible good wish to each and all of you.
Affectionately
B.B.

[16 March 1958]

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190

My dear BB.
I was glad to see your writing, but very sad to read your letter207 & know how
miserable you feel. It is horrible to be in continuous discomfort & pain, & for
you, in particular, to know that there is so much you could be doing if given
a chance.
I have been meaning to write to you about a correspondence I have had
with an American publisher named Holt. He asked me to do your biography.
I told him that I had long ago thought of doing this & promised it to Hamish
Hamilton.208 Then when Mrs Sprigge set to work it seemed foolish to publish

207 Letter missing.

208 See Jamie Hamilton
1953–1958 453

two biographies at the same time. I have, however, always kept in mind writing
a non discursive & personal book of BB and his circle, & should like, with your
agreement, to take up the project again. Hamish Hamilton would like to publish
it – what arrangements he makes in the us it is for him to say. I think it would
be something of lasting value – the picture of a vanished civilisation, as well as
the portrait of a philosopher.
All goes very well with us. Jane is extremely well & perfectly happy as long as
she stays in Saltwood. Alan has completed a second novel, which I haven’t seen.
The first was funny & well done in a horrifying way a sort of up to date Evelyn
Waugh. But it was about the Stock Exchange, which is such an animal world
that we lost interest in places. The second is about his life in Rye.209 He has been
for two months at Zermatt, where he skis & writes. His brother has been with
him, but has now returned to the entertainment industry which has a paramount
fascination for him. Poor Colette, after getting perfectly well, caught jaundice,
& is much pulled down by it. It is sad to waste the flower of her youth like this.
My public life aborts [sic] most of my time, and grows more & more
complicated. I have been trying to do some television programmes which so far
haven’t been a success:210 it ought to cure me of trying to popularise art. Alas,
I have had to say that I will do some more Sunday Times articles, and I have
absolutely no appetite for them. Sequels are always a mistake: the first lot just
struck lucky, & I won’t get that back again.211
Jane sends her love, & please give our warmest love to Nicky.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

209 Alan started work on his novel about the Stock Exchange, Bargains at Special Prices (provisionally
and originally titled Guilt Edged), in 1955 and it was eventually published in 1960. The vicissitudes
of its creation and publication, including the lawsuits, are chronicled in Ion Trewin, Alan Clark: The
Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009. His second novel, Summer Season, was about a
young man called Kenneth Crane who takes a post as temporary tutor in a small seaside town and
finds himself a prime suspect for murder. It was published in 1963. Alan moved to Rye in 1956 and
eventually owned several houses there. He spent the early part of 1957 in Zermatt and purchased
property there in 1958.
210 The programmes which Clark made for Associated Television, in black and white, were broadcast as
follows: ‘Is Art Necessary?’, 8 February 1958; ‘Encounters in the Dark’ (in conversation with Henry
Moore in the British Museum at night), 17 March 1958; ‘Should Every Picture Tell a Story?’ 14 April
1958; ‘Do we want Public Figures?’ (in conservation with Osbert Lancaster and Hugh Casson), 19
May 1958; ‘Can Art be Democratic?’ 15 December 1958;‘Can Photography be an Art?’ 9 March 1959;
‘Should we have him Painted?’ 23 March 1959; ‘What is Sculpture?’ 6 April 1959.
211 See n. 190.
1953–1958 454

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
March 24 1958

Dear K
Thanks for yours of the 16th. I am so sorry about Colette and what you write
about Alan. I have a ‘hunch’ that something unusual will come out of him.
I understand too well how broken engagements can be. Surely nobody of yr.
generation has your gift as interpreter of art to Das Grosse Publicum. Nothing
comparable to your paper on ‘Las Meninas’ not to speak of your fabulous [illeg]
on ‘The Nude’. You still have unpublished the exquisite admirable pages on
Rembrandt which you kindly let me see years ago.
x
As for writing about me.You thrilled me once by proposing to do me as the
‘New Winckleman’. Nothing could make me happier ‘exalt my heart’. Why
were you put off, and remain put off by Mrs Sprigge. Her book is a success-
story of a bright Jew-boy from the meanest birth and status built up by Mrs
Gardner and Lord Duveen into a being of maturity and affluence. It is a book,
by the way that will never be published. One publisher after another takes it,
keeps it a certain time, and then returns it. It is burthened with an advance of
£200. In any event not to appear in my life. Doubts arise but I am fit to live
some years still.
So the field is free for the ‘new Winckleman’. A rumour reached me years
ago that you had in mind to write about English in Florence and centering
on Vernon Lee. I wonder how any one could do that. The only survivor who
knows, and recalls is myself. To do it on documents? What documents are there?
I doubt whether there is [illegible] haste. So there would [be] time to discuss.
I only wish to be written about as a historian, thinker, etc and not a myth.
Love to you all
Yours B.B.
PS let me hope you can decipher these [illegible] and thoughts. My hand-
writing is so hard to read that I cannot decipher it myself.
1953–1958 455

c/o Christabel A[berconway]

Maenan Hall
Llanrwst
North Wales
Saturday [17 May 1958]

Dearest B.B.,
We are so glad to have Nicky’s postcard saying that the dialthermy was
helping a little and that you were working again in spite of the pain. It is sad
the surgical waistcoat was useless. Nothing is so tiring as constant pain and I
do hope B.B. is a little easier now.
We saw Umberto at the Italian Embassy last week but he had no extra news.
That reception was far too crowded – embassies always seem to invite twice
too many people. But the State Banquet the night before was very beautiful and
great fun.212 One advantage of being older is that one knows and likes so many
people and is glad to see them at intervals. I was also delighted to have the excuse
to have a new grand dress! When I said Embassy’s usually spoilt their parties,
the great exception is of course the Schwarzenbergs.213 They have really taken
the place the Massiglis used to have and everyone enjoys it. I hope you got the
postcard we all sent you from Saltwood (and Georges Salles) a few weeks ago.
K has nearly finished his television series which is a relief. The one next
Monday is on outdoor sculpture and is I think very good but they take too
much time.214 We had a glimpse of Johnny and Margaret Walker – alas too short.
Alan Jarvis (head of Canada n.g.) comes to stay soon with his unknown wife (a
widow with three children). He is a very old friend of ours – we knew him first
as a Rhodes scholar.215 Vincent Massey216 said he was making a great success of

212 Giovanni Gronchi (1887–1978), 3rd President of the Italian Republic (1955–62) and a Christian
Democrat, made a state visit to London in May 1958. On 13 May the Queen hosted a state banquet
at Buckingham Palace.
213 See n. 16.
214 Clark’s television programme, broadcast on Monday 19 May, was in fact ‘Do we want public figures?’,
with Osbert Lancaster and Hugh Casson.
215 Alan Jarvis, the young and charismatic director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1955, had
already won a Rhodes scholarship, managed an aircraft factory, written a best-seller, produced films,
run a slum settlement and moved in a London social circle that included Noël Coward and Vivien
Leigh. He shook the Canadian art world out of its complacency and introduced modern art into
the National Gallery. In 1959 he had to resign after a disagreement about his purchase of works by
European painters.
216 Charles Vincent Massey (1887–1967) was a Canadian lawyer and diplomat who served as the
Governor General of Canada in 1952–9.
1953–1958 456

the Gallery. We shall see it as we have arranged to go to Canada in the autumn.

We have never been and it seems a pity not to cash in on a Governor-General
when he asks you to stay!
I think you and Nicky know Alan Jarvis?
In between ordinary toil K works away on his proposed Ruskin anthology
but it is a long job, as some of it is quite unreadable though it has to be read, in
case.
K sends his best love and we will propose ourselves to see you as soon as K
is freer and you are better and not too harried by visitors and Nicky thinks it
possible.
We shall not go to Brussels – only to Amsterdam for 24 hours to see Roel’s
exhibition end of June. Best love to you and darling Nicky and I do hope the
pain is easier or has gone
Ever affectionately
Jane

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
22 May [1958]

My dear BB,
I cannot tell you how touched I was to receive your card217 commending my
Ghiberti review.218 I had thought it very flat-footed, & was quite prepared for
Ben to decline it; & I certainly never supposed that anyone would read it.
We were so distressed to read of the latest affliction which has assailed you
– great pain added to perpetual discomfort. Alas, there are no possible words of
consolation. I am glad to hear that David Crawford is going out to i Tatti as I
know you will enjoy his company, & he yours.
We are all well & happy. I wish you could once have seen Saltwood on such
a day as this – it is an earthly paradise. At this time of year there are too many
things going on in London, & I have missed almost ten days of Spring here. As

217 Card missing.

218 Clark wrote a lengthy and admiring review of Krautheimer’s ‘noble work of scholarship’ on Ghiberti,
Burlington Magazine, May 1958.
1953–1958 457

you know, I do programmes on television, and which now go quite well. Heaven
knows what il popolo make of them. They bring me the money necessary to live
here. But I sometimes reflect that by selling one of my 19th century pictures at
the present grotesque prices I could make just as much & could spend rather
more time here. However, I suppose the fact is that I have in me a buried actor,
and rather enjoy giving performances. Also it is interesting to try and put things
simply, in a way which even the lazy, ignorant television public can understand.
But I must start writing again soon, & looking forward to making my first
sketch of BB. & his circle. As you say, it will be difficult to find documentation
for many members of the circle, & I fear I shall have to bother you with some
questions. I am not even sure how far to make the book personal.
I do not send you London news, partly because I know so little, & partly
because Jamie Hamilton says he keeps you posted. We have had a Gronchi week
– rather magnificent, as the English do that sort of thing well; & now we are
having a Russian week with the Moscow Art Theatre doing a marvellous series
of Chekov plays.219 If only Jane & I could do with six hours sleep – unfortunately
we require eight, & prefer 10, & simply cannot go to late parties.
All our love & wishes for the least possible discomfort, & love to Nicky.
Your affectionate
K.

219 The Moscow Art Theatre, which had been co-founded by Stanislavsky, visited Britain in 1958 with
9 plays, all performed in Russian, 5 of which were by Chekov.
1953–1958 458

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
14 July ’58

My dear BB,
I wonder if you have heard that our Alan is getting married.220 The whole episode
is characteristic of his oddity. [He took a fancy to a girl who lived near him in
Rye.] After a time the parents became alarmed, & took her away to Malta (her
father is a Colonel in the Army) where they destroyed in classic style, Alan’s
letters to their daughter, & hers to him. However when she came back they were
equally devoted to each other, & soon after her 16th birthday Alan came to us
& said that he wanted us to meet someone whom he wanted to marry. The first
we had heard of her, of course. Fortunately she turned out to be most attractive
– charming to look at & with none of the silliness or self-consciousness of most
young girls. So we spurred him on, and her parents consented, & the marriage
takes place on the 31st of this month. It seems to me no more chancy than any
other marriage. Alan is capable of great devotion, & will really try to look after
his little shrimp. But he is terribly imprudent & impulsive; so that they may both
get into trouble before she is old enough to talk sense to him. He still hasn’t had
one of his books printed, though I think they are excellent of their kind & will
one day bring him in a reasonable amount of fame and fortune. He is taking his
beloved to Italy, and is most anxious to visit you, if only for a few minutes.221 I
know you don’t see many visitors now, but if you felt up to it the sight of this
strange young couple might please & interest you.
We have been distressed and hear how wretched you had been feeling, &
hope that things are a little easier now. We are all well, though rather flustered
by the approaching marriage. In a fit of madness I even bought some pictures at
the sale of the last remnants of the Cook Collection, including the very beautiful
Alonso Cano of Tobias & the Angel, and a Giulio Romano; also a splendid
Granet.They were sold for the price of a small Cézanne pencil drawing. I nearly

220 Alan and Jane Beuttler first met in mid-August 1956. See Introduction above. Her father was a
serving army colonel, often overseas, and they had bought a house in Rye, where Jane was at
school, as a permanent base. There appears to have been immediate interest on both sides. They
were married at the Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley Street, London, and a reception was held
at the headquarters of the Arts Council in Piccadilly. The wedding attracted much press coverage,
including newsreels and television, in part because of the society interest and in part because of the
age of the bride who was only just of legal age. Colin Clark was best man.
221 The honeymoon was spent visiting, by car, the First World War battlefields in Flanders, Nuremberg,
Positano and Zermatt. They did not go to I Tatti.
1953–1958 459

bought the Botticelli Pentecost, as the Virgin is so beautiful, but didn’t know
where to put it.222 How queer museums are!
Much love to Nicky – I do pray that the weather isn’t too hot so you can stay
comfortable at i Tatti.
Love from Jane.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
5 Sept ’58

My dear BB.,
We have been worrying all summer that it is such a long time since we saw
you last, & when we suddenly realised that we should be away in Canada till
the middle of October we sent you the telegram suggesting we came out for a
sight of you before we went. Of course it would be far nicer for us to come in
November when you are back at i Tatti, & I hope that you may then be feeling
rather more comfortable – or less miserably uncomfortable.
Our summer has passed with its usual succession of incidents which sound
all-important at the time & have now vanished from the memory – all but
Alan’s wedding which really was memorable, as they both looked so beautiful &
happy, & Alan’s whole character seemed suddenly to change & loose its defensive
inconvenience. I hope you may yet see him & his bride when they are in Italy
again, as you would love to look at her.

222 See Herbert Cook. The Cook Collection was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, 136 lots.
See Elon Danziger, ‘The Cook Collection, its Founder and its Inheritors’, The Burlington Magazine,
vol. 146, no. 1216 (July 2004), pp. 444–58). Clark purchased: Alonso Cano (1601–1667), Tobias and the
Angel; Giulio Romano (1499?–1546), St Catherine (copy from Christ and Saints altarpiece in Parma);
François Granet (1775–1849), The Interior of a Sacristy, Rome. The Descent of the Holy Ghost, 1500–10,
attributed to Botticelli and his workshop, was acquired by Birmingham City Art Gallery in 1959
with help from the nacf; it measures over 2m in both height and width.
1953–1958 460

We decided to stay at home all summer, & have been rewarded with the worst
weather on record – deluges of rain & an atmosphere like Bombay.223
I went to Madrid for two days to see the Rococo exhibition – not that I like
18th c. art, but I am doing a new series of articles for the Sunday Times, & I had
a fancy to write about Watteau’s Enseigne de Gersaint, which is on exhibition
there.224 It is as beautiful as I had remembered, & I have managed to write
something about it which is up to sample. The rest of the articles seem to me a
little worse than the first lot – not from want of trying, but the formula becomes
monotonous, & they are lacking in freshness. I remember your urging me to
attempt the Primavera. Alas, I dare not. I have tried my hand at the National
Gallery Nativity, but I fear that the result is a bit pretentious.225 One way &
another I came to regret the whole enterprise – it is like writing advertising
copy (or so I imagine – I have never written any).
I am also dreading our visit to Canada, as I have to make a lot of speeches
on the subject which bores me most – public patronage of the arts. The poor
Canadians have decided to spend a lot of money on art & want to be told how
virtuous they are. But my sympathies are all with the New Zealanders who have
passed a law prohibiting the import of any works of art at all – a truly democratic
measure.
Signor Papi has very kindly sent me his book of a visit to i Tatti.226 Of course
I can’t make head or tail of it. Every now and then a few images emerge from
the swirling mist of words – hats, sticks, the house cat & so forth – & I clutch at
them desperately, but they vanish or are transformed into something else before I
can grasp them. People always say how pragmatic the English are, and I certainly
feel it as I flounder in this sort of metaphysical eloquence. By the way, I met, for
the first time, yesterday Mary McCarthy,227 & liked her. As I have never read one
of her books I had no preconceived ideas about her. It seems that she promised
to translate Papi’s book – not an easy task.

223 In 1958 there was a notably wet summer and September saw violent storms especially along the
south coast of England. On 5 September occurred one of the fiercest hailstorms on record, with
tornadoes which moved from Sussex into Kent, followed by rainstorms and flooding.
224 See n. 190.
225 Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, 1500 (NG 1034).
226 Robert Papi, Una visita al signor Berenson e ai Tatti, Florence : Sansoni, 1958. Papi was a good friend of
Arturo Loria and was married to the daughter of the dealer Count Contini-Bonacossi.
227 Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), American author, critic and political activist. Her two books about
Italy, Venice Observed and Stones of Florence, had been published in 1955 and 1956.
1953–1958 461

Jane sends her love to you & Nicky. She is very well, but needs a holiday from
Saltwood, which is too big for her to look after alone – & I have been trying to
write, so haven’t been much help.
Much love, dear BB., & sympathy in your afflictions, from your affectionate
K.

Government House
Ottawa
7th October [1958]

Darling Nicky and darling B.B.,

Very pleased to hear a p.c. has arrived from Nicky at Saltwood – but alas the silly
country secretary hasn’t had the wits to enclose it. Have written to have it sent
to Boston and will write again from there. Meantime we have thought of you
both so much and with such sympathy and do hope poor darling B.B. is more
comfortable and able to move without pain.
Have been looking for photographs to amuse B.B. but wherever we have been
either there are no works of art or photographs were proudly dispatched years ago.
Quebec as you know is a provincial city with no works of art – it was very
romantic staying at the Citadel with h.e. guarded by little red soldiers and their
white goat with gold horns! But at the State banquets we never succeeded in
meeting anyone who had heard of the visual arts existing much less seen more
than an engraving of a rose or a Napoleonic soldier. Tho’ they were all nice
clever people Lord Chief Justices and the like! One exception was dear Father
Levesque – the Dominican head of Montmerency228 – the modern chapel he has
had built there is tiny and without stained glass but is the most beautiful we have
ever seen except the Matisse chapel at Vence.
After Quebec we were allowed loose in the Ritz in Montreal – now we are
back in our prams pushed about by dear little Canadian adc’s, and occasionally
dropping our toys over board so as to give them something to do. (It is wonderful
how quickly one can get accustomed to being grand!).

228 Georges-Henri Lévesque (1903–2000), priest, sociologist, Christian humanist, was the creator and
administrator of the Dominican Order’s Maison Montmorency (1955–63).
1953–1958 462

The Montreal gallery very moderate except for its objects – Japanese porcelain
Chinese bronzes etc which are enviable. Johnny Steegman229 told us that he had
sent you photographs of the Italian pictures.
Our most enjoyable experience was a visit to the Randalls’ (nee Rosentahl!)
He was not there but she was beautiful as an Egyptian relief and with a remote
dignity very agreeable on this side of the Atlantic. They have marvellous
drawings, mostly medieval. You and B.B. would adore them – a Hugo van der
Goes silverpoint virgin which is both large and exquisite – two shaky shadowy
Durers in pen, endless dear little Gothic virgins – the famous Memling angel
(looking very Leonardesque) etc. Amongst the miniatures there was a beautiful
and interesting dark Signorelli – quite large for a miniature – of the building of
the Ark. I asked Mrs Rosentahl (sorry Mrs Randall) to send B.B. a photograph
and she promised to gladly so I hope she will but of course you are sure to
have it. All B.B.’s books lined the bookcase and she said how much she and her
husband regretted never having met B.B.
K lectured on Turner at McGill and J-F Millet at the Catholic University – the
latter in French. Here he is mostly talking on the Arts Council to the Canada
Council but tomorrow at the Museum he is calling his talk ‘The Blot & the
Diagram’ (Leonardo and the Tachists – B.B. will understand the idea).
I am having a v. enjoyable holiday nothing to do but dress up.
Dickie Mountbatten230 is also staying here.When they wanted to cut expenses
in Delhi, they managed to do with 380 gardeners instead of 420 – difficult lives
people lead.
Forgive this long scribble – no need to read any of it – its only point is to
bring our best love and sympathy to you both.
Ever affect.
Jane

229 John Steegman (1899–1966), was British-born and spent much of his career at the National Portrait
Gallery and with the British Council. He was the head of the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal in
1952–9.
230 Lord Mountbatten (1900–1979) was the last Viceroy of India (1947). He was the First Sea Lord
in 1954–9. He was a controversial figure in Canada because of his responsibility for the disastrous
Dieppe raid in 1942, when Canadian troops suffered severe casualties. Earlier in 1958 the Royal Navy
had visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, the first appearance in Canadian waters since 1758, and conducted
exercises with the Canadian navy.
1953–1958 463

[This is a postcard published by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University,

of Arnolfo di Cambio (1260–1302), Censing Angel (Acc.1957.57 – Gift of Mrs.
A. Kingsley Porter in memory of her husband), but posted in England on 16
October (year illegible but must be 1958; see next letter)]
Boston
We are thinking & speaking often of you dear BB. during a rapid visit to your
old home town. The museum is enormously improved since we saw it 23 years
ago: now it is too big, like everything else except the Freer & the Gardner Coll.
Love from us both.
K.

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
22 Nov ’58

My dear BB,
I am so glad to hear from friends who have visited us lately a rather better report.
We have been so sad to think of you suffering & dispirited. At last we can make a
firm date for a visit to see you – any time between the 16th & the 21st of January.
If it is a trouble to Nicky to have us at i Tatti we can stay in Florence & see as
much or as little of you as you wish. All I want is to experience once more the
joy of hearing your conversation & telling you once more how much I owe you.
We had, to be truthful, rather a boring time in Canada. There are practically
no works of art, & the scenery is extensively dull – no surprises, like Australia.
Even the celebrated view from the citadel of Quebec isn’t beautiful, merely
extensive. Much the most interesting thing is the political situation, with the
french-speaking [sic] provinces still regarding themselves as a conquered country
& dreaming of independence. Quebec is more priest ridden than Ireland –
or Ceylon. I must say that the universities are excellent, but the politics pure
tammany – or Huey Long.231 It was nice to get to Boston.The museum is greatly

231 Tammany Hall was the New York City Democratic Party political machine that played a major
role in controlling New York City and New York State politics. Its enormous power came through
the support of millions of Irish immigrants in New York. Tammany Hall was notorious for political
corruption. Huey Pierce Long, Jr. (1893–1935) was an American politician who served as the 40th
Governor of Louisiana in 1928–32 and as a member of the us Senate from 1932 until he was
1953–1958 464

improved & the new director is a fine, bouncing fellow.232 But it is now too big,
like everything else (talking of which, the Chinese Collection in Toronto is the
only thing of that kind worth seeing in Canada, & stupendous).233 It was very
agreeable to find the Gardner Collection unchanged: & what beautiful things
you made her buy! I had forgotten how fine the Botticelli is – or rather both of
them are,234 & the Pollajuolo profile is astonishing.235 It was a sunny afternoon,
and I have never seen Titian look so well – it remains the most beautiful picture
in America.236 I am not often moved by patriotic feelings, and am sickened by all
the cant about national treasures – still I do think it was a disgraceful thing to let
the Rubens’ portrait of the Earl of Arundel leave England.237 I suppose Poynter
was director of the N.G.238 What a happy, complacent somnolence in this island
then.
I am still engaged in television’s talks & other odd jobs.239 The former are chiefly
a way of making money, which I now must do if I am to stay on at Saltwood. But
I confess I find it interesting – tho’ very difficult – and curious. One’s ideas have
to be very clear – little flowers of rhetoric are meaningless. Talking of flowers, I
did a broadcast on Wind’s book which enraged him because after cracking him
up much beyond his deserts, I compared him to a conjurer pulling paper flowers
out of a hat. I see that the word ‘paper’ was rather offensive.240
Alan, your great admirer, is now happily married to his dear little girl, & is
now engaged on a book about the 1914–17 campaign in Flanders – I suppose

assassinated. He was a controversial figure, an unashamed populist who denounced the rich and the
bankers and was accused by his enemies of demagoguery. An effective and forceful political boss, he
commanded a wide network of supporters.
232 The Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, 1955–72, was the ebullient Perry Rathbone
(1911–2000). He transformed the museum into a lively, broad-based cultural institution, with a much
greater attendance. He was also known for shrewd acquisitions, appealing exhibitions and publicity
stunts. After retiring from the museum, he became the head of Christie’s office in New York.
233 The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, has extensive and outstanding collections of Far Eastern art.
234 Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia, c. 1500–01, purchased in 1894 from the Earl of Ashburnham,
through Berenson, and Virgin and Child with an Angel, early 1470s, purchased in 1899 from Prince
Chigi, through Colnaghi, London, and Berenson.
235 Piero del Pollaiolo, Portrait of a Woman, 1490s.
236 Titian, Europa, c. 1560–62, purchased in 1896 from Colnaghi, London, through Berenson.
237 Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, 1629–30, purchased in 1898 from Colnaghi, London,
through Berenson.
238 Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) trained as a painter and worked in the studio of Frederic, Lord
Leighton in Rome and Charles Gleyre in Paris. He was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at
University College, London, in 1875–81, the Director of the National Gallery in 1894–1904 and the
President of the Royal Academy in 1896–1918. He was Charles Bell’s uncle.
239 See n. 210.
240 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London: Faber & Faber, 1958. On 14 November 1958,
Clark made a radio broadcast on the Third Programme of the bbc entitled ‘The Concealed God’ in
which he discussed Wind’s book.
1953–1958 465

inspired by his namesake’s Gallipoli.241 Irene had a great success as Maria Stuart
in Shiller’s [sic] play, and was, I think, really magnificent. She has just done Mrs J.
G. Borkman – not quite so good, but it is an ungrateful part.242
I am struggling through the new 3 vol edition of Van Gogh’s letters.243 It is
very well done, with the drawings tipped in; but in the end it makes depressing
reading, because I can’t see that all the suffering imposed on himself & everyone
else was really necessary to his painting. I have got to review it for the New
Yorker – I am also reviewing J. P. Hennessy’s Italian Sculpture, vol ii, which I
think extremely good – Sensible & well balanced.244
Now Nicky will have had enough of my illegible writing, so I will send to
her & you much love & our hopes of seeing you soon.
Ever your affectionate,
K.

241 Alan Clark, The Donkeys, London: Hutchinson, 1961, a study of the 1915 Western Front offensives.
Alan Moorhead, Gallipoli, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956.
242 Irene Worth appeared in Stephen Spender’s version of Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Old Vic, London,
in September 1958. Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman is his penultimate play, written in 1896: a television
production by atv with Worth and Olivier was broadcast on 19 November 1958.
243 Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh:With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence, 3 vols,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1958.
244 John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, London: Phaidon, 1958.
466
Ten

Farewell
1959

Berenson celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday on 26 June 1959. At hand to

celebrate this, his last anniversary, were John Walker, Freya Stark, Umberto Morra
and Henry Francis, the curator of paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
McGeorge Bundy from Harvard was also present and assured him that they
would do their utmost to fulfil his wishes.
That summer there was one last visit to Vallombrosa, where, with failing
eyesight, he sat in his wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, looking through dark
glasses at the landscape and the sunsets.
In early September a wound in Berenson’s mouth became infected and the
subsequent swelling spread to his throat, distorting the lower part of his face.
Treatment was ineffective and impaired speech was now added to failing eyesight.
A month later, his doctor, fearing that Berenson might die of suffocation
from the swelling in the throat, administered a powerful antibiotic. His frail body
was unable to withstand the shock of the treatment and in the early hours of 6
October, he died. The local village priest performed the last rites and he died
peacefully in a dimly lit room, attended by Nicky and Alda, his sister Bessie, the
estate manager, Geremia Giofreddi, and his daughter, Fiorella, and by Emma and
the night nurse.
Berenson lay in state in a walnut coffin in the large library of I Tatti, wrapped
in an ivory-white cashmere shawl, a Sienese cross on his chest, and with candles
burning nearby. During the day friends and neighbours came to mourn and filed
by the coffin.
On the following afternoon his coffin, covered with oak leaves and roses, was
carried by workmen from I Tatti to the little church of San Martino al Mensola,
half a mile away. At the funeral, hooded monks of the Misericordia, in white
robes, carried lighted torches and black crosses outlined in gold. The funeral
cortège, which included children, nuns, local people, as well as representatives of
the great and the good, stretched for nearly half a mile.
When the coffin was brought back from San Martino it was placed before
the chapel door at I Tatti, and it was there that he was laid to rest and still rests.

467
1959 468

Mary’s coffin was later brought down from Settignano so that they could be next
to each other, and in the place where they had chosen to live and make their
lives together.
The last time that Clark saw Berenson was in early January 1959. On his
return he wrote to Harry Hodson, the editor of the Sunday Times, ‘[I] fear he
cannot live very much longer. . . . I have thought of writing you the short article
on Mr Berenson’. Clark had been asked by the paper in August 1957 to prepare
an obituary, but they feared that Clark might already be committed to write
one for The Times. (He had, in fact, been asked to do so in 1934 and had been
reminded again in 1940 that he had not done so. In the end The Times asked
someone else to write it in 1942.)
On 6 October, within hours of Berenson’s death, Clark sent to Harry Hodson
the first draft of his article on Berenson which was published on the following
Sunday, 11 October. During the intervening few days there were revisions and
queries to be attended to. It is not recorded how, or exactly when, Clark received
news of Berenson’s death. He was in London at the time and he dealt with
the article and the editorial changes from the offices of the Arts Council in
Piccadilly. He did not attend the funeral. Clark’s opportunity to pay his last
respects, personally and publicly, came eight months later when, at Nicky’s
request, on 7 May 1960, he gave a lengthy address in Italian in the Palazzo
Vecchio in Florence (see Appendix 3).
1959 469

[Postcard dated at the bottom 9 Dec. ’58].

My dear BB,
This is only to say how glad we are that we shall be seeing you before long.
I think of you many times in every day – so many ideas that I owe to you, &
fancies that I should like to discuss with you. So many allusions & turns of
phrase that no one else will understand. I feel that I have wasted my time by not
spending more of it in your company.
Our love & wishes for as much happiness as your body allows you.
Ever your affectionate
Kenneth.
9 Dec. ’58

Saltwood Castle
Kent
Hythe 67190
Jan ’59

Dearest BB & Nicky,

I began a letter to you in Paris, but never finished it, & as soon as I got home a
deluge descended on me – Nicky knows that kind of desk, piled about 3 ft high
with largely unanswerable letters, telephone ringing & meetings every day. All of
which will make you realise, dear BB. how much I loved the peace of i Tatti. It
was such a great joy to be with you again. The fact is that there are many things
I like to talk about which no one else understands, & every thing you say to me
supports, indirectly, my beliefs. It is sad that you can no longer communicate
with many people but the great thing is you can still inspire the few who have
entered into your world of values.
How marvellous for you to have darling Nicky. I can’t imagine greater good
fortune on Earth.
All love to you both,
Kenneth.
1959 470

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Jan 23, 59

Dear Kenneth
How sweet of you to write as you have.When you get to be my present age you
too will realise how precious is the appreciation, the affection and the sympathy
of one’s juniors, particularly as one only survives [‘survives’ is re-written over
first attempt] as is the case with you.
I look forward eagerly to seeing you but Tatti is taken up with so much [sic]
with guests or with urgent pre-occupations that would prevent my devoting
myself to you entirely and with my whole mind.
Talk is like water. It flows away a mere trifle faster than seemingly more solid
thought. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?1
We have been enjoying Irene.2 How she has flowered since we last saw
her! She now can hold her own in any talk on any subject, and is a dominant
personality. I envy you all seeing so much of her.
World affairs make me sick, literally give me nausea and heart-burn. Thanks
overwhelmingly to dear ‘Ike’ and Mr Dulles3
Much love to each and all of you
Ever B.B.
From u.s.a. I keep getting letters of wild enthusiasm about the Book.
B.B.

1 Latin for ‘Where are those who, before us, existed in the world?’
2 Irene Worth
3 Dwight (‘Ike’) Eisenhower’s presidency, 1953–61, coincided with the height of the Cold War. John
Foster Dulles was his Secretary of State, and Richard Nixon his Vice-President. After the Suez Crisis
of 1956, the United States sought, from 1958 onwards, to shore up unstable but friendly governments
in the Middle East. Designed by Dulles, this ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ stated that America would use
armed force to resist aggression from any country controlled by international communism, and
would provide economic and military aid to stop the spread of communism in the Middle East.
On 2 January 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. On 12 January, the Soviets confirmed their
supremacy over the usa in the so-called ‘space race’ by launching the first spacecraft to escape the
earth’s gravity, flying past the moon towards the sun. The us presidential election of 1960 was won
by John F. Kennedy.
1959 471

I Tatti
Settignano
Florence
Jan 27. 59

Darling Jane –
Thanks for the caressing shawl.4 I already have worn it on our noon-day walk
today.
Willy5 reports how much he enjoys staying with you but also how ill Colette
has been. All my sympathy!
Irene has been with Alda6 to Rome and lunched here today. In splendid shape.
I learn that K’s book is selling like a popular best-seller. I rejoice as if it were
a book of mine.
Glorious wintry weather that does much to alleviate my senile troubles. I am
never comfortable altho I succeed occasionally in forgetting my used up body.
How I look forward to seeing you all!
Love
B.B.

4 Although it is not possible to be entirely certain, it seems probable that this is the shawl in which
Berenson’s body was wrapped to lie in state.
5 William Mostyn-Owen
6 Alda von Anrep
1959 472

The Sunday Times, 11 October 1959

‘The Sage of Art’
By Sir Kenneth Clark
Bernard Berenson, the world’s greatest authority on Italian art, died at Florence on Tuesday,
aged 94. Sir Kenneth Clark, one of his ‘pupils’, has written this appreciation of the man
and his work for the Sunday Times, and in view of this the third in a series of articles on
great paintings is held over until next Sunday.

During his long life Bernard Berenson enjoyed four different periods of fame.
The first began in 1888, when as a poor scholar from Harvard he came to Europe
and enchanted the intellectual society of London and Paris by his intelligence,
his ardour and his exquisite beauty.
At that time he was known chiefly as a student of oriental languages. He had
taken top honours in Sanskrit and had gained a good knowledge of Hebrew and
Aramaic, which he retained until late in life. He had been the favourite pupil
of William James, and James’s way of expressing his theories through yarns and
popular wisecracks still influenced his talk and the best of his later writing. But
these siren strains of the aesthetic movement had floated across the Atlantic and
Berenson had fallen under the spell of Walter Pater’s ‘Renaissance’. This was the
world he hoped to enter in Europe; and he succeeded.
I don’t think he ever met Pater, who was shy of brilliance, but he became
a close friend of Wilde, and in Paris he made the acquaintance of Robert de
Montesquieu. He never wavered in his admiration for Wilde; but he soon
discovered that fin de siècle was not for him, and the deepest single influence in his
life pointed in the opposite direction. This was Goethe, whom he read as a boy
in his little canoe, moored in the backwaters of the Boston river. He determined
then ‘in Goethe’s untarnishable words, to live manfully in the whole, the good
and the beautiful’: and for almost eighty years he allowed nothing to deflect him.
To a mind so formed Greece and Italy were the goals. He was too poor to
go to Greece at once: Italy was more accessible and for several years he travelled
insatiably, treating works of art more as pretext for pilgrimage than as objects
of study. His ambitions were still boundless and undefined. Then one day he
decided to concentrate. He had discovered that the outlines of the great Italian
painters were blurred by uncertainty. Legend and optimism had attributed to
them many works by inferior hands which diminished their fame. It would be
his task to establish once and for all who had painted every Italian picture of the
Renaissance.To do so he would apply the method of the only writer on art who
then commanded his respect, Giovanni Morelli; that is to say he would rely on
the internal evidence of style rather than on documents or signatures. It seemed
to him a temporary contraction of his energies; in fact it was to be like a tin tied
to his tail for the rest of his life.
1959 473

By themselves the lists of authentic pictures might not have brought him
fame. But they were prefaced by four essays on the various schools of Italian
art, two of which – the Florentine and the Central Italian – are masterpieces.
They do what practically no one else has done since Winckelmann: they apply a
consistent and appropriate aesthetic theory to an historical process in such a way
as to evaluate the work it produced.

The First Function

Berenson took from Goethe the idea that the first function of a work of art
was to be life-enhancing, and, following the physiological approach of James,
he believed that this was achieved through ideated sensations. Thus, the vivid
presentation of form in Florentine art, stimulating our sense of touch, increases
our grasp of reality; the vivid presentation of movement makes us feel the thrill
of violent action without its fatigues; and when we contemplate the ordered
space of Umbrian painting we seem to breathe more freely.
After all the high-flown language which has swirled around the summit of art
during the last sixty years, these conclusions seem shockingly flat; and I suppose
that in the end we can never be satisfied by a physiological theory of aesthetics.
But at least it was concrete. It did not simply repeat a magic formula of approval
in more fashionable language, by substituting ‘significant form’ for ‘ideal beauty’.
It was a short, firm, positive step forward.
These essays on the Italian painters were written between 1892 and 1897,
and they established Berenson’s position as the leading scholar of Italian art.
But the author was not destined to live in the modest penumbra of scholarship.
Among his occasional writings was the review of an exhibition of Venetian
Art at the New Gallery in 1895, to which the chief English collectors had sent
their most valued ‘old masters’. Convincingly, sarcastically and with obvious
relish Berenson pointed out that about three-quarters of the pictures bore
names to which they had no right. In an hour the value of the collections
was halved. There were protests, black-ballings, terrible threats. But Berenson
could not be suppressed.The only solution was to turn this insufferable poacher
into a gamekeeper. The dealers came forward and asked him to authenticate
their pictures, offering him a percentage of the purchase price in return for his
certificates.

Money Poured In
For a long time Berenson hesitated. He was poor, but he was free, and all his
energies were occupied with a great work of scholarship, The Drawings of the
Florentine Painters, which he had begun the same year. He knew all too well
the Goblin Market which he was being asked to enter. Finally what tempted
him was the dream of forming a great library which could be a unique means
of study both for him and for future students. He agreed, and immediately the
1959 474

money came pouring in. On the first day of the new century he moved into i
Tatti, the villa near Settignano where he lived till the end of his life.
There followed thirty years of prosperity such as has not been the lot of any
scholar since Petrarch. Inevitably this entailed certain losses. Very little of what
he wrote in those years is of lasting value, for the Florentine Drawings, although
not published until 1903, was almost completed in his years of poverty and
independence. But then, as he frequently said, writing was not his chosen means
of expression. It was talk.
His Self-Portrait contains a confession which all who knew him will confirm.
He did not like a critical audience. He dried up like a medium if he felt the
presence of an unsympathetic listener. He liked best an audience of well-dressed
ladies, but was quite content with an American momma who asked him the
meaning of life. For this reason very few intellectuals can have heard Berenson
talking at his best, and so are apt to underrate what was certainly the most
remarkable performances of their kind that I have ever heard.
During the years of his prosperity there was an unfailing audience at every
meal: social and international celebrities for lunch, the talk conducted in at least
three languages; humbler pilgrims and a few young people for tea; old friends and
house guests for dinner. B.B. never flagged; in fact, on the rare occasions when
there wasn’t someone fresh to talk to he said that he felt like a cow that hadn’t
been milked. He talked seldom about art, often (and best of all) about history,
and often, alas, about contemporary politics, on which he had the onlooker’s
uncertain grasp, at once too hopeful and too cynical. He loved vituperation.
Naturally his success had made him many enemies, and the mention of their
names would bring down on the head of some benevolent old sheep of a visitor
a clatter of epithets worthy of an Old Testament prophet.Then he would pat her
hand, and gaze at her with his grey Slav eyes, and she would soon be purring
again.
In 1930 a change began to take place. The slump had restricted the traffic
in certificates of authenticity; and in any case B.B. had long been sick of the
whole business. His whole interest was in the decline of classical and the rise of
mediaeval art and he planned a great book on what he called the deformation
of form. To this end he travelled in Syria and North Africa, and to this end
enlarged his library. In fact none of it was ever written, except for the fragment
of a chapter on the Arch of Constantine. His great book remained, radiant and
fructifying, in the realm of conversation.
In these years Berenson’s talk was at its best. Display and vituperation had
diminished, but his marvellous memory was unimpaired, and the ideas thrown
up in conversation were illustrated by a confluence of facts equalled only in the
pages of Spengler. This comparison, though just, would have displeased him; for
he disliked the solemn attitudes of our apocalyptic historians, dreaded, too, all
1959 475

forms of freelance mysticism saying that although you could bamboozle people
in a second it took centuries to debamboozle them.

Fall in Favour
While his powers were at the height his public reputation had declined. There
were fewer visits from potentates, fewer calls from anxious dealers, and the sales
of his books almost ceased. In the spring of 1939 I went to say goodbye to him:
it did not seem probable that we should meet again. I admired the new libraries
which he had recently added to i Tatti. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the library is my only
personal achievement: the only thing which will give posterity any idea what I
am like.’ I could not help agreeing; and I doubt if any of his friends could have
foreseen the new phase of eminence which he was about to enter.
How can an artist or philosopher who has achieved worldly success withdraw
from the world? A monastic life is too constricting, exile produces the déraciné,
bankruptcy involves many petty annoyances. The war provided Berenson with
an answer. He was cut off from society, first in his own villa and then hidden
in the house of a friend with diplomatic immunity. He had time to gather his
thoughts. As a result he wrote two books from which prosperity can derive a fair
idea of his personality and conversation.
The first is the Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. It was written in his
own library and some of the restraints of scholarship survive. I cannot say that
it is all easy reading; it is so packed with ideas that after every page or two one
is obliged to lay it down and digest. And of course many of these ideas run
counter to our accepted notions. But that is its great strength. It is entirely free
from fashionable cant. Every conclusion has been tested by experience and by a
prodigious reading of history.

In Hiding
In the second of these wartime books, the Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Berenson is
far more liberated. It was to a great extent written while he was in hiding, cut
off both from his friends and his books. All the familiar props and stays had been
removed. ‘And then he came to himself.’ He wanted to call it ‘self dippings’, and
sure enough it is not a piece of systematic self-analysis, but a number of random
samples, produced without order and without shame. Digression builds upon
digression, an image suggests a train of memories, and in this way it acquires
something of the movement of thought itself.
And what sort of man is revealed? Not, certainly, the sort of man we were
encouraged to be in an English public school; but a human being of such
intelligence and candour, and a mind so richly stored and free from prejudice,
that any grown-up person will find his companionship irresistible. It will keep its
place on the small shelf of books in which the finest minds have mapped out the
1959 476

crooked path to wisdom; and if it be the sign of the true artist to pass unperceived
from detachment to engagement and back again, it is also an extraordinary work
of art.
No one in England foresaw that the Self-Portrait would be a best seller. But
its quality was immediately recognised in America, and at the same time the
prefaces to the Italian Painters of the Renaissance achieved, in an illustrated edition,
an enormous popularity. From having been the somewhat awe-inspiring wizard
of expertise, Berenson suddenly became an acceptable myth. He was just what
the great American middlebrow public was looking for – a sage. And soon the
potentates of democracy, reporters and cameramen, were pouring to i Tatti, as
eagerly as the rich and smart had flocked there in the 1920s.
This time success left him unmoved. He was over eighty and thoroughly
inoculated against the poisons of the world. His zest for life and his curiosity
were undiminished: his love of nature increased. Walking with him in the hills –
and up to his ninetieth year he tripped about them like a mountain goat – one
realised why he maintained that he had been a failure. He was a lyric poet who
never mastered language. He could only point and clasp his hands in a gesture of
mingled gratitude and despair.

The Dandy
Berenson was small and slight, with beautiful but brittle-looking hands, grey eyes
with long lashes and a large mouth full of formidable teeth. He was a dandy with
an endless repertoire of beautifully-cut suits in which he always wore a fresh
picked buttonhole. This effect of neatness and fragility was enhanced by contrast
with the Giottoesque bulk of Mrs. Berenson. As one walked behind them in the
garden one had the impression of a chivalrous mahout guiding the steps of an
absent-minded elephant. In fact Mrs. Berenson gave her volatile husband some
of the ballast he lacked. She was the daughter of a famous American evangelist
named Hannah Whitall Smith; her brother was Logan Pearsall Smith, her sister
the first Mrs. Bertrand Russell.
When they were all together in the nineties it was the nearest thing to normal
family life which Berenson ever knew. Life at i Tatti was much more like that of
a small Renaissance court. Up to B.B.’s ninety-second year it followed the same
pattern every day, and even in Baalbec or Leptis Magna an effort was made to
reproduce the usual time-table.
In later life he was easily fatigued and suffered acutely from the cold, but only
in the last two years was he seriously ill. He was looked after by one of the most
angelic companions who have ever fallen to the lot of a great man, Miss Nicky
Mariano, who came to help in the library as a girl, and remained at i Tatti as the
devoted friend of Mr. and Mrs. Berenson for over forty years.
1959 477

Unforgettable
Berenson’s isolation not only gave him a sort of posteritorious wisdom, but saved
him from many activities in which public figures waste their time. He never sat
on a committee, never went to a public dinner, never made a speech; even when
he was given the freedom of Florence he simply bowed and withdrew. The
thought of academic life made him feel uneasy.
His fear of pedantry made him unwilling to give the generations of young
men who frequented i Tatti any sort of formal instruction. But I think we may
properly consider ourselves his pupils; for at almost every meal, and on those
unforgettable walks, our eyes were opened and our minds were filled. At first
we might resent the hard knocks administered to local gods. But as we came
to realise that neither Oxford, nor Bloomsbury, nor Cambridge, Mass, had
established the ultimate boundaries of civilisation, we found ourselves entering
a larger inheritance. We were educated, as few young men have been educated
since the Renaissance; or perhaps I should say since the Reformation, for we
learnt to think of civilised life as catholic and apostolic. We learnt, in Johnson’s
immortal phrase, to suspect ‘the cant of those who judge by principles rather
than perception’; and we came to believe that the love of art is only a part of
the love of life. I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I
know; and I can only try to repay this debt by holding on to the values which
he maintained for so many years.
Afterword

Why?
Why did they first start writing to each other, and why did they never stop?
Was it love at first sight, or was it simply opportunism? Clark was young and
ambitious, not as secure financially as he had once expected, his father having
recently lost a large part of his enormous fortune as a result of the Welsh Dam
Disaster. If he was going to make his mark in the art world he needed a mentor.
No one fitted his ambitions better than Bernard Berenson, for he had the
knowledge, the expertise and the contacts that Clark needed to acquire sooner
or later. The Berensons were looking for an assistant and Clark seemed to be
the answer. Even if he did not immediately love the Berensons, Clark fell in
love with i Tatti - the place and the way of life - and there grew from that first
meeting a remarkably strong friendship which deepened with the years. There
were numerous occasions when the relationship and the correspondence could
have wavered and ceased. The first occasion was when Clark delayed going out
to I Tatti.The second was when he announced his engagement to Jane.The third
was when he was dismissed as the collaborator on The Florentine Drawings. The
next was when he joined the Committee of The Italian Exhibition. The Clarks’
busy pre-war life in London at Portland Place and the National Gallery left little
time for personal letter writing, but his correspondence never petered out. The
long interruption of the war years might have resulted in a break but, as soon as
the postal services resumed, the correspondence was taken up again, even more
fulsomely than before.

Friendship
Why do friendships start and then deepen? Opportunism is probably as good
a starting point as any, but it is not sufficient by itself in the long-term. Deep
friendships have to be consciously nurtured, especially when they run into
choppy waters. Both sides have to will it to continue when the original raison
d’être no longer applies. Mutual interests and friends in common are essential,
and these Berenson and Clark had in abundance. Trust is also essential: the

478
Afterword 479

confidence that personal sensitivities will not be trespassed on. It is notable, for
example, how money, the art market and Joseph Duveen do not come into the
correspondence; nor do the amours and consequent marital complications, even
though all were, in a sense, pre-occupations in common. Trust and affection
are not the same thing: over-affectionate expression can sometimes be used
as a means of disguising reservations. Did they trim their views, curtail their
criticisms of each other, over-praise each other, while simultaneously expressing
a different point of view to others? The letters speak for themselves.
In any close friendship there is always a certain amount of manoeuvring,
turning a blind eye, and a wish for something more or slightly different.
Sometimes this comes to the surface of the correspondence, as for example
when Clark manoeuvres round his dismissal from The Florentine Drawings; when
Berenson overlooks or forgives Clark’s participation in The Italian Exhibition;
and when he discharges his exasperation at Clark’s unwillingness to be more
affectionately responsive.
A sustained friendship between people of different generations is not easy to
achieve. In early adult life, thoughts are of the future and tend to dwell on hopes
and aspirations. In old age, thoughts are more of the past, of what has, and has
not, been achieved rather than what will be achieved, of time running out and
of infirmities.To bridge the gap both sides need consciously to reach out, to edit,
to listen, to proceed with caution. Berenson was a demanding friend, forever
seeking favours – photographs, visits, affection. Clark was useful for him with
access to what he wanted, and his own connections and knowledge were useful
to Clark in return. It was not until after the war that the mutual opportunism
seems to translate into genuine deep affection.
John Updike once observed, apropos his own father with whom he had an
uneasy relationship, ‘It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love
them when they are there in front of you.’ Berenson seems to be an instance
where the opposite holds good. All his relationships were complicated. Those
who were his friends could suddenly become his bitter enemies, or be consigned
to a unique category of his own creation which he called ‘enemy-friends’.
Yet there seems to have been something charismatic about his company and
presence. John Walker noted that Clark’s relations with Berenson were always
complex. Clark told Walker that for many years he and Berenson were never
completely at ease together. He cites a letter from Clark where he says ‘after 1938
I believed myself to be on comfortable and affectionate terms with B.B., and
after the war he behaved to me with the utmost kindness and sympathy. It was
only later on that I discovered to my surprise that B.B. did not really like me. A
friend of mine who looked up my name in the index of Sunset and Twilight, said
to me: “Heavens! How Mr Berenson disliked you!” It was a great shock, and it
proves how sweet he was that he never let me feel it when I was in his company’
(Walker pp. 291–2).
Afterword 480

Second Thoughts
Sunset and Twilight, which is a selection of entries from Berenson’s dairies chosen
by Nicky Mariano, was published in 1963. What Clark’s friend had read was this:
November 13th 1952, Rome. Kenneth Clark is in every way a homo novus, but
his father was rich so his career is not regarded as a success story, while mine
is, because my father was poor. Yet he has had every possible success, held
high positions and continues to fill them, frequents highest official society,
and is considered the best art lecturer in English language, the best art writer
and critic ditto, has a brilliant wife in foremost ranks of fashion, promising
children.Yet his is not a success story, and mine is – not because I have done
this or that, but only because I have succeeded in attaining to enough money
to live decently. K. C. not only inherited his fortune, but increases it. He buys
and sells works of art, and that counts only as a gentleman exchanging a good
thing for a better one. If I sold any picture I should at once be put down as a
‘dealer’, because I started poor. (Berenson S&T p. 283)
Clark would have been sensitive to the term novus homus, which carries
implications of someone of plebeian origin rising to high office in the Roman
Senate or a Renaissance court, through cleverness. Yet the only other directly
negative comment in the published diaries is: ‘June 5th, 1954 Venice. I learnt that
Kenneth Clark is preparing to write about me as a product of my American
“contacts”, as well of contacts with Vernon Lee, Janet Ross, Edith Wharton, and
the like, abroad, i.e. in Europe. What will come out of it I shall not see, nor do I
greatly care’ (Berenson S&T p. 348). Clark was not being singled out for reproof,
and what Berenson confided to his diary was quite often at variance with what
he said in conversation. In contrast, Berenson also wrote: ‘May 22nd, 1957, I
Tatti. The work done by young men, yet as old as Kenneth Clark, seems to me
miraculously superhuman’ (Berenson S&T p. 479).
Berenson said things that, even if he did not regret them, he should not have
uttered, and they spiced up his conversation and his writings. It was gossipy
entertainment until it became one’s turn to be on the receiving end. He could
also be just as hard on himself, to the point of tedium. The subject of his most
intense and tortuous love-hate, after Mary, was probably himself. Isaiah Berlin,
whose family were also Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, did not take to
Berenson at their first meeting but later warmed to him, and was then deeply
offended when he read Berenson’s recollections in the diaries. Iris Origo, who
had known him since childhood, and had written with deep and loving emotion
about what she owed to him, was asked to write an introduction to Sunset and
Twilight. She accepted, only to find that once she had read the diaries she then
felt ‘considerable distaste’ for him.
Afterword 481

In Another Part of the Wood, published in 1974, Clark gives a surprisingly

chilly account of the first meeting at I Tatti. He slips in Charles Bell’s supposed
comment, ‘he’s only a kind of charlatan, and all that business of attribution is
pure guesswork’, and gives a witty but waspish account of Berenson’s greeting of
his guests. Clark then says: ‘by this time I had taken the strongest possible dislike
to him. I had a strong instinct that Mr Berenson’s personality would remain
foreign to me, and I did not like what little I had experienced of the atmosphere
of i Tatti’ (Clark APW pp. 127–9).Why are the sentiments expressed here in such
contradiction to those he expressed immediately after Berenson died?
In 1981 Clark took the text of his Memorial Address at the Palazzo Vecchio in
Florence in 1960 (see Appendix 3) and expanded and amended it. Now entitled
The Work of Bernard Berenson, it was included in his book of essays, Moments of
Vision, and was offered as a fresh evaluation. His original opening, ‘I can imagine
no greater honour than the invitation to speak to you in this noble hall, which
seems to stand at the centre of European civilisation on the subject of one
who became almost the embodiment of that civilisation, Bernard Berenson’,
was changed to ‘For almost fifty years Bernard Berenson knew himself to be
a legendary figure. His delicate frame, his beautiful eyes, his slightly artificial
courtesy and the tone of infallibility which he sustained in the unbroken line of
his conversation, made it very difficult to believe that this exquisite little conjurer
was not bamboozling us but had made solid additions to our knowledge and
understanding of art’ (Clark MV p. 108).

Money and Scholarship

Did Clark realise, in 1975 and again in 1981, that books were about to be
published about Berenson with the aim of destroying his reputation, and that,
therefore, it might be wise to establish some distance between them?
Berenson’s vulnerable spot was always his relationship with art dealers. The
issue was: did Berenson knowingly give false attributions in order to make
money? He himself knew that such accusations were made, behind his back, and
it plagued him. Whatever the truth, once the allegations had been made in print
(but no one dared print them while he was alive), the mud stuck. Whereas the
mention of Berenson’s name in general conversation once elicited a respectful
reply – ‘Ah! The sage of Settignano’ – now it gleans the response ‘Oh! The
crooked art dealer.’
He was not an art dealer and never was. You could not call at I Tatti to shop
and buy. He did not buy for stock as did Duveen, Colnaghi or Wildenstein. He
received commissions from such dealers by providing them with advice and
services. Having started with not a penny to his name, by the time he and
Mary first settled at I Tatti in 1900, in their mid-30s, he was well-off. He had
acquired his money by encouraging American collectors to buy works of art,
Afterword 482

invariably through dealers who paid him commission or profit share. Colnaghi’s
in particular supplied Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston with copious works
of art at high prices. She trusted Berenson’s judgement and expertise and he
roamed Italy searching for suitable treasures. Secretly, without disclosing what
he was doing, he took a double commission, simultaneously from her and from
Colnaghi’s. This was unethical. Isabella Stewart Gardner never knew, although
her husband, Jack, began to have his suspicions.
From 1907 to 1937 Berenson was in the pay of Joseph Duveen. He kept
an eye open for masterpieces to buy, arranged to meet clients who wanted to
purchase and, above all he gave certificates of authenticity on Italian paintings.
This was common knowledge. What was kept secret were the financial terms
of the agreement. These changed several times but, essentially, he was paid a
combination of a fixed annual retainer and a commission on the purchase price
or sale price of any transaction. After Duveen died, he had a similar arrangement
with the Florentine dealer Contini-Bonacossi and then with Wildenstein’s.
Royalties from his books were minor in comparison. These dealers provided his
principal sources of income that enabled him to sustain I Tatti, his lifestyle and
his travels. He also used his earnings to support his parents and siblings in Boston
and to accumulate an endowment for the future of I Tatti.
Did Berenson deliberately and knowingly make false attributions so that
the dealers would get a higher price on which he would thereby get a higher
commission? No substantive evidence has yet been produced, and in any case it
is inherently unlikely. Any work of art that he attributed would, sooner or later,
have to appear in The Lists: if its attribution was patently wrong, his expertise
would be called into question and his reputation, on which his earning power
depended, would be compromised. In any case, he first made his mark in the art
world not by talking attributions up but by pointing out that they were incorrect,
and he finally broke with Duveen by refusing to attribute the Allendale Adoration
to Giorgione.
It is also important to take into account the state of the art market, and the
mindset of collectors in his lifetime, particularly between the wars. There was an
abundant supply of paintings into a market in which dealers, not auction houses,
were dominant. Spotting an overlooked great work was a popular game and
Lord Lee’s diaries offer a fascinating insight. Although he had no training, Arthur
Lee thought he had a good eye and he liked to think that he could outsmart
the dealers by ferreting out pictures whose attribution they had missed and had
therefore under-priced. He also regarded his ability to do so as a useful source
of personal profit. Like many others at the time, he speculated in art, and inside
knowledge and secrecy were consequently paramount. It was a perfect breeding
ground for chicanery. Clark also enjoyed hunting for neglected or overlooked
treasures which were under-priced. The irony for Arthur Lee was that although
Afterword 483

he occasionally got the better of the dealers, generally speaking they got the
better of him, and his collection swelled with pictures that were over-attributed,
over-restored and over-priced.This is the background from which the four little
panels that Clark thought were by Giorgione emerged, and whose acquisition
by the National Gallery caused him so much grief.
There were many experts, some with high scholarly reputations, who were
willing to sign certificates of attribution for a fee, and who touted for business
on this basis. Indeed, it is pertinent to ask, when one sees how many collectors
were clearly taken for a ride by unscrupulous dealers with worthless certificates
of attribution, how often was a collector prevented from wasting money because
Berenson would not make a false attribution? Such instances are, of course,
impossible to prove but anyone who makes accusations against him should also
take this likelihood into account.
John Walker wrote in his autobiographical reminiscences that, apart from a
few early commissions, Berenson had nothing to do directly with the sale of
works of art. He admitted he sometimes unduly praised pictures, and the lists
became more inclusive, but Walker takes the view this was because he recognised
that virtually all Italian Renaissance paintings were the product of a shop with
assistants and so ‘he came to care less for the autograph of the master himself
than for the evidence that the fundamental drawing, composition, and colouring
were his’ (Walker p. 93). This, in Walker’s view, was not because of any money he
received from Duveen Brothers.
John Pope-Hennessy, who could be a merciless destroyer of reputations and
others’ scholarship, and would have had no hesitation in demolishing Berenson’s
if he had thought it justified, said of him: ‘the main thing I learned from him
was honest mindedness. It affected points of attribution . . . but it affected value
judgements too’ (Pope-Hennessy p. 151). He wrote an excoriating review (The
NewYork Review of Books, 12 March 1987) of Colin Simpson’s book, Artful Partners
(1987), which attempted to portray Berenson as dishonest, concluding:
were Berenson’s attributions honest, we are justified in asking . . . my own
answer . . . would be an emphatic ‘Yes.’ . . . Berenson’s value to Duveen was
not that his attributions were invariably right, but that, of the opinions then
available, they were least likely to be wrong. The reason for this was that the
attributional method applied at I Tatti was a good deal stricter than that used
by other scholars . . . re-reading his lists of paintings I cannot find a single case
in which the definition of an artist’s personality is queered by a commercially
motivated attribution.
John Updike, who had no art-world axes to grind, wrote an equally condemnatory
review for the New York Times (29 March 1987): ‘what, exactly, did Berenson do
wrong? To recommend artworks for purchase and resale is surely no sin, nor is
Afterword 484

asking a fee in exchange for scholarly expertise notably venal. . . . if B. B. badly

cheated anyone, it was himself ’.
Clark, in contrast, did harbour doubts about the absolute probity of Berenson’s
relationship with Duveen and the integrity of some of his attributions. Perhaps he
felt he had been let down by Berenson? On the one occasion when he could have
done with Berenson’s support about an attribution – over the four Giorgionesque
panels – Berenson demurred. Clark may also later have suspected that Berenson
knew more than he had been willing to disclose about Duveen’s interest in the
Chalandon Sassettas: if Duveen had not been paid by Mackay, Berenson would
not have been paid any commission either, and he must have known. He did
highlight a weakness in Berenson’s connoisseurship, namely that he never had
enough respect for, and understanding of, the skill of restorers (see Chapter Five).
Berenson’s other weakness, which no one denied, was that he was capable of
over-praising a picture’s aesthetic qualities, in flowery language that would, if
it were for sale, encourage a potential collector to acquire and pay handsomely.
Yet one of his better qualities was his unquenchable optimism, and it was in his
nature to get carried away by some spur of the moment enthusiasm. It was just
such a passing impulse that triggered his invitation to Clark to come and work
at I Tatti.

Art Criticism, Art History and Connoisseurship

Berenson had a dim view of art historians and the way in which the subject
was developing. When he started out, those who wrote about art were called art
critics, and that is what he considered himself to be – in the tradition of Goethe,
Voltaire, Winckelmann, Ruskin, Burkhardt and Walter Pater. When Clark was
asked, on Alan’s birth certificate, to state his occupation, he wrote ‘Art Critic’.
Berenson regarded academic art historians, with few exceptions, as pedants.
In his lecture, ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’, delivered at the University of
Edinburgh in 1950, Clark said:
I belong to rather an obscure profession – that of critic and historian of
art . . . if I were to fill in a form with ‘profession – art historian’ it would
be returned to me for correction. In Germany, on the other hand, the
word Kunsthistoriker would have been considered an adequate, and indeed
an honourable statement. Art history, when it becomes an end in itself, can
easily become sterile and self-destructive, as it has done in some American
universities which have inherited the less desirable side of German culture. It
has in fact, only one ultimate aim and justification, and that is to increase our
understanding and so our love of art. . . . the only reliable documents are the
works of art themselves . . . their aesthetic value is essential . . . the history of
art is absolutely inseparable from a sense of critical values. . . . I believe that
art is concerned with life, and that the emotions aroused by a work of art are
Afterword 485

those which we experience in life, clarified and concentrated so that we may

apprehend them in a flash. (Clark AAH)
Berenson and Clark present three conundrums for art historians. The first is that
the breadth and depth of their knowledge and interests make them impossible to
pigeon-hole. Art history became almost exclusively concentrated on theoretical
studies, and what a work of art signifies historically, whereas an art critic is just
as much interested in what an historic work of art means to us now. Hence
Berenson’s final summary of his philosophy in the introduction to a reissue of
The Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1952:
[I do] not attempt to give an account of painters’ domestic lives or even
of their specific techniques, but of what their pictures mean to us today as
works of art, of what they can do for us as ever contemporary life enhancing
actualities . . . too much time should not be wasted in reading about pictures
instead of looking at them. . . . least profit is to be got from the writings of
the metaphysical and psychoanalytical kind. If read one must, let it be the
literature and history of the time and place to which the paintings belong. . . .
We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting
moment become identified with it.
The second conundrum is that Berenson’s connoisseurship, which is reliant on
intuition, on a ‘good eye’ and on feeling, is unteachable, un-examinable and
un-gradeable. Berenson’s art criticism is easily dismissed as ‘preciosity’ and
mere ‘appreciationsim’, which in unskilled hands it undoubtedly is. The third
conundrum concerns the value and quality of his and Clark’s scholarship. The
answer is that both of them produced pioneering scholarly work of the highest
calibre that set benchmarks, which are still regarded as such by art historians.
The best of the Germans, notably Warburg and Panofsky, were opening
up channels of exploration and new ways of thinking that were much more
intellectually rigorous than Berensonian connoisseurship, and they could touch
topics that were beyond its reach. Clark’s enduring strength as a critic, historian
and writer was his ability to synthesise the two approaches in language that is
easy to read and had the quality of literature – something which few have been
able to rival; and, in fairness, Berenson quietly recognised this, and applauded it.
Comparing such different ways of seeing, Clark concluded:
[I]t is a curious fact that the great scholar and interpreter of the visual image,
whose approach to art history has, for the time being, overshadowed that of
Berenson – I refer, of course, to Aby Warburg – was also a peripatetic, a talker
rather than a writer. Indeed his writings give even less indication of the almost
hypnotic power he exercised on those who listened to his words. But, being
a German and a natural pedagogue, he had a sense of apparatus academicus that
Afterword 486

Berenson lacked. His historical intuitions could be edited by disciples, and

almost engulfed in footnotes and appendices. . . .
The passages in Berenson’s work which are likely to retain their value are
few . . . and with a scholar such as Warburg the actual writings are almost
unreadable.The history and criticism of art is a literary form in which quantity
and quality are seldom united.What we value in the critic is a general attitude
of mind, revealed, it may be, in isolated judgements, which nonetheless imply
a new direction of thought, fresh historical intuitions and insights to enlarge
our own range of understanding. All these we find in the work of Berenson .
. . they spring from qualities that are seldom found in combination – learning,
intelligence, sensibility and faith in man – and I think that posterity (if I may
invoke such a dubious concept) will value them, even though they often seem
to us imperfectly expressed. (Clark MV p. 129)
Clark could have been describing his own writings, and the fact remains that
most visitors to art galleries are more likely to be seeking an experience that
is within the gravitational pull of Berenson’s and Clark’s connoisseurship than
that of the theoretical contexts of Warburg and Panofsky. It is Berenson and
Clark who have written the genuine best-sellers that have offered something
meaningful and readable to the public at large.
Connoisseurship has an honourable lineage stretching back to Vasari in the
sixteenth century, to Jonathan Richardson in the early eighteenth century and
to Ruskin in the nineteenth century. The principal influences on Berenson’s
and Clark’s connoisseurship were Walter Pater and the late nineteenth-century
Aesthetic Movement, where intensity of feeling was everything.Temperamentally
they both had a natural propensity to feel profound passion and emotion.
Berenson came to the Aesthetic Movement as it waxed, Clark as it waned. Full
moon was the 1890s, the decade which saw Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being
Earnest, his trial and imprisonment, and the publication of Berenson’s four essays
on Italian art. True aesthetes felt intense emotion in the presence of art and
they felt it so acutely that it affected them physically as well as intellectually and
emotionally. That is why Berenson articulated his philosophy of ‘tactile values’
and ‘life enhancement’, and why, in popular literature and in Punch cartoons of
the day, ardent aesthetic heroines were inclined to swoon in front of a blue and
white Chinese vase and earnest young men went weak at the knees in front
of a Botticelli. True aesthetes also sought equal intensity in their love lives and
personal relationships, and in their response to nature.

Master and Pupil or Father and Son?

As a schoolboy, Clark declared an ambition to work for Berenson but had never
dared to dream it would happen. His ‘apprenticeship’ was the event that set him
on the road to fame and fortune, and his career developed with astonishing
Afterword 487

speed. Clark’s connection with Berenson was soon common knowledge in the
London art world, and was one of the reasons why he was selected to participate
in organising the Italian Exhibition. His work with Berenson was publicly cited as
one of the reasons for his appointments at the Ashmolean and and the National
Gallery. Berenson followed his every move with the keenest interest and never
expressed opposition or jealousy over his work or writings. Wisely prescient
was his letter to Clark in which he begged him not to accept the job at the
Ashmolean because ‘you can do better . . . [and be] a formative influence upon
the humanization of that fascinating biped man’ (see Chapter Four, letter of
10 June 1931). He could not possibly have foreseen the advent of television, or
Civilisation or how well his protégé would fulfil this hope.
What would Clark have been without Berenson? It is unlikely that he would
have passed unnoticed. He had too many talents, too many good contacts and
too much ambition. Nevertheless, from the first roll of the dice at that first
meeting with Berenson, he continued to throw astonishingly well. The Italian
Exhibition happened at just the right time. The National Gallery job fell into his
lap and, given the trouble that it brought, it was fortuitous that it was interrupted,
but not terminated, by the outbreak of hostilities. The war gave him all sorts of
opportunities to make his mark in a much wider sphere than the art world, and
made him into a much sought after national personality. His appointment as
chairman of the Independent Television Authority gave him a key insight into
the most popular and influential post-war medium, then in its infancy, and this
enabled him to develop the last phase of his career as a television presenter and
the opportunity to make Civilisation, for which he is now most remembered.
Without Berenson and without his support – or indeed if Berenson had chosen
at some point to turn against him – it might all have been different.
Two of the principal ingredients of a successful master–pupil relationship are
reverence and obedience. It is also for a finite period and can be terminated. A
parental relationship is for ever (although banishment is a possibility); children
see faults in their parents to which others are oblivious, and which they are
anxious not to repeat, while parents see qualities and familiar traits in their
children to which others are blind. And both feel remorse. Clark regretted that
he had ‘never made the most of my opportunities . . . he [Berenson] had far
more to give if only I had known better how to release his genius’ (Mariano
p. xiv).
They could not, of course, have had that instinctive familiarity that exists
between blood relations, yet perhaps they knew each other’s foibles too well.
Maybe the dilemma for Clark (and Jane) was that Berenson wanted the impossible
from them – the reverence of pupils at the same time as the affection of children.
Fortunately, the falling out and the banishment never came, so that when Clark
wrote ‘I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I know’,
perhaps he was expressing relief as well as gratitude.
Afterword 488

Legacies
Both Clark and Berenson dreamed of writing a great discursive, scholarly mag-
num opus by which they would be remembered and revered, but neither of them
achieved, or even attempted, this ambition. Berenson’s legacies are: The Florentine
Drawings, The Lists, his major role in laying the foundations that established art
history as a proper scholarly discipline, his gift of I Tatti to Harvard University
and above all, perhaps, his seminal role in the formation of American taste and
collections. Through him the American millionaires first became interested in
Italian art. ‘I want America to have as many good pictures as possible’, he said as a
young man at Harvard, knowing that then there were few anywhere in America.
There are now more Italian Renaissance paintings in the United States than
anywhere else in the world, other than Italy. Any visitor to the great American
museums that have holdings of such Italian paintings is in his debt. Whatever
view one takes of Berenson’s character, the simple fact remains that without him
the walls of the great museums of America would be noticeably and regrettably
poorer, and the serious study of Italian Renaissance painting would have a mark-
edly less secure foundation.
Clark is most remembered for his writings and lectures, especially Landscape
into Art, The Nude, and above all for Civilisation. He transformed the National
Gallery, added many notable works, and ensured that its treasures were taken to
safety during the war, to be returned in better condition.The War Artists Scheme
provided the nation with a unique and remarkable record of a country at war,
diligently and without grandiose heroics, getting on with the job in hand of
making the world a more civilised place. The personal view that Clark narrates
in Civilisation would not have been conceived without Berenson’s influence.
One senses that in his conversational style, his emphasis on the importance of
individual human achievement and of aesthetic pleasure, Clark was repeating
many of the têtes-à-tête that occurred between them on their walks in the
hills round Settignano. He embraced a philosophy and a way of understanding
art that sought to be accessible to all, and to show how life-enhancing and
necessary are art and connoisseurship for humankind’s spiritual fulfilment. The
opening chapter of such accessible, humanistic seeing, thinking and enjoying
was Berenson’s four essays on The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. The closing
chapter was Clark’s Civilisation.
Appendix 1

This paper by Robert and Carolyn Cumming was delivered at the Convegno, ‘Berenson at Fifty’, at the
Villa I Tatti, in October 2009. The full text of the paper, with illustrations and footnotes, was published
in Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, eds, Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, Villa
I Tatti Series 31, Boston, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Bernard Berenson and Count Umberto Morra: ‘Do Not Forget Me’
In November 1925, Bernard Berenson, having just turned sixty years old, wrote to the forty-
three-year-old William M. (Billie) Ivins: ‘I wish I could see you very often. How sad that the
handful of people who really life enhance are apt to be centrifugally located or disposed. Edith
Wharton is at Hyères. I have a few playfellows in Paris, as many in London, as many again in
New York. Here none, alas! Except such as are brought like Elijah’s food by the ravens.’
Ivins had first met Berenson in 1924 and had visited I Tatti earlier in 1925, but he resided
in New York, where he was curator of the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum.
What Berenson did not realise, or failed to report, is that the ravens had already brought food
which would provide continuous, lifelong and life-enhancing nourishment in the shape of
two unexpected young visitors – Umberto Morra, whose first meeting with Berenson was in
June 1925, and Kenneth Clark, who first set foot in I Tatti in September 1925.
The reason for Morra’s visit was unusual and his immediate mission was unsuccessful,
yet he was invited to stay for supper and immediately accepted into the whole Berenson
family circle with a rapidity and intimacy which was, perhaps, unique. On the face of it, it
was an unlikely friendship but it continued from that moment until Berenson’s death in 1959.
Apart from the resident members of the household, Morra spent more time with Berenson
at I Tatti and on travels with him than anyone else. Paradoxically, however, he remains the
most unrecognised and unknown of all Berenson’s most important friends, acquaintances, and
correspondents.
The purpose of this short paper, therefore, is to sketch a brief portrait of Morra and, in
particular, to explore what it was that drew the two men together and the bonds that evidently
tied them closely to one another.

The First Meeting

When Berenson and Morra met in 1925, Berenson was in his early sixties and Morra in his
late twenties. For reasons we shall discover, it was between that first meeting and the outbreak

489
Appendix 1 490

of war in 1939 that each was most influential, the one with the other; and, in spite of the age
difference, it was mutual. The significance of the friendship is recorded by that keen observer
of human character, Nicky Mariano, in her memoir Forty Years with Berenson. Mariano (born
in 1885) was twelve years older than Morra, but they formed a close and affectionate bond, as
that of older sister and younger brother:
From the first moment there was such a feeling of warmth, of mutual understanding
between this young man and the three of us that he stayed on to supper that same day and
from then on became a constant visitor. His name was Count Umberto Morra di Lavriano,
the descendant of an old Piedmontese family of military traditions and no doubt he too
would have been brought up for service in the army had he not been struck by coxitis as
a small boy. Tall and slender he would have been well made but for the lameness that this
illness had left him with. His subtle intelligence combined with great sensitivity showed
in his features and in his expression. A great help in his becoming almost a member of the
family was his familiarity with the English language, literature and history. For Mary at any
rate it was essential. She never felt really at home in another language and probably was
never able to think in it. (Mariano, p. 124)
Later, when mentioning many of the young people that BB took under his wing, Mariano
wrote: ‘perhaps of all these men the one BB talked to most during his frequent visits to I
Tatti and to Poggio allo Spino was Umberto Morra. He had a special gift of drawing out
BB’ (Mariano p. 147). These sentiments were echoed by Berenson himself: in 1935 he wrote
to Mariano, ‘You ask about Morra. He is simply perfect and I feel not a thin sheet of paper
between us. He takes almost as much interest as your darling self in all that pertains to me’
(Mariano p. 219).
What brought the two together initially, and what held them together particularly in
those pre-war years, was a passionate and indignant hatred of fascism. Morra had become
an intimate member of a circle of young writers and intellectuals who were opposed to
Mussolini, especially centered round the charismatic young radical, campaigning journalist
Piero Gobetti. From time to time these men were actively harried, persecuted, imprisoned
and even killed by the fascists. Gobetti, for example, was beaten up by fascist thugs in 1925 and
died shortly afterwards in Paris from his injuries. They were also close to the eminent socialist
writer Gaetano Salvemini, who, although a generation their senior, shared the same ideals
and objectives. Salvemini was an old friend of the Berensons, having first met them in June
1908, and he became a regular visitor to I Tatti and Vallombrosa. On 2 June 1925 Salvemini
was arrested in Rome and imprisoned in Florence. Following the arrest, Morra was asked
either by Carlo Placci or Salvemini’s wife Fernande (or possibly both) to visit Berenson with
two requests: to save any notices of the incident appearing in the foreign press, and to ask if
Salvemini might borrow Berenson’s passport in order to effect an escape to Switzerland. Both
men looked remarkably similar and it was an ingenious suggestion, but it did not meet with
favor. It was in that fateful year of 1925 that Mussolini assumed dictatorial powers and began
to construct a police state. All this was watched by Berenson with interest and anxiety.
Morra did not bring to I Tatti any particular interest or expertise in art or the art world.
What he did bring was his network of young anti-fascist contacts, and over the next few years
many of them became visitors to I Tatti. Through Morra, Berenson met the Bracci family in
Rome; the Ruffinos at La Rufola near Naples, with whom Salvemini took refuge after his
release; Alberto Moravia; Pietro Pancrazi and many more. Gugliemo degli Alberti, Alessandro
Passerin d’Entrèves and Morra were an especially close trio of anti-fascists connected with
Berenson. Alberti, a descendant of Leon Battista Alberti, translated Berenson’s Rumour
and Reflection into Italian for publication in 1950. Thus, in Mariano’s words, ‘BB ended by
Appendix 1 491

belonging to a network of anti-Fascist intelligentsia and wherever he went could be sure

of meeting kindred spirits’ (Mariano p. 127). What Berenson and the I Tatti household gave
Morra was an intimacy and a type of friendship which he clearly craved.

Umberto Morra
Morra was born on 13 May 1897 in Florence, a healthy, lively, well-formed son, the first and
only child of elderly parents. His father, then aged sixty-seven, was Count Roberto Morra di
Lavriano, who had established a highly successful career in the military, politics and diplomacy.
Close to the royal family, Roberto Morra had participated in the independence movement
of 1848, fought against the Austrians in 1849 and fought in the 1866 war which recovered
the Veneto for Italy. A deputy and senator between 1874 and 1890, he was sent by Umberto i
to Sicily in 1884, where he was responsible for the bloody suppression of a peasant uprising.
From 1897 to 1904, he was the Italian ambassador in St Petersburg, organising the state visit
to Russia of Umberto i. In 1895, at the age of sixty-five, he married for the first time: his
bride was Maria Teresa Bettini (always called Lucia), the widow of the noble Cortonese
Pirro Laparelli di Lapo, whom she had married aged seventeen. General Morra and Colonel
Laparelli were close friends in the army and when the colonel died of an incurable illness in
1893, the general wooed his beautiful and wealthy widow, then aged forty. Within two years
of the marriage, Umberto Morra was born in the headquarters of the Eighth Army Brigade
in Florence, which General Morra then commanded, and was christened in the Royal Chapel
at Monza. King Umberto and Queen Margherita were his godparents.
From his father Morra inherited a certain Piedmontese dryness and severity of character,
and a love of history, politics, diplomacy and foreign travel. It is sometimes speculated that the
massacre in Sicily turned the son against the father and caused Morra to pursue left-wing
ideals. There is perhaps some truth to this, though on balance it is unlikely to have been a
major cause, as Morra was devoted to his parents; they were a close-knit family and he later
preserved his parents’ house as a shrine to them and his godparents. Rather, we suggest that he
inherited from his father an intense patriotism and love of country which, in his father’s case,
following the Risorgimento, manifested itself in a deep loyalty to the monarchy; in Umberto,
it manifested itself, following the turmoil of the First World War and the rise of fascism, in
an equally deep loyalty to constitutional democracy and modern liberty. From his mother
Morra inherited his much-loved country house outside Cortona at Metelliano, an abiding
attachment to the landscape of the Province of Arezzo, an unpredictable sense of humour,
a Tuscan passion for debate and independent thought, and a curiosity about the unknown.
In spite of the advantages bestowed on Morra at birth, the years before he met Berenson
were not without their difficulties. He was struck down with tuberculosis at the age of five
and this left him permanently crippled. His mother died when he was twelve and his father
when he was twenty. His early education was interrupted by his illness and the search for
cures. Morra’s ambitions to study law at university were frustrated by the First World War
and he abandoned them without taking a degree in 1919. His desire to establish himself as a
political writer and to be part of the shaping of a new liberal framework for a modern Italian
state was crushed by the rise of fascism.
The formal facts about Morra’s life are well documented and accurately set out in the
celebratory volume of Morra’s life and writings that was published in 1967 when the citizens
of Cortona honored him with the title of Castellano, in succession to the painter Gino
Severini. Yet, in all that has been documented of Morra’s life, and of what has been written
about him, the least explored aspect is that of his relationship with Berenson and the circle
of I Tatti.
Appendix 1 492

Morra at I Tatti
After the death of Gobetti in February 1926, Morra went underground, like many anti-
fascist intellectuals, and based himself principally in his villa at Cortona. It became a place
of refuge for anti-fascist thinkers and writers, a sort of sanctuary. A near neighbour was the
fellow journalist and sympathiser Pietro Pancrazi, so Morra’s retreat was not isolated. Although
handsome and spacious, the villa was tucked away unobtrusively in the hamlet of Metelliano,
behind high walls and invisible from the road – yet it was easily accessible by rail, being on
the main line from Florence to Rome, and also not distant from I Tatti. Morra’s political views
and friendships were known to the authorities and, although watched by them, he was left
undisturbed. There is speculation that his royal connections gave him some protection, and
perhaps this is true. Also, he did not promote protest and agitation, realising their futility at the
time. His aim was simply ‘to keep the flame of liberty alight’ in readiness for the time when its
illumination would be able to shine again.
Away from Metelliano, Morra spent time in Rome, where the Bracci family allowed him
use of a room in their property on via 10 Novembre, and of course at I Tatti and La Consuma.
He regularly stayed at both of the Berenson places – four to six times a year – and could be
in residence for a total of two to four months or even more. In 1937, for example, he seems
to have been with the Berenson entourage for most of January, the first half of April, for two
weeks in mid-June, in early July, for two to three weeks in August and for a good three weeks
in December. In addition, there were the times when he accompanied Berenson on his travels:
for example, he travelled with Berenson, Mary and Nicky Mariano to Spain in the early
autumn of 1929 on a long expedition which lasted until early December.
We hope we have sketched enough detail, and with sufficient evidence, to give the outlines
of Morra’s formative and inter-war years and of how he became part of the life of the Berenson
circle. After the war, Morra had a busy life of his own but, even so, the connections with the
Berenson circle remained strong and important.
What, though, of the subtle tones and shades that lend substance and interest to the outline?
Our own memories of Morra in the early 1970s are of a tall, gaunt, elderly, angular figure,
at first sight potentially intimidating, but softened by a welcoming smile which signalled
approval. Not everyone was approved, and those who came under his wing were treated
with respect in the local community. He was energetic, kindly, humorous, gentle, gregarious
and sometimes endearingly childlike in what amused him; yet at the same time, he could be
acerbic, melancholic and aloof. He admitted to an ingrained pessimism. He never married but
had a wide circle of friends, was respected by men and women of all classes and backgrounds
and was much loved. Morra set high standards for himself and expected them in others.
He was uncomplaining, completely without vanity and social snobbery, though he would
not tolerate fools. He was frugal and indifferent to material comfort, personal adornment
and material possessions. Above all, he was unswervingly loyal to the people and causes that
mattered to him. In pursuing our recent researches we have found no cause to change one
syllable of this personal view and we have been delighted to find it so often reciprocated in
the mouths of others.
Yet, it also emerges that many of his fellow Italians found him baffling and enigmatic,
whereas his Anglo-Saxon friends seem to have found in him a kindred spirit which required
no explanation or unravelling. [Clark wrote of his own first visit to I Tatti:‘I did however make
one friend whose sweet character, intelligence and absolute sincerity have been a joy to me
ever since, Umberto Morra. . . .The thought of meeting Umberto again was one of the factors
which made me look forward to returning to the world of i Tatti in the following autumn’
(Clark APW p. 157)]. Indeed, several commentators have noted the Anglo-Saxon character
in Morra and, with Berenson’s own self-confessed admiration for Anglo-Saxon culture and
Appendix 1 493

people, this must have been one of the things that drew them and kept them together. Not
everyone was allowed, in Berenson’s own words, to become unsereiner – one of us – and Morra
was certainly well aware of the rareness of that blessing. It was an acknowledgement that
enabled him to become part of something, an intimate entrée into an intellectual and familial
group which arrived fortuitously, just at the moment – after the death of Gobetti – when he
most needed it; and we think it also filled a void that his own early life had left in him. Capable
of affection and warmth himself, he also needed to receive it in return.
As we explored further Morra’s own character and that of Berenson, we started to keep a
checklist of those aspects of character that they held in common, and those they did not.There
was of course a difference in age of more than three decades but Berenson and Morra came
together just at that mutual moment, which occurs not infrequently in men’s lives, when there
is a desire to find and develop a paternal rather than fraternal relationship.
What were the differences? Morra was a perfectionist, capable of strict self-denial, and
committed to an ideal of public service; we are not convinced that these were qualities
that were natural to Berenson. Although not devoid of aesthetic sensibility, Morra lacked
confidence when it came to the visual arts. His first love was literature – he was well-read and
learned and a significant part of his day was set aside for reading literature and newspapers. He
also enjoyed reading aloud, giving particular pleasure to his audiences at Cortona and I Tatti.
The resonances between Berenson and Morra were deep and strong. Both had had
obstacles to overcome in finding and establishing themselves in early life; both had an insatiable
curiosity, both were indefatigable sightseers, both enjoyed walking in the countryside and had
a deep love of Italian landscape. Above all, both of them enjoyed conversation and clearly
indulged in it together to the full. Each was given to self-analysis and introspection; each
could be, and at times clearly wished to be, aloof. In spite of this, it seems that each had a great
fear of loneliness, although each addressed it in a different way. Berenson hid from his demon
by surrounding himself with distractions and acquaintances; Morra faced his demon alone in
the dark hours of the night, determined to outstare it and conquer it unaided. Each found
writing necessary but difficult, and each failed to bring much-hoped-for writing projects to
completion. And each was fascinated by politics and contemporary events, both united in
their absolute determination to oppose all forms of totalitarianism in whatever guise it chose
to raise its ugly head.
Morra also gave Berenson what he craved for and most needed: an active and engaged
listener. An ability to listen was perhaps one of Morra’s most valuable and typically selfless
qualities, and one that he shared with many. Many also were those who acknowledged the
value of it but perhaps nobody summed it up as well as Alessandro d’Entrèves:
I think it was in Morra exactly that singular gift of sympathy, that interest, that inexhaustible
curiosity about things and for people that captured the affection and the estimation of the
old sage of Settignano, [who was] sometimes stern and sometimes even merciless in his
judgement of the young. A good judge of Italy and the Italians, I think that Berenson
might have seen and cherished in Umberto that quality which has become so rare in our
compatriots of today: an acuteness of judgement, an absence of servility, with a mistrust of
rhetoric and above all (and this was a quality which Morra possessed in the highest degree)
the art of listening . . . (Umberto Morra, Vita di Piero Gobetti: Con una testimonianza di
Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves, Turin, 1984)
Appendix 2

On the Future of I Tatti

Bernard Berenson’s wishes for I Tatti, written c. March 1956

I want to put down in writing my ideas for the future of the institution that is to use I Tatti
and my entire estate after my demise.
Our present western world is harassed, hustled and driven. It excludes leisure, tranquillity,
permits no unexciting pursuits, no contemplation, no slow maturing of ideas, no perfectioning
of individual style.
Therefore my first and foremost wish is to establish fellowships that will provide leisure and
tranquillity to sixteen or more promising students. I would like them to have yearly stipends of
5000 dollars each, at present purchasing value which would be twice the amount stated in my
will. When the fellowship fund is assured and the institute fully organised, the plan would be
to begin with four or more fellows the first year, adding four or more the second year, again
four or more the third year and once more four or more in the fourth. In the fifth year the
first lot would go and the next one come in. From then on there would be a regular rotation:
each year four or more fellows would leave and four or more would come in.
I would like half of these fellows to be appointed from the United States and Canada, four
or more from England and one or more each from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Holland. I
omit France and Germany because these countries already have institutions in Florence. With
the approval of Harvard University, the Advisory Committee hereafter referred to should
make recommendations about making exceptions when needed to my suggestions as to the
composition of the fellows. It might happen that particularly gifted individuals from other
countries, including the Soviet Block and the Far East, would seem more promising than
Anglo-Saxons of the same year and more eligible as fellows.
I would like these fellows to be no younger than 25 and no older than 35. Students who
are still candidates to Ph.D’s should be excluded and the selection made from those whose
attitude towards art and literature and thought and their history is not merely archaeological
and, in the German sense of the word, ‘philological’ but psychological and empirical, founded
on direct and loving contact with the work of art and not on book-learning. I should wish
them to have complete leisure in these four years while maturing to be creative writers and
teachers in the interpretation of art of every kind including the verbal as well as the visual
arts and not excluding fiction and verse. Research for the lust of mere research is not to be
encouraged.

494
Appendix 2 495

In a sense I venture to confess that I would like the fellows of I Tatti to continue what all
my life long I have been trying to do but have only faintly succeeded in doing. I would like
them to take as models Goethe and Winckelmann, Ruskin and Pater, Burckhardt and Wölfflin,
rather than mere antiquarians or mere attributors of the type of Cavalcaselle, Bodmer and their
likes. I would like them to write about the way artists and their works have been appreciated
through the ages rather than to concentrate on the material history or the provenance of the
given work of art. In short, I want this institute to promote aesthetical and humanistic rather
than philological and antiquarian interests.
If possible the fellows should live as an intellectual group at I Tatti and its dependencies
or in Florence half the year. Nothing opens the mind and heart like free discussion of gifted
maturing individuals coming together with their own national traditions and differing
attitudes and approach. During the other six months they shall be free to travel and to get
new impressions or revise previous ones. I would prefer their travels to be confined to what
was the ancient Oecumene, not going farther East than the Euphrates and not farther South
than Egypt and the great desert of North Africa.
The best results may be expected from the most intimate possible acquaintance with our
Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Mediaeval and Renaissance past as centred in the Mediterranean
countries and their ‘Hinterland’. Italy holds the dominant position in that region, having
absorbed all the influences of the historical past while radiating its own influence to the West
and the North, to France, Spain, England and Germany.
I have provided a library (which by the way could furnish the surest and completest
biography of myself) covering nearly every field of art and literature as well as all the ancillary
material, historical, philological and critical for rendering the arts intelligible, suggestive and
inspiring. A person properly prepared who would use the I Tatti library for four years could
not help coming out as a cultivated appreciator of all that art is and of what it has done to
humanise mankind.
The library should be accessible to serious students of whatever nationality who could
profit by using it.
I recommend that the serial publications should be continued or replaced by better ones
(if any such appear) and that new books which promise to be of permanent value should be
added to the extent that funds will permit. Dead books, by which I mean books of merely
temporary interest gathered in a lifetime had better be given to any Italian libraries who may
want them, rather than to attempt to sell them.
I would prefer my works of art to remain distributed over the house and not dumped into
a separate room as a museum or gallery.
It is a great and earnest wish of mine that not a single square yard of the grounds now
surrounding I Tatti from Ponte a Mensola up to the house and beyond should ever be
alienated. I want them to serve as a protection against the invasion of the suburbs and to
promote a feeling of free space and of distance. I should recommend that the permanent
features of the garden, like trees and hedges, should be carefully kept up, reducing if necessary
the expenditure on the cultivation of flowers.
I have every hope that whatever government prevails in Italy in the near and not too
remote future will respect I Tatti and what it offers to students of promise interested in the
pursuits that have absorbed my own life.
For the residing director I would prefer a person who was not a specialist of Florentine art
but who had the whole world’s art always in his mind, whose interest was in styles rather than
in illustration and did not reduce the work of art to a mere document for the history of its
own period. For instance, I greatly admired the Warburg Institute for appointing as its director
the late Professor Frankfurt, a student of Ancient Mesopotamian art.
Appendix 2 496

I would recommend that John Walker (at present Chief Curator at the Washington National
Gallery) should be after my demise the first director of the Harvard Institute that I Tatti is to
become. He knows intimately what my hopes and intentions are for such an institution as I
want I Tatti to be. Ever since the idea of leaving I Tatti to Harvard took shape, John Walker
and I have discussed what it should be and what could be done with it. I am convinced that
he could give it at the start the direction and the quality that I have in mind. My second
recommendation would be Philip Hofer.
As members of an Advisory Committee for I Tatti I would suggest the following names:
For the u.s.a:Walter Lippmann, John Walker, Philip Hofer, Robert Lehman, John Nicholas
Brown, Charles Henry Coster, Francis Taylor, W. G. Contstable
For England: Lord Crawford, Sir Kenneth Clark, Anthony Blunt, William Mostyn-Owen
For the Scandinavian countries: Axel Boethius
I further recommend that the Advisory Committee consult my cousin Lawrence Berenson
and Miss Elizabeth Mariano before presenting any suggestions or proposals to Harvard. Both
have full understanding of my views about the future of I Tatti.
It is my hope that the President and the Corporation of Harvard University will consult
with the Advisory Committee in the selection of the Director, in the choice of the fellows
and in the determination of the general policies of the institution.

Bernard Berenson
Appendix 3

The English text of the address that Kenneth Clark gave, in Italian, on 7 May 1960, in the Palazzo
Vecchio, Florence, appeared in the Burlington Magazine, 102 (1960), pp. 381–6, and is reprinted here
with kind permission of the editor. In the actual speech, Clark omitted one or two passages that seemed
inappropriate to a non-specialist audience, and these he put back in the text of the article.

I can imagine no greater honour than the invitation to speak to you in this noble hall, which
seems to stand at the centre of European civilisation, on the subject of one who became
almost the embodiment of that civilisation, Bernard Berenson. Those of you who knew him
will agree that he appears in our memories in many different guises – as a talker, a looker, an
artist in life and a sage. But today it is surely appropriate that we should celebrate his memory
as the unsurpassed student and critic of Italian art. How is it that a man born in Lithuania, and
brought up in a poor quarter of Boston, achieved this position?
There exists in the archives of Harvard University the application dated 30 March 1887,
which Bernard Berenson made for a travelling fellowship in Europe. He claims that he has
excelled in the field of Arabic, Assyrian, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and that his chief aim is to
increase the appreciation of Arabic literature. As in Leonardo da Vinci’s letter to Ludovico il
Moro, art is mentioned only incidentally. In fact Berenson says: ‘It is there that I feel weakest.
One can study literature after a fashion here [in Harvard], but art not at all.’ It is a shock to
recall that when Berenson was a young man there were practically no pictures by the great
Italians in the United States, a situation which Berenson himself was to do so much – we may
sometimes think almost too much – to alter.
He did not get the fellowship, but in the same year friends who recognised his brilliance,
financed a journey to Europe. He was extremely poor. Often he could not get enough to eat.
But he stayed in Europe for the next seventy years. He went first to Paris, then London, and
the pictures in the Louvre and the National Gallery made a deep impression on him. He did
not immediately abandon his ambition to combine his learning and his sense of poetry in one
compendious philosophy; indeed one may say that he never abandoned it, and that this is what
gives quality to his latest writing. But in his first year in Europe the visual arts occupied his
mind more and more, and all that was needed for him to fix his mind entirely on this study
was a means of integrating it with a way of life and an intellectual method. Both of these were
waiting for him in Italy. In Italy he found that works of art are not all imprisoned in galleries,
but are, so to say, an extension of the surrounding life and landscape; and in Italy he found a
scholar who had, as he supposed, elevated the study of art to an intellectual discipline – I refer,
of course, to Giovanni Morelli.

497
Appendix 3 498

Readers of Berenson’s Sketch for a Self-Portrait will remember the moment when his
vocation first presented itself to him. Sitting at a rickety table outside a café in the lower town
of Bergamo, he suddenly said to his companion that they should devote their entire lives to
connoisseurship. ‘We are the first to have before us no ambition, no expectation, no thought
of reward. We shall give ourselves up to learning, to distinguishing between the authentic
works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and those commonly
ascribed to him. Here at Bergamo, and in all the fragrant and romantic valleys that branch
out northward, we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a
Cariani, every Previtali a Previtali.’ ‘To this’, he adds, ‘had vaulting ambition or at least dazzling
hopes shrunk.’ And indeed it must strike us now as a strange ambition for a brilliant young
student of oriental languages. Now that there is substantial agreement about the outline of
most of the great Italian painters we forget the confused and misleading picture of their work
which in the 1880s was available to even the most diligent and perceptive student. But think of
Walter Pater, the writer from whom Berenson, to a large extent, derived his critical standards,
and whom he revered all his life. Pater’s famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci not only includes
the Medusa of the Uffizi as one of the most famous and certain of Leonardo’s works; but in
a long paragraph devoted to his drawings contrives not to mention a single one which is by
Leonardo himself. And do not let it be thought that this is because Pater was a dilettante. His
Leonardo essay was written in 1868. Thirty years later the critic Muntz published a heavy
volume which was supposed to be the authoritative study of Leonardo, and of the drawings
illustrated not a single one was authentic. And in this very same year – 1898 – Mr Berenson
was writing the Drawings of the Florentine Painters, in which the list of Leonardo’s drawings is
absolutely accurate and almost complete.
Well, if that was the predicament of so fine a critic as Pater, it certainly was worth someone’s
while to bring a little more critical acumen to bear on problems of attribution. But, you may
ask, was this not being done already by less volatile spirits than the youthful Berenson – in fact
by Cavalcaselle? Many of us would consider his History of Italian Painting the foundation of all
our knowledge. Nevertheless one can understand why Berenson reacted against that famous
work and sometimes spoke of it with distaste. It was entirely without a sense of method, it
showed no distinction of mind and, owing to the collaboration of Mr Crowe, it was written
in a style worthy of the Great Exhibition.
The intelligence and the sense of method which were so painfully lacking in Crowe and
Cavalcaselle were exactly what characterised Giovanni Morelli; and it was, therefore, natural
that the young Berenson, who was brimming over with intelligence, and who had derived
from William James the notion that a physiological method could be applied to things of
the mind, should have taken him as his master. Moreover, Morelli’s whole approach – his
aristocratic independence, his love of teasing museum directors, his Socratic professions of
ignorance – were all entirely sympathetic to Berenson and had I think a permanent influence
on his conversational style. I may add that Mr Berenson never knew him, and only set eyes
on him two or three times.
The method with which Berenson determined to winnow the rustic churches of the
Veneto and the upper Adige is described in a paper on the rudiments of connoisseurship
written in 1894 – that is to say at the same same that he was compiling the lists of the Venetian
painters and preparing the Lorenzo Lotto. The first point he makes is that the only real
evidence of who painted a picture lies in the picture itself. Documents, traditions, signatures
can be shown over and over again to be completely misleading. Nothing is certain except
quality and style. As Berenson says: ‘All that remains of an event in general history is the
account of it in a document or a tradition; but in the history of art, the work of art is the event.’
The other conclusion of his essay on method is that it is in those parts of a picture where the
Appendix 3 499

artist works unthinkingly or relies on his own formulation that he is most likely to reveal his
personality.Thus the best tests of authenticity are the ears, the hands, the folds of drapery.This,
of course, was the Morellian method, and Morelli, who had been trained as a physiologist,
carried it to great lengths. To many of you these two propositions will be very familiar, but
I repeat them now because the so-called science of connoisseurship has receded so far into
the distance that it is hard to imagine a time when it seemed a new and invigorating mental
exercise. Yet such it undoubtedly was, and appearing in the form of Berenson’s confident,
destructive articles, produced in the 1890’s a complete revolution. In particular his lists of
authentic pictures, by their laconic finality, attained an air of almost magical prestige. No
argument; no explanation or apology; just a name.
Mr Berenson’s own procedure when considering a picture rather added to this feeling of
magic. He used to tap the front of the picture with a delicate finger and then listen intently
as if expecting an almost inaudible voice to speak to him. Then after a long pause he would
pronounce a name. I hardly ever knew him explain or give his reasons – quite rightly, because
they would have been full of complexities and imponderables. And of course he tapped the
picture in order to find out if the panel was in good condition or if the canvas had been
relined. All the same I can well understand why people without his visual memory and rapid
processes of deduction thought there must be some trick. ‘I soon discovered’, he said, ‘that I
ranked with fortune tellers, chiromantists, astrologers – and not even with the self-deluded of
these, but with the deliberate charlatans.’
That, of course, was written in a moment of depression. In fact the prestige of the early lists,
and of Berensonian connoisseurship in general, was overwhelming. For almost thirty years this
particular branch of scholarship – the giving of names – had a prestige similar to that of textual
criticism in philological studies. And just as the greatness of a Bentley or a Housman does
not reside in the correctness of their textual emendations, but rather in some combination
of elegance of mind and far-reaching scholarship, so the value of Berenson’s early lists is not
invalidated by the fact that a very large number of his hypotheses have proved to be incorrect
– often by Berenson himself.
I said that there was a flaw in the doctrine that the work of art in itself should be the
sole basis of connoisseurship. It is, of course, that there must be some fixed points to which a
name is attached, and this name can only be provided by documents and signatures. To ignore
such signposts and proceed entirely on internal evidence may sometimes succeed – as it did
for example, in the case of Alunno di Domenico, whose name, Bartolomeo di Giovanni, was
afterwards discovered; but more often it ends badly, as in the outstanding example of Amico
di Sandro. This was the most ambitious of all Berenson’s ‘artistic personalities’, and as you will
remember he ended by disintegrating into Botticelli of the ’80s and early Filippino. A similar
fate overtook Alvise Vivarini, Polidoro Lanziani and several others. And yet the creation of
these Pirandellian figures performed a useful function in criticism; in fact certain phases of
art history, for example the relationship of Filippino to Botticelli, could hardly have been
clarified without them. And how often those of us who still privately practise the art of
connoisseurship (for there has long ceased to be a public demand for it), lament the loss of
these convenient cards of identity. How useful Alvise was for those Bellinesque portraits now
transferred to Jacometto; how satisfactory when we could pronounce the name of Polidoro
Lanziani before a whole group of Venetian paintings done in the 1530s. To embark on a long
inconclusive explanation is far less satisfactory.
The early lists were the production of idealistic youth.They were, as Berenson later pointed
out, too exclusive: dandaical aestheticism, he called it. They did not allow for an off-day. They
took no cognizance of studio practice. Actually the most serious result of this idealism was
one which the author never quite admitted, his lack of interest in the physical condition of
Appendix 3 500

pictures. If there was one thing that bored the young Berenson more than documents it was
technique; and although he learnt to be much more careful in these matters, to the end of his
days he never had quite enough respect for the skill of restorers. Perhaps nobody who hasn’t
worked in a gallery can realise how much that one sees exhibited is the work of these gifted
and self-effacing craftsmen. The young student from Harvard had never visited a restorer’s
workshop, and so he could put as the only illustration to his Venetian Painters the Hampton
Court Shepherd, which, if all later repaint were removed, would be a very faint shadow indeed.
I may add that I was with him when he came to look at it again for the later lists. A long
silence was broken by Mrs Berenson saying to him ‘Bernard, we must have been in love.’
As everybody knows, the success of the lists, and of the accompanying essays in the science
of connoisseurship, especially that on the New Gallery Exhibition of 1894, led to a great
change in Berenson’s material circumstances. His destructive comments on famous and
valuable old masters had so greatly alarmed collectors and dealers alike that there was nothing
for it but to persuade this terrible poacher to turn game-keeper. People sometimes say that
his decision to work for dealers had a crucial effect on his intellectual development. Berenson
himself placed the crisis of his life in these years, but related it to a different event, the decision
to write The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. There may be an element of what (I believe)
psychologists call substitution in the tone of regret in which he always referred to that great
work; but no doubt he was right, looking back on his life, in seeing this as the moment when
he might have followed one of two paths: the path opened up by the introductions to the
Florentine and Central Italian volumes, the path, that is to say, of philosophic criticism and
appreciation; or the path opened up by the lists. And it is important to notice that Berenson’s
reason for choosing the latter was not material gain (for the choice preceded, by some years,
his decision to work for dealers) but the feeling that scholarship was a more respectable and
serious-looking occupation than criticism. ‘I dared not resist the chance offered me of proving
that I could toil and plod and pedantise and bore with the best of them.’
I have called the Florentine Drawings a ‘great work’, and it deserves that epithet on many
counts: for its sheer bulk, for its originality, for the quantity of penetrating criticism which
it contains and for the way in which its judgements have stood up to sixty years of scrutiny.
No large systematic study of old master drawings had ever been written before, and no one
had thought, in the words of the title, of criticising and studying them as ‘documents in The
History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art’. Consider the mere physical difficulties of coping with
this mass of material, and persuading the custodian of the freezing print room of the Uffizi to
leave his scaldino and rummage in the dark for another portfolio. Mr Berenson often said that
it was those winters in the Gabinetto di Disegni which accounted for the row of shawls and
coats which struck every visitor to I Tatti. But through it all his eye never lost its sharpness and
really the only judgements which required revision were those in the section on Michelangelo
which, paradoxically enough, contains the best criticism in the book.
The Florentine Drawings was finished in 1897, but did not appear till 1903, owing to the
machinations of Dr Bode, who would not allow the illustrations printed by the German state
printing press to be released. I may add in parenthesis that the relations of Berenson and Bode
continued for about thirty years to be that of Pope and Emperor in the thirteenth century:
on the whole the Pope had the best of it, and ended by giving the Emperor absolution. There
followed fifteen years during which Berenson greatly enlarged his range of knowledge – how
greatly can be judged by a single fact, that the original Central Italian lists do not contain the
name of Sassetta, and such of his works as are included appear under the name of Sano di
Pietro. He began to pay far more attention to chronology, as one can see, for example, in his
Venetian Paintings in America. The original method was less rigorously applied, but the word
Appendix 3 501

still held some magic for him and appears in the title of a work, Three Essays in Method, which,
personally, I think the least satisfactory of his books.
During these years collectors, dealers and students of art history were all clamouring for
revised lists, and I don’t see how Mr Berenson could have refused them. It must have been
galling for him to see the old ones, with all their mistakes and omissions, quoted as his
opinions. Almost every day he would receive corrections which he himself had made twenty
years earlier. The revised lists were inevitable. But of course they were much less fun than the
old ones. Instead of being a touchstone of quality they had to be all inclusive. Instead of being
a sharp weapon used to assault an inert mass of tradition, they themselves became the mass,
the canon, the object of assault. And then instead of the fragrant valleys north of Bergamo
the work had to be done from photographs. Those photographs! They were like a plague of
flies which descended on I Tatti, driving everybody mad. You will remember that the old
brown silver prints were on very thin paper which curl up at sight. Mrs Berenson stuck them
down with paste onto pieces of cardboard, but the paste fermented and the photographs got a
disease, which infected all the other photographs, and they had all to be put in the sun to cure
them, and then of course they all curled up again – and so it went on.
When I first stayed at I Tatti in the early 1920s, the revision of the lists was in full swing, and I
must say that the atmosphere was very far from the tranquil, frugal, hopeful aestheticism which
must have prevailed in Fiesole when the first edition of the Italian Painters was being prepared.
Young ladies ran hysterically from room to room, and every few minutes Mr Berenson would
emerge like Jehovah from his study and ask for a photograph which was invariably missing.
I was often reminded of Yeats’s lines: ‘I saw a staring Virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died.’
The lists were done in the end: but alas, it was too late. By 1932 the prestige of connoisseurship
had declined. The new fashion for iconographical studies was already in the ascendant. And
although it is a vulgar error to associate the science of connoisseurship with the art market, the
fact remains that it derived some of its force, as all forms of art and scholarship do, from the
fact that it was needed: needed, I mean, by the big, wicked world. It is difficult for anyone who
was not concerned to imagine the mania for ‘attributions’ which flourished in the inflationary
20s. It was like the railway mania of the 1840s – or, to take a closer parallel, it was like the trade
in relics in the fourteenth century. Certificates of attribution were the means of keeping in
affluence quite a large proportion of the priesthood of art. In this hierarchy Mr Berenson was,
as I have said, the Pope. Like the Holy Father he was himself entirely above suspicion, and his
pronouncements were accepted as infallible. All this collapsed with the 1930 slump. And by
the time rich people were willing to pay high prices for pictures again, their eyes fell on the
brighter, more accessible and, by and large, more authentic works of the Impressionists. This
meant that by the time the revised lists appeared, everyone (and scholars are not immune from
social change) had lost just that extra eagerness which we bring to a subject which offers great
material rewards.
But this does not affect their permanent value. It takes, I think, a little imagination to realise
what an extraordinary achievement the small volume of the Italian Pictures of the Renaissance
is. Open it at random.You will probably find yourself confronted with the name of a painter
– let us say Paolo Farinati – which suggests a fairly vague mental picture. You will find a list
of about 100 works in village churches, in galleries, in private collections all over the world.
Every one of those works Berenson had seen, and they had formed a clear image of Farinati in
his mind, so that he could apply it instantly in going round a collection. Now multiply this by
300, for that is the number of painters listed in the volume, and remember that all these images
had to be clear and usable. And each judgement not only involved a feat of memory, but was
often a piece of condensed criticism. It meant saying ‘given the character and capacities of this
Appendix 3 502

particular artist, this is the kind of picture he might have painted.’ All this must be kept in mind
when we find ourselves questioning, as we inevitably do, certain of the judgements; or when
specialists in one particular artist point to occasional mistakes.
This remarkable achievement was to some extent the result of an unusually good memory,
not only for visual impressions, but for facts and dates. But one remembers most vividly, and so
to say, creatively, things which have moved one: and the first reason why Berenson’s lists have
a quality which no other compilation of the kind has achieved (I am thinking for example of
van Marle’s volumes) is that pictures moved him. The lists are a record of his responses to the
quality of the pictures he had seen, and ultimately it was this responsiveness which decided
all his judgements. He came more and more to distrust arguments in favour of an attribution,
and maintained that real conclusions were always arrived at instinctively. ‘In the beginning was
the guess.’ On the other hand, he didn’t like it when other people did this (what he called the
basta vedersi school) and, to be fair, his own conclusions were always examined methodically
after they had been reached.
In the 1932 edition the essays on Renaissance painting were, for the first time, issued
in a volume separate from the lists of authentic pictures. This was obviously a convenience
to the student and the tourist, but it diminished and even falsified Berenson’s achievement.
The point of the first lists was that they were an index of quality, an evaluation: and this was
supplemented by the evaluations in the essays. These remain, after sixty-five years, remarkably
convincing – and I do not think this means simply that we still agree with them. There are
points of disagreement. I think we should all be disposed to rate Uccello and Pietro Lorenzetti
higher than he does. But the reasons for his low opinion of these painters are in themselves
interesting. He under-rated Uccello because, influenced by Vasarian tradition, he associated
him with science and naturalism. To condemn a Renaissance painter in the 1890s for his
naturalism is surprising and impressive. And after perceptive praise of the Lorenzetti, he writes
that ‘Pietro could sink to the rubbish of his Passion scenes at Assisi, when he carries Duccio’s
themes to the utmost pitch of frantic feeling. Form, movement, composition – even depth
and significance – have been sacrificed to the most obvious and easy emotion. A like anarchy
has seldom again overtaken an Italian master, even of the Bolognese school. To find its parallel
you must go to Spain and to certain Germans.’ Well, one may not agree with this judgement
(although I think there is much truth in it), but one must admit that to keep one’s critical
faculties so rebelliously alive in spite of the holy hypnotism of Assisi, was a remarkable feat.
But such sudden shocks of disagreement are rare. In general we find ourselves assenting
almost too easily. We take his evaluations for granted until we remember the accepted values
of the 90s. For example the unquestioned supremacy of Ghirlandajo — thought to be
Sophoclean climax of the Quattrocento – an evaluation which you will find not only in
Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but in the ordinary encyclopaedia article right up to 1910. That
is firmly put on one side. ‘Not a spark of genius.’ ‘The painter for the superior philistine.’
And in contrast, Botticelli, whom Pater had included so diffidently, so apologetically, in the
Renaissance, Botticelli is rated by Mr Berenson as ‘the greatest artist of linear design that
Europe has ever had.’
Even more remarkable than his evaluation of Botticelli, who had, after all, been highly
praised by Ruskin, was the place he gave to Piero della Francesca, whose work is never
mentioned by Ruskin at all. Piero plays no more than an historical role in Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, yet Berenson puts him with Giotto and Masaccio as one of the three or four
greatest artist of the Quattrocento, and recognizes his affinities with early Greek sculpture and
Velázquez.
This comparison suggests one of the ways in which Berenson’s approach to the old masters
differs so markedly from that of his contemporaries, not only Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but
Appendix 3 503

Bode, Muntz or Frizzoni. He had far wider terms of reference. He was not confined to the
groove of his own period. Already his mind was ranging back to Egyptian art, and dwelling
with fascination on the problem which was to absorb his last thirty years, the declining art of
Hellenism; and most striking of all when viewed historically, his pages are full of references
to contemporary French painting. Signorelli is compared to Daumier, the early drawings
of Leonardo, most justly, to those of Degas; and in the middle of a passage on Umbrian
landscape is this sentence: ‘In spite of the exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky
its tactile values as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure, in spite of Monet’s
communication of the very pulse beat of the sun’s warmth over fields and trees, we are still
waiting for a real art of landscape.’ That was written in 1896, and you see that Berenson
has recognised what we have only recognised quite recently, the two decisive figures in late
nineteenth-century painting.
The other factor that gives the lists their exceptional authority is, as I have said, that they
were accompanied by a fresh and vigorous aesthetic philosophy. Re-reading the introductions
to the Florentine and Central Italian Painters it is surprising how much space is taken up with
the statement of aesthetic principles. Most of us remember the pages on tactile values, but
forget that there are similar disquisitions on naturalism, on movement, on the visual image,
on illustration, on the impersonality of art, on space-composition. Even in the North Italian
Painters, which sometimes has the weary and distracted tone of an afterthought, there are
admirable disquisitions on the influence of the antique, and on prettiness in art. There is no
doubt that Berenson attached great importance to these statements of critical principles, and
he often lamented, both in his conversation and in the Sketch for a Self-Portrait, that he had
not carried this sort of criticism far further. ‘I cannot rid myself ’ he says, ‘of the insistent inner
voice that keeps whispering and at times hissing “you should not have competed with the
learned nor let yourself become that equivocal thing, an ‘expert’.You should have developed
and clarified your notions about the enjoyment of the work of art. These notions were your
own. They were exhalations of your vital experience.”’ How far was this inner voice justified?
How valuable were those ‘notions’, as he calls them, and how fruitfully could they have been
applied?
I believe that as they stand in the prefaces, they have great value. Like so much of
Berenson’s thought they go back to Goethe, to whom I believe the term ‘life enhancing’
is due; and although he says that they contain no echo of what he had heard or what he
had read, I think they must owe something to Hildebrand’s Problem of Form (1893), which
in turn was inspired by the correspondence of Conrad Fiedler and Hans von Marées. But
where Berenson was strikingly original was in developing the theory that the life-enhancing
effect of works of art is due to what he called ‘ideated sensations’ experienced through an
unconscious self-identification. It was the first, and remains the only, de-mysticised aesthetic to
command respect (because a sexual aesthetic is really too incomplete to be worth considering).
Compared to it the ‘plastic sequences’ of Roger Fry and the ‘significant form’ of Mr Clive Bell
are pure mysticism – not to say incantation. And even the more respectable aesthetic theories
of the past – for example, those based on laws of proportion – end up in magic, although
we may agree that the magic of numbers is a very ancient and honourable one. In three of
its applications, tactile values, movement and space-composition, I find that the aesthetic of
the ideated sensation really works, and is a most valuable basis for criticism. And if we feel
that Berenson under-rates the value of illustration (as, for example, in his slighting references
to Bruegel), we must remember the popular instinct, especially in England, is to think of
art solely in those terms. As he pointed out forty years later, he was writing for ‘a public
accustomed under the influence of Rio, Ruskin, Lindsay and the pre-Raphaelites, to see little
in painting but illustration’. His contention that changes of taste are changes of visual imagery,
Appendix 3 504

because this reflects the objects of our daily interest or desire; whereas the non-illustrative
element in art, being dependent on our bodily responses, is far more stable, is I think true and
valuable; but in 1895 it was a shock, and it is not surprising that, as he said, ‘the public took no
notice of reservations or attenuations, and remember only that part of my theory which was
startling’. Incidentally, one of the great drawbacks of this passage in the Central Italian Painters
is that he could not find a satisfactory name for the non-illustrational element. He called it,
you may remember, ‘decoration’: a most unhappy piece of terminology, because that word has
different and precise associations from which it cannot now be separated.
Berenson’s theory was, as I say, a revolutionary doctrine in 1895, and strangely enough
it can be applied to the revolutionary art of today which Mr Berenson himself disliked.
For example, Mr Henry Moore’s statements about sculpture are in fact amplifications of the
doctrines of tactile values and space composition, although they are related to organic life in
general, rather than to the human figure alone. And what other justification for tachist art can
there be except that of the ideated sensation? No doubt Berenson was right in thinking that
his theories would stretch far further than the application he had given them in the Florentine
and Central Italian Painters.
Should he then have spent his life, as he himself several times suggests, in extending and
applying these principles? I think it was a wise instinct which prevented him from doing so.
Berenson was not a philosopher in the limited or professional sense of the word. His thoughts
were not controlled by logic; his mind, which could accommodate such a multitude of concrete
impressions, was hostile to abstractions; and he had a corresponding mistrust of systems. ‘Every
attempt at a system’, he said, ‘is made at the expense of facts, fancies, suggestions and ideas that
clamour for notice like the denizens of Dante’s Inferno. I can never get their cries out of my
ears.’ Could he have continued with the same kind of intensive critical examination of Italian
art? Here the difficulty was, I think, that the prefaces had said too much in too small a space.
In a way it is their strength: it is this which has kept them alive for sixty-five years. But the
price of such concentration was that he could not go back over the same ground. He could
not undertake a fuller and more leisurely critical survey of Italian art without feeling that he
was repeating himself. The lists, on the other hand, were continually expanding; and so the
essays published between 1903 and 1940 are not criticism, but connoisseurship – footnotes
to the lists.
And yet the lists bored him. Indeed I doubt if he would have stuck to them had it not been
for Mrs Berenson, whose mind had not evolved at the same rate as her husband’s, and whose
strong, pragmatic common sense saw them as a job that had to be done. How often have I seen
them in a gallery together, he delighting in the azure distance in some Bellinesque Madonna,
she insisting on a conclusion as to its authorship.
All the time he cherished certain dreams of escape. The one which took most concrete
form in his mind was a critical and philosophical survey of one of the great crises of art
history, the decline of classical and rise of mediaeval art. He collected material for this book
from about 1910 to 1940. It was to this end that he undertook his journeys and accumulated
his library, and in many ways it seemed a subject ideally suited to his genius. His learning, his
memory, his unrivalled power of relating incidents remote from one another and of drawing
analogies – in a word his historical wisdom – could all have been united and controlled by his
aesthetic principles. But the book was never written. All that remains is the fragment on the
arch of Constantine, and the brilliant suggestions in the last chapters on Aesthetics and History.
And what, we may ask, prevented it?
One answer, frequently given, is that he could not write. I have often heard it suggested
that this was because English was not his native language. But this, I am sure, is a mistake.
He could not remember a time when he did not speak English, and although a formidable
Appendix 3 505

linguist, he did not know a word of Yiddish – the language of his parents. It is true, however,
that he never had a sure grasp of English idiom or of the rhythm of an English sentence. His
style was peculiar. And he had the misfortune to be surrounded by stylists. His closest friend,
R. C. Trevelyan, wrote an admirable classic English; his brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith,
was a master of fine writing. Mrs Berenson wrote a normal straightforward English prose.The
young Berenson with his flowing locks and drooping eyelashes, wrote in a sort of Disraelian
style, which offended the pure taste of his three closest associates. ‘You have no idea what
Bernard’s style was like’, Mrs Berenson used to say, ‘Logan had to take him in hand. Trevy had
to rewrite practically the whole book.’ Can it be wondered that when Mr Berenson took up
his pen he felt somewhat inhibited by the thought of these eager critics breathing down his
neck; or that certain pages, for example the section at the end of the North Italian Painters,
called the Decline of Art, read as if they had been put through a mangle and starched by a very
severe laundry. And the proof of this is, that when this formidable trio were no longer behind
him, his natural style appeared; and was by no means a bad one. The Self-Portrait is, in a way, a
well written book, with a fresh, vivid, idiosyncratic use of language. The miniature portrait of
Carlo Placci in Rumour and Reflection is a masterpiece. It is revealing, and rather touching, that
he wrote most naturally when he knew that his work wasn’t going to appear in English, but
in the admirable Italian of his friend Loria.
The reason why Berenson never wrote the great book that was in him is that his powers
came more and more to be controlled by his immediate responses. He became a sort of
sublime improvisatore, playing with his vast learning according to the happy chance of the
moment. He treated knowledge and ideas as the bards treated legend and poetic imagery, as
part of an inexhaustible reservoir to be drawn upon for the delight of his audience; and he had
a half-conscious feeling that to fix facts and ideas on a printed page was to deprive them of
their life. At most they could be allowed to show themselves in those marvellous digressions
and asides which illuminate so many pages of Aesthetics and History and Rumour and Reflection.
Such a procedure is rare in the modern world; it is hard for us to believe that the Iliad or the
Bagavad Gita was originally spoken from memory. But in the history of man, this has been
the classic form of teaching, especially in those teachings of the East, where Berenson’s first
interests lay. But he differed from Homer and the author of the Bagavad Gita in one important
respect, and that was his response to his surroundings. The bardic recitals take place on a stage
as bare of scenery as that of antique sculpture; but Berenson was the child of Rousseau – the
Rousseau of the Réveries d’un Promeneur Solitaire. Only his walks, fortunately for many of us,
were not solitary. Anyone who has had the privilege of accompanying Mr Berenson on his
walks in the garden of I Tatti or in the hills behind Vincigliata, will, I believe, agree that it
was then that he was most entirely himself, because it was then that his powers of perception,
of memory and of co-ordinating intelligence were all brought into harmony. His mind was
continually enriched by what he saw and not distracted by what he heard. And what he saw
was the countryside and the country people of Italy.
I began by saying that he was drawn to Italian art because he felt it to be an extension
of Italian life. In his first resolution to devote his life to connoisseurship, the fragrant valleys
north of Bergamo are as important to him as the Lotto’s and Cariani’s he will find hidden
there; and in the course of life they became more so. Italy, which at first had charmed him by
its beauty and the abundance of its art, came in the end to be the centre of his moral being
as well, and so in the truest sense his own country. Paradoxically, the realisation of this only
came to him clearly in 1942 when Italy declared war on the United States; and those of you
who have read his Rumour and Reflection will remember the moving pages in which he decides
to stay on in this country, despite all the possible risks and hardships involved. He gives three
reasons, that he felt so identified with the deeply humanised people of Italy that he could
Appendix 3 506

not face deserting them; that if he left he could not avoid ‘serving against this Italy which I
love so much’; and finally he wanted to round off his acquaintance with the Italian people by
seeing how well he would be treated. He was not mistaken. When the war was over he felt
himself even more closely linked with the Italian people, and the town which he had loved
for so many years showed in return its admiration for him. This citizen of the world became
a Citizen of Florence. It was the one honour ever bestowed upon him which really touched
his heart.
Dramatis Personae

Part 1

The biographical details of Berenson’s and Clark’s lives between 1925 and 1959 are covered in
detail in the introductions to the chapters. This section gives a summary of their lives before
1925 and after 1959 as appropriate, with brief biographical information on their spouses, and
those blood relations and members of their households mentioned in the letters.
Bernard Berenson (1865–1959)
Bernard Berenson was born on 26 June 1865, in Lithuania, at Butrimonys, in the province
of Vilna, in the Pale of Settlement, an area set aside by the Russian Tsars in which the Jews
were allowed to reside. His father, Alter Valvrojenski, was a logger who married Eudice
Mickelshanski. He was the eldest of five children. He was brought up in the Jewish faith.With
a precocity for languages, he learned Hebrew and German and he was also taught to admire
German culture.
In 1874 or 1875, with increasing anti-semitic pogroms in Lithuania, his father emigrated
to Boston in the usa and the family joined him soon afterwards. On arrival in America, the
family changed their name to Berenson. At that time, Berenson spelt his first name Bernhard
(he adopted the Anglicised spelling Bernard in the First World War). In America, his parents
changed their first names to Albert and Julia.
With no money and few worldly possessions, the family lived in considerable hardship
in the poorer parts of Boston. Albert, a somewhat feckless individual who did not make
friends and relationships easily, struggled to make a living as a pedlar. His eldest son, Bernhard,
however, flourished. Good-looking, charming and with noticeable intellectual abilities which
he nourished by voracious reading in the Boston Public Library, he secured a place at the
Boston Grammar School and from there, in 1883, a place at the recently established Boston
University, then recovering from the great Boston Fire of 1872 which had destroyed many of
its buildings.
In 1884, sponsored by Edward (‘Ned’) Perry Warren, a young aesthete and collector
who had just graduated from Harvard University, and who came from a rich Massachusetts
family, Berenson was admitted to Harvard. He majored in literature, pursued linguistic studies
(including Sanskrit) and began to take an interest in the fine arts. At Harvard, the subject was
taught by Charles Eliot Norton who did not take to Berenson (the sentiment was reciprocal).
The person with the most significant influence on the young Berenson was the philosopher
William James, from whose teachings Berenson developed his ideas of ‘tactile values’ and
‘ideated sensations’.

507
Dramatis Personae 508

Boston and Harvard Universities had a profound, formative influence on Berenson and at
Harvard he made a favourable impression on his contemporaries, noticeably as editor-in-chief
of the Harvard Monthly. On graduation in 1887, his idea was to travel to Europe and become ‘a
critic or historian of literature’. He applied for a travelling fellowship but this was blocked by
Norton. However, a number of his admirers (including Warren and Isabella Stewart Gardner,
the immensely rich collector, patron and philanthropist who created the eponymous Museum
in Boston) offered to support him financially in his venture. He travelled to Paris and to
Oxford where he joined Ned Warren. What had been intended as a one-year visit in pursuit
of literature was a watershed: Berenson discovered a passion for paintings and the visual arts,
and he did not return to the usa for many years. He studied Italian Renaissance paintings in
the museums, galleries and churches of Europe and started his collection of photographs. He
met the pioneer scholars of Italian Renaissance studies, Giovanni Cavalcaselle and Jean-Paul
Richter, and through the latter became a disciple of Giovanni Morelli, whose pioneering
methods of analysing the way in which individual artists treat detail opened the path to a new
level of accurate attributions and authentications.
However, Berenson’s most significant meeting came in 1888, in London, when he was
introduced to Mary Costelloe, née Pearsall Smith. The initiator of the introduction was a
close friend of both Mary’s and Berenson’s, Gertrude Burton. She was the young wife of a
professor in Boston, and Berenson corresponded with her about his travels in Europe; she also
corresponded with Mary, telling her about Berenson and praising his ‘genius’, the tenderness
of their friendship and details of his travel plans. Gertrude had been one of the Boston
University group of girls on whom Berenson’s eye had fallen.Thus, Mary, having been briefed
by Gertrude that Berenson was in England in 1888, invited him to dinner with her husband,
Frank Costelloe, at their house.Their second encounter took place at Mary’s parents’ house in
Surrey in 1890; having been briefed regularly by Gertrude, Mary prepared for it carefully so
as to make the best impression. They fell deeply in love and, although they always lived apart
formally before they eventually married, they were at once inseparable as lovers, travelling
companions and business partners. In 1885, Berenson had been baptised into the Episcopalian
Church in Boston and, in February 1891, he was received into the Catholic Church at Monte
Oliveto Maggiore in Italy.
The following decade, between this second encounter and their marriage in 1900 after
the death of Frank Costelloe, witnessed the laying of the foundation stones on which all
Berenson’s subsequent career and achievements would be built. Berenson published his first
books, notably three volumes of the Italian Painters of the Renaissance (the fourth was published
in 1907) and his monograph Lorenzo Lotto; a volume of essays, The Study and Criticism of Italian
Art, was published in 1901. He was also carrying out the laborious spadework for his ground-
breaking scholarly achievement which was published in 1903, The Drawings of the Florentine
Painters. The extensive travels that he and Mary made throughout Italy to look at works of
art at first hand during this time laid the cornerstone of knowledge on which his reputation
and expertise came to depend. He started to earn fees by advising American collectors and
receiving commission on their purchases, his most important client being Isabella Stewart
Gardner. In the spring of 1900, in preparation for marriage, they took a lease on the Villa
I Tatti, a relatively humble farmhouse in the hills above Florence. On 27 December 1900,
Berenson and Mary took a horse and carriage from I Tatti to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence
and were married in a civil ceremony. The majority of the paintings in their collection was
acquired soon afterwards.
From 1900 to 1945, Berenson’s writings consisted principally of revisions to, and new
editions of, works already published, and the constant revision of the ‘Lists’. Much time was
spent on travelling and creating the extensive library and on entertaining: the young and
unknown who showed promise were as much welcome as the rich and famous. In 1907,
Dramatis Personae 509

Berenson entered into a contract with the art dealer Joseph Duveen and this provided the
income with which to sustain the expensive way of life that he and Mary required and
enjoyed. I Tatti was purchased in 1907 but the lifestyle and routines, including the stormy
personal relationship, were much the same in all their essentials in 1925 as they were at the
time of their marriage. The only notable variation occurred during the First World War when
Berenson, on the recommendation of Edith Wharton, was employed by the us government as
a translator and negotiator for the American Army Intelligence Section and, as a consequence,
attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Contemporary politics always held a strong
fascination for Berenson.
Berenson spent only twelve years of his life – from ten to twenty-two – in the usa but he
always considered himself first and foremost to be an American and a Bostonian. He last went
there in 1903–4 when he and Mary were on a business trip lasting six months. His parents
and siblings remained in America and he kept in contact with them, giving them substantial
financial support. His parents never escaped their straitened circumstances: his father died in
1928 aged eighty-three; his mother, in 1938 aged ninety-one. Berenson was closest in age to
and most intimate with his sister Senda (see Senda Berenson Abbott) who was a pioneer
in promoting women’s basketball and an instructor in gymnastics at Smith College, where
she married the professor of English, Herbert Vaughan Abbott. His youngest sister, Rachel,
vivacious, amusing and self-centred, married Ralph Barton Perry who became professor of
philosophy at Princeton University; she died suddenly in 1933. The only sibling to outlive
him was his second sister, Elizabeth (‘Bessie’), who was solitary and melancholic, with some
talent as a sculptor; she never married. His brother, Abraham (‘Abie’), was a drifter, and feck-
less like his father, constantly in need of money for some unpromising venture; he died after
an operation in 1936.
Senda Berenson Abbott (1868–1954)
Senda Berenson Abbott was the most beautiful of Berenson’s sisters and the one nearest to him
in age. She rose to prominence as a pioneer of women’s basketball, writing the first Basketball
Guide for Women (1901–7). She did not have much interest in athletics as a child, preferring
music, literature and art, but when back problems forced her to give up the piano in 1890, she
entered the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. At first, she hated the exercise but as her
back improved she grew to enjoy it, and she was recommended for a physical education job at
Smith College. She remained at Smith for twenty-one years, introducing fencing in 1895. In
1911, she married a professor of English at Smith, Herbert Vaughan Abbott.
Alda, Bertie and Cecil von Anrep
Alda Anrep (1883–1974) was Nicky Mariano’s elder sister. She married, in 1909, Baron
Egbert (‘Bertie’) von Anrep (1873–1955), also from the Baltic aristocracy. In early 1920, Alda
and Bertie, both impoverished, with their young son Cecil, left Germany for Italy and came
to live with Nicky at the Villino at I Tatti; they later moved to a rented apartment in the
Borgo san Jacopo, Florence. In time, they became an integral and indispensable part of the I
Tatti household: by 1924, Bertie was helping to run the I Tatti estate, eventually being given a
salaried job as the general manager; in 1930 Alda took over the running of the Library.
Mary Berenson (1864–1945)
Mary Berenson (née Pearsall Smith) was one of seven children but only she, her sister Alys
and her brother Logan, survived into adulthood. She was brought up in Pennsylvania in an
ardent Quaker community. Her mother, Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911), was active in
the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, a lay speaker and author in the Holiness
movement in the United States and in the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland. Her father, Robert Pearsall Smith (1827–1999) shared his
wife’s social and spiritual beliefs and was also a successful businessman, publishing maps
Dramatis Personae 510

and managing a glass factory, thus enabling the family to enjoy a substantial income. Mary
was educated at Harvard Annex where she met Frank Costelloe (1855–1999), a Catholic of
Scottish Irish descent, whom she married in 1885. She was also received into the Catholic
Church. Costelloe qualified in England as a barrister and was an active political reformer.
They settled in England and had two daughters, Rachel (‘Ray’) who was born in 1887 and
Karin who was born in 1889. In 1888, Mary’s parents settled in England in order, in part, to
be near their daughter and grand-daughters, and in part to spread their evangelical messages.
Logan and Alys also settled in England. Mary’s relationship with Frank Costelloe was not
particularly happy and, in England in 1890, she met Berenson. She was captivated by him, his
interest in art and his abilities, which she determined to see him develop to the full. Leaving
her husband and children behind, she followed Berenson to Italy and worked with him as a
partner to develop their skills as connoisseurs, writers, art advisers and collectors. When Frank
Costelloe died in 1899, she married Berenson shortly thereafter and together they purchased
I Tatti and made it the centre of their lives and careers. She was a woman with a powerful
physical presence and personality, and she had a strong appetite for physical fulfilment, travel,
material possessions and stimulating company. In many respects she was the driving force in
establishing Berenson’s early reputation as the leading authority on Italian art, and ensuring
that his skills and expertise were noticed and well remunerated. She and Berenson had no
children by choice. Their relationship was stormy yet passionate, although they both accepted
that each was free to pursue love affairs with others. Mary had a particular penchant for men
younger than herself who needed looking after. However, Mary proved, in the end, to be less
robust than her husband and from the mid-1920s began to suffer increasingly from nervous
collapses and debilitating physical conditions.
Richard Arthur Berenson (1908–1990)
Richard Arthur Berenson was a second cousin once removed. Berenson had no nephews as
such but was inclined to describe male Berenson relations of the appropriate age as ‘nephew’.
When Berenson’s father moved to Boston, he joined cousins on both his and his wife’s sides
who had already moved there and adopted the name of Berenson. Richard Arthur was a
Harvard graduate and completed his studies at the Harvard Business School under Georges
Doriot. He became a successful businessman in Boston and supported many charitable causes.
In 1983, he gave a substantial amount of documentary material relating to Berenson family
history to Harvard University.
Barbara Halpern (1912–1999)
Barbara Halpern was the daughter of Mary Berenson’s daughter, Ray Strachey (who had
married a younger brother of Lytton Strachey, Oliver). After studying history at Oxford
University in 1930–33, Barbara Halpern sailed on a windjammer to Cape Horn, marrying
the Finnish purser when they reached Australia. A son, Roger, was born in March 1935 but
the marriage soon broke down and they were divorced. She met and married Wolf Halpern
in 1937 (he was killed in an air crash in 1943) and then wished to be reunited with Roger. At
the start of the war, Barbara Halpern joined the North American Service of the bbc, and in
a career there which lasted four decades she became the chief producer for the forerunner of
the World Service. She was notably clear-headed, with a reputation for formidability, strong
organising powers and grasp of detail. Roger spent his first three winters, 1935–8, in Florence
with Mary Berenson and brought her much consolation.
Nicky Mariano (1887–1968)
Nicky Mariano was born in Naples. Her mother’s family were of aristocratic, landed German
descent, from Livonia, a historic region on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea which is now
part of both Estonia and Latvia. Her father, the son of an Italian lawyer from Capua, was
deeply interested in philosophy and church history. He taught at the University of Rome
Dramatis Personae 511

where Nicky’s mother’s family spent their winters. They married, in spite of opposition, in
1879. In 1885, Nicky’s father was awarded a chair in church history at the University of Naples.
Later, they settled in Florence where her mother died in 1898. Her father then married her
mother’s younger sister. In the spring of 1914, Nicky met Mary Berenson who took a liking to
her. She was with her family and friends in Livonia and Russia from 1914 onwards and then,
in 1918, because of war, revolutions and political upheaval, she and her relations lost all their
possessions and land and were forced to flee, at first to Berlin and then to Switzerland. While
in Lausanne, she heard from Mary Berenson, proposing that she join the I Tatti household as
the Librarian. Penniless and in need of employment, she accepted the post and so came to
spend the rest of her life there, eventually to become Berenson’s closest and most intimate
confidante and the organiser of his life and work. Fine-looking, petite, with fair hair, blue eyes
and something of a Slavonic look, she exuded spontaneous warmth, cheerfulness and patience.
Umberto Morra (1897–1981)
Count Umberto Morra (see Appendix 1) was one of the key figures in the I Tatti household
and one of Berenson’s closest confidants. Berenson treated him, a regular visitor, almost as a son.
Morra’s interests were in literature and politics, not the visual arts, and he introduced Berenson
to a safe and secure network of anti-fascist intellectuals in Italy. Of the same generation as
Clark, they became close friends. In Another Part of the Wood, Clark wrote about his stay at I
Tatti in January 1926: ‘I did, however, make one friend whose sweet character, intelligence
and absolute sincerity have been a joy to me ever since, Umberto Morra. . . . The thought of
meeting Umberto again was one of the factors which made me look forward to returning to
the world of i Tatti’.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)
Logan Pearsall Smith, Mary Berenson’s brother (and the same age as Berenson), was an essayist
and writer of epigrams and aphorisms. A large man with a pronounced stoop, he wrote with
agonising slowness. He was extremely well read and an authority on seventeenth-century
divines. His magnum opus was a two-volume biography of the seventeenth-century diplomat,
politician and poet, Sir Henry Wotton, published in 1907. Educated at Harvard and the
University of Berlin, he also studied at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1891. As a boy,
he lived briefly in England, where he eventually settled, dividing his time between London
and a Tudor farmhouse near the Solent in Hampshire called Big Chilling. He became a British
citizen in 1913. He was a friend of Walt Whitman in the poet’s latter years. Unmarried, he
employed a regular succession of young male secretary-companions. His literary followers
included Desmond MacCarthy, John Russell, Robert Trevelyan and Hugh Trevor-
Roper. Endowed with exquisite taste and sensibility, and a love of sailing, he for a while ran
an elegant antique shop in Pimlico, London, called Miss Toplady, but it was not a financial
success. Mary Berenson referred to it as the ‘iniquity shop’ and supplied him with things for
sale from Italy, making money on the transactions.
Alys Russell (1867–1951)
Alyssa Whitall Pearsall Smith was Mary Berenson’s sole surviving sister. She married the
distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1894. They separated in 1911 and divorced in
1921. In 1907, she helped to set up a School for Mothers in north-west London and in the
1930s she chaired the Italian Refugees’ Relief Committee to help those fleeing from the fascist
regime.
Karin Stephen (1889–1953)
Karin Stephen was Mary’s younger daughter. In 1914, she married Adrian Stephen (1883–
1948), the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He and Karin became interested in the
work of Sigmund Freud and were among the first British psychoanalysts. Karin inherited the
Dramatis Personae 512

Smith family tendency to manic depression and died from an overdose of morphine in 1953.
Martha Carey Thomas (1857–1935)
Martha Carey Thomas was Mary Berenson’s cousin (their mothers were sisters). Preferring
to be known as Carey Thomas, she went, as did Mary, to the Howland Institute, a Quaker
boarding school near Ithaca, New York, and then to Cornell University. After travel and study
in Europe, she became, in 1884, the Dean of the College and chair of English at the newly
founded Bryn Mawr College, of which her father, a surgeon, was a trustee. In 1894, she was
elected the president of the College, a post she held until 1922. Carey Thomas was prominent
in the women’s suffrage movement and had two long-standing same-sex relationships: with
Mamie Gwinn and, after 1904, with Mary Garrett who died in 1915 leaving her a fortune, after
which she forsook the rigid disciplines that had driven her hitherto and embarked on a life of
luxurious worldwide travel.
Kenneth Clark (1903–1983)
‘I was born on July 13th, 1903, at 32 Grosvenor Square, a space now occupied by the American
Embassy. My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although,
in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler.’ So
Clark memorably wrote in the opening paragraph of the opening chapter, ‘An Edwardian
Childhood’, in his autobiography Another Part of the Wood.
Clark’s father, Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, came from a rich Scottish industrial family, whose
enormous fortune was established in the first half of the nineteenth century by two brothers
who perfected a smooth, fine cotton thread as an inexpensive and readily available substitute
for silk thread, and which they made conveniently available on small wooden bobbins.
The company expanded rapidly through constant innovation and the introduction of new
products, including the first-ever thread suitable for machine use.Their trade was international
and particularly successful in the United States where they established factories. Clark’s father,
who never worked, nor ever needed to, and whose siblings all died early, spent his inherited
fortune on yachting (Clyde yacht racing was his passion), shooting and gambling. Like many
men of his generation and background, he over-indulged in food and drink, yet he was not
without a social conscience. Clark’s mother was Margaret (known as Alice) MacArthur, from
a Manchester Quaker family and a cousin of her husband. She was shy and inhibited, whereas
his father was ebullient with an unselfconscious naturalness. They were intelligent but not
much interested in intellectual pursuits, and without snobbery.
As an only child, Clark wanted for nothing materially and when his parents died he himself
inherited a substantial fortune, although smaller than his father’s. He lived with his parents who
migrated between their ocean-going yachts, their estates in Scotland and Suffolk, their house
in London, their house in Bournemouth, and their property in the South of France (gambling
at Monte Carlo). His parents were not collectors or inheritors of a collection. Their taste was
for solid and undemanding, but showy and expensive, Edwardian art and architecture. Clark
was born with a natural aesthetic sensibility, aware of his surroundings and the feelings of other
people, and had a liking for painting and drawing, at which he himself was more than averagely
competent. His upbringing followed the pattern familiar to the children of rich Edwardian
families: more contact with nannies and servants than with parents; from the age of eight,
most of the year was spent away from parents at boarding school – in Clark’s case to reputable
establishments where he fitted in and was well taught, firstly at Wixenford Preparatory School,
near Guildford, Surrey, until he was thirteen, followed by Winchester College, one of the most
distinguished boys’ schools in the country, with six centuries of history and an impeccable
record of scholarship. From there, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, to read
history. It was just after the completion of his third year at Oxford that he went out to Italy
and met Berenson.
Dramatis Personae 513

When Berenson died in 1959, Clark was less than four years away from his sixtieth birthday.
His reputation as a writer, broadcaster and administrator on anything concerning the visual
arts, and as the authority to whom the British establishment and successive governments
looked for advice and reassurance about the arts in general, was unassailable. However, during
the decade from 1959 to 1969 much of Clark’s attention and creative talent was directed
towards the making of television programmes.When he stepped down from the chairmanship
of itv in 1956, he signed a ten-year contract with Lew Grade’s Associated Television, making
more than forty television programmes for them, covering a wide range of topics from general
subjects such as the place of art in society, temples, landscape, and Japanese art, to programmes
on individual artists such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso. They were pioneering
programmes in the early days of television and he enjoyed responding to the challenges and
innovative demands that they presented: his skills and his approachable manner as a presenter
of the arts to the general public were much commented on. This regular exposure to a public
audience, together with his reputation, also made him in demand for lectures and speeches,
exhibition openings, contributions to exhibitions and catalogues and as a trustee, chairman
or committee member: as such he participated in the activities of, for example, the National
Theatre Board, the British Museum and the Granada History Trust Archive. He was appointed
the Slade Professor at Oxford, for a second term, for 1961–2. Honours both at home and from
overseas also began to accumulate: among the early ones were the Austrian Order of Merit in
1959, an honorary doctorate from Liverpool University in 1960 and Membership of the us
Academy in 1964.
Clark himself, when not travelling, spent his weekdays in London, residing in his rooms
in the Albany. Weekends were spent at Saltwood, often with family and friends. His wife
Jane spent most of her time at Saltwood. The separation from her, which Clark’s busy life
demanded, put a strain on their relationship but, in spite of it and Jane’s alcoholism, his loyalty
to her never wavered, although it roused both embarrassment and admiration in his friends.
In 1966, soon after his contract with Associated Television concluded, Clark entered a
commitment with the bbc to make a thirteen-part series of television programmes: Civilisation:
A Personal View by Kenneth Clark. Their success made him a household name in the English-
speaking world and are the peg on which most of his subsequent popular recognition hangs.
The bbc wanted to show off its proposed high-definition colour signal and decided that the best
expression of this would be a series of programmes about the arts with a strong visual content.
Initially, Clark was consulted about what the programmes might contain and who should
present them. He sketched an outline of thirteen episodes and suggested that he could narrate
them. After a certain amount of hesitation on both sides, the project went ahead. It was an
expensive gamble that took three years to make and required visiting eleven countries, travelling
80,000 miles across Europe and North America and shooting enough celluloid to make six full-
length feature films. Jane accompanied Clark and the production team on their travels and was
both supportive and participative behind the scenes. First broadcast from February to May 1969,
Civilisation was an instant hit with British audiences and was even more enthusiastically received
in the usa when it was first shown there in November 1969. Even before Civilisation, Clark
had become the standard by which all other television presenters on the arts were judged. After
Civilisation, he was frequently compared to Ruskin – not because of his style and content, which
could scarcely be more different, but because of his manifest aspiration to preach the gospel of
art to a wide audience, and his ability to get the message over to that audience. Nonetheless,
Civilisation, and its success, provoked a fierce reaction from some younger critics and would-be
presenters, who regarded Clark’s approach and style as haughty, patronising and elitist, and so
provoked them into establishing an alternative way of presenting the arts, and with a different
yardstick. Invitations to make public appearances, to accept honours and awards, to write books
and catalogues and generally to be seen to give his blessing to almost any artistic enterprise,
Dramatis Personae 514

were abundant.Within weeks of the showing of the last episode of Civilisation, he was appointed
Chancellor of the University of York and became a life peer, taking the title of Baron Clark of
Saltwood. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1976.
The series also became a best-selling book. Numerically, Clark published more books after
1959 than before, although none achieved the scholarly and literary heights of Landscape into
Art and The Nude. Many are re-workings of earlier writings. Most notable among them are
Ruskin Today (1964) and Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966). The literary enterprise
that most engaged him after 1969 was his two-volume autobiography, Another Part of the
Wood (1974) and The Other Half (1977) which he subtitled A Self-Portrait. He continued to
make television appearances and films, including one on Berenson in 1970, and several in
collaboration with his younger son, Colin, who had become a film director.
In 1971, the Clarks gave Saltwood to their elder son Alan and moved into a large, modern,
architect-designed, bungalow in the kitchen garden of Saltwood. Jane’s physical and emotional
health continued to deteriorate, exacerbated by injuries from falls, and much of Clark’s
attention, time and energy, were focused on supporting her. Twelve months after Jane’s death
in 1976, Clark married the French-born Nolwen Rice, the daughter of the Comte de Janzé
and the widow of a neighbouring landowner in Kent, who owned an estate in Normandy.
Clark’s own health had already begun to deteriorate, with infirmities resulting from arterio-
sclerosis and digestive problems, and from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. He died in
a nursing home in Kent on 21 May 1983. That autumn, at a packed memorial service at St
James’s, Piccadilly, it was claimed that a few days before his death he had been received into
the Roman Catholic Church.
Alan Clark (1928–1999)
Alan Clark first established himself as a military historian, later becoming a Conservative
MP. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, at the Departments
of Employment, Trade and Defence, and became a Privy Counsellor in 1991. Opinionated
and never afraid of publicity, an inveterate iconoclast, he gained popular notoriety with
the publication of his three-volume diary which candidly chronicled a political life under
Thatcher, and his private affairs and opinions. His widow, Jane, continues to live at Saltwood.
There are two sons.
Colette Clark (born 1932)
Colette Clark survives her twin brother. She lives in London.
Colin Clark (1932–2002)
Colin Clark established himself as a film-maker for the arts in both cinema and television in
the uk and the usa. He retired from film-making in 1987 to write. Colin died in December
2002. He was three times married but had no children.
Jane Clark (1902–1976)
Always known as Jane by her friends and married relations, Jane Clark (née Martin) was
christened by her parents Elizabeth Winifred (called Betty by her family, it was at university
that she renamed herself Jane.) Her father, Robert Martin, of Scottish descent, was a
businessman in the linen and lace trades, based in Ireland, and her mother, Emily, was a doctor
who qualified in Dublin. She gave up practising medicine when she married aged thirty-three
in 1899, although she went back into practice in the First World War. Robert Martin was
her junior by ten years and was a lazy spendthrift who was supported financially by his wife
and in his later years (in South Africa) by the Clarks. Jane had one elder brother and three
younger brothers who were named Kenneth, Alan and Colin. Initially brought up in Ireland,
she was educated in England at boarding school – Malvern College for Ladies. She went on
to Somerville College, Oxford, where her beauty and stylish dress sense, together with her
vivaciousness and warmth, ensured social success and a string of male admirers. She graduated
Dramatis Personae 515

in history and then took a teaching job at Downe House, a girl’s private school near Newbury.
Jane died on 14 November 1976, after years of ill health (including a stroke which left her left
side paralysed) and constant nursing.

Part 2

Ashton, Leigh
Sir Leigh Ashton (1897–1983) was a student of Chinese art and the Director of the Victoria &
Albert Museum, London (1945–55). His interest and influence were in promoting museums
and displaying objects to appeal to the public, rather than in scholarship. Although homosexual,
Ashton married the divorcée and Vogue Fashion Editor, Madge McHarg Garland, in a
marriage of convenience in 1952. Several years older than Clark, he had also been educated
at Winchester. Clark called him ‘my first link with the art world in London’. They travelled
in Europe together and Ashton introduced Clark to important collectors. He was best man at
the Clarks’ wedding.
Baker, Collins
Collins Baker (1880–1959) was the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a post to which he was
appointed in 1928. At the same time, he was the Keeper of the National Gallery, a position
he held from 1914 until 1933. He was one of the driving forces in the National Gallery and
was instrumental in moving the pictures to safety in the First World War (they were stored in
the London Underground). Baker was a self-taught scholar, having first studied painting at
the Royal Academy Schools, who then wrote art criticism for weekly magazines. His entry to
the museum world came initially through the Director of the National Gallery (Sir Charles
Holroyd) who hired him as his assistant. After leaving the National Gallery, he moved to
California to work at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.
Baldass, Ludwig von
Ludwig von Baldass (1887–1963) was an Austrian art historian who specialised in Early
Netherlandish painting. He studied under Max Dvořák at the University of Vienna and began
to lecture there in 1926, gaining the position of professor in 1934. During the Nazi occupation
of Austria he adhered to their policy on the arts. When the Nazis began plundering works
from Jewish collectors, Baldass successfully frustrated attempts by the Rothschilds to get works
in their collection out of Austria. In 1949 he retired and devoted himself to writing. He
married Paula Wagner, a granddaughter of the architect Otto Wagner.
Balniel, David
David Alexander Robert Lindsay (Lord Balniel; 1900–1975), known as David Balniel, later
28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres, came from a Scottish family with a long
history of interest in the arts as inheritors, scholars and public servants. He was the eldest son
of the 27th Earl of Crawford (d. 1940), who was, among other things, an art historian with a
particular interest in Renaissance sculpture and took an active interest in arts administration.
David Balniel was educated at Oxford just before Clark. He became an mp at the 1924 General
Election. Balniel held many trusteeships including the Tate Gallery (1932–7), the National
Gallery (1935–41, 1945–52 and 1953–60), the British Museum (1940–73) and the National
Galleries of Scotland (1952–72). He was a member of the Italian Exhibition selection committee.
In 1925, he married Mary Katherine Cavendish, the third daughter of Lord Richard Frederick
Cavendish.
Béhague, Martine-Marie-Pol, de
Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague (1869–1939), Comtesse de Béarn, was the daughter of Count
Octave de Béhague and Laure de Haber, the daughter of a Berlin banker. She was briefly
Dramatis Personae 516

married to a French cavalry officer but they soon separated without children. Rich and single,
she travelled the world looking for rare and beautiful works of art. She amassed collections
of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, antiquities, porcelain and oriental works of art, which
she installed in a lavishly restored and decorated hôtel particulier in Paris. Among her other
properties was a house near Edith Wharton’s at Hyères. She was a close friend of Robert
Norton.
Bell, Charles
Charles ‘Charlie’ Bell (1871–1966) was educated privately and joined the Ashmolean as the
Assistant Keeper in 1896. Acerbic and with impossibly high standards, he declined an offer
of the Directorship of the National Portrait Gallery in 1909, choosing to remain at the
Ashmolean, where he re-hung the collection and took a particular interest in portraiture.
Clark wrote: ‘in 1922 I believed him to be an old man. . . . He was descended from one of the
famous Macdonald sisters, and so was a cousin of Baldwin, Burne Jones and Rudyard Kipling,
whom I never heard him mention, although his grandfather, Ambrose Poynter, had been
one of Kipling’s dearest friends. He had entrée into every great collection and intellectually
distinguished milieu in England and Italy. But he had no wish to shine in the great world, only
to excel in certain precise and narrow branches of art history’ (Clark APW). In fact, Bell was
not a blood relation of the Macdonald sisters. His uncle Edward Poynter had married Agnes
Macdonald).
Bell, Clive
Clive Bell (1881–1964) was a prominent art critic and theorist, a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. He married Vanessa Stephen in 1907. With Roger Fry, he organised the Second Post-
Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912. Bell adopted many of Fry’s aesthetic ideas and
published them in 1914 in an influential book, Art. It established the Bloomsbury art-for-art’s
sake aesthetic, coining the phrase ‘significant form’ and arguing that form, rather than content,
is the most significant aspect of a work of art.
Berlin, Isaiah
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was the Russian-born son of a rich Jewish family, who spent much
of his childhood in Riga, Latvia, to escape persecution. In 1921, the family settled in Britain.
A historian of ideas, political theorist, educator and essayist, Berlin spent his life in academe
and was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was one of the most eminent philosophers
of his generation, renowned for his conversational brilliance, his defence of liberalism and his
attacks on political extremism and intellectual fanaticism. He visited Berenson in the 1950s
and corresponded with him.
Binyon, Laurence
Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) read classics at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won a
prestigious prize for poetry in 1891. Immediately after graduating, he began working in the
Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, later joining the Department of Prints
and Drawings. In 1913, he was appointed as Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings. He was
a friend of Ezra Pound, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert and Charles Ricketts. Binyon
married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell. His most famous poem, For the Fallen, is often
spoken in Remembrance Day services.
Bliss, Robert and Mildred
Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Bliss (1879–1969) were step-brother and
sister. Robert’s father married, secondly, Anna Barnes, the widow of Demas Barnes who had
made a fortune in patent medicine, Mildred being their only child. Together, Robert and
Mildred created Dumbarton Oaks, one of Washington’s most famous residences: in 1920, they
Dramatis Personae 517

purchased an early nineteenth-century, red-brick federalist building, which they substantially

altered and expanded to provide a setting for their outstanding collections of European,
Byzantine and pre-Columbian art. Robert had a distinguished career as a diplomat, serving
as the us ambassador to Argentina in 1927–33. In 1912, he and his young wife were posted to
Paris, where they became friendly with Edith Wharton and Royall Tyler, who encouraged
their interest in art and collecting. Robert Bliss retired fully from government work in 1945.
It was at meetings at Dumbarton Oaks, in 1944, that the United Nations Charter was drafted.
The Blisses gave Dumbarton Oaks and its collections to Harvard University, with a substantial
endowment.
Bode, Wilhelm von
Dr Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929) was a German art historian and curator who founded the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin in 1904 (now called the Bode Museum), having rebuilt
the Strasbourg Museums which had been destroyed in the Franco-PrussianWar of 1870. A
commanding figure in the international art world, he initially trained as a lawyer and then
studied art history at the universities of Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig, becoming an expert on
sculpture and Italian Renaissance art, about which he wrote widely and influentially.With the
support of Wilhelm ii he was active in the art market, acquiring a wide-ranging and major
collection for the museum in Berlin.
Bodkin, Thomas
Thomas Bodkin (1887–1961) was an Irish lawyer turned art historian, art collector and curator.
He became the Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (1927–35) and then the
founding Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (1935–52), where, by
judicious purchases in a depressed market, he built up a collection notable for its quality. He
was an active broadcaster and author, publishing personal reminiscences and translations of
modern French poetry, as well as works of art history and criticism.
Borenius, Tancred
Tancred Borenius (1885–1948) was a Renaissance scholar, dealer, editor and, from 1924, an
advisor to Sotheby’s on ‘Old Master’ pictures. Finnish-born, he settled in London and held
academic posts including a lectureship at University College, London. It was said, even if not
proven, that he accepted payment on the side for certificates of authenticity.
Bos, Charles du
Charles du Bos (1882–1939) was a French critic of English literature whose mother was
English and who had studied at Oxford University. His particular interests were Shakespeare,
Shelley and Byron. His approach and interest tended towards the spiritual and he sought to
investigate the ‘soul’ of a work and its emotional impact on the reader. His six-volume Journal
intime (1946–55) is an account of the spiritual evolution that brought him into the Roman
Catholic Church in 1927.
Bowra, Maurice
Cecil Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) was one of Clark’s most important lifelong friends. A few
years older than Clark, he was a young don at Wadham College, Oxford, when Clark was an
undergraduate at Trinity and he became, in Clark’s words, ‘without question the strongest
influence in my life’ (Clark APW p. 99). A classical scholar, and famous for his audacious wit,
an overt homosexual, Bowra was warm-hearted and had little sympathy for armed conflict,
pedants, bores, Americans, convention, frivolity and indifference. He was the Warden of
Wadham College (1938–70), the Professor of Poetry (1946–51) and Vice-Chancellor of the
University (1951–4). Bowra visited the Clarks (in the company of John Sparrow) when they
were on their honeymoon at I Tatti in 1927 and was introduced to Berenson, but the meeting
was not a success and Bowra was never invited back to I Tatti.
Dramatis Personae 518

Brinckmann, Albert Erich

Albert Erich Brinckmann (1881–1958) was a German art historian and a disciple of
Heinrich Wölfflin. He published a major book on Baroque sculpture in 1917 (Barockskulptur:
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Skulptur in den Romanischen und germanischen Ländern seit Michelangelo
bis zum 18. Jahrhundert) and a short book on Michelangelo drawings in 1925 (Michelangelo
Zeichnungen). The son of an architect, architecture and space were his principal interests.
Brown, John Nicholas and J. Carter
John Nicholas Brown ii (1900–1979) was a member of the Brown family that had been active
in American life since before the American Revolution.They were the major early benefactors
of Brown University. Berenson nominated John as one of his wished-for appointments to an
advisory committee for the governance of I Tatti after his death (see Appendix 2). Brown
inherited a huge fortune based on real estate and textiles businesses, of which he took control
after 1929. After the war, he was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Army and
travelled to Europe to supervise the restitution of art treasures stolen by the Nazis. Brown
settled in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a senior fellow of Brown University. He was also
a regent of the Smithsonian Institution and in 1975 was awarded the Smithsonian’s Joseph
Henry Medal for his cultural leadership. His eldest son, John Carter Brown iii (1934–2002)
became the Director of the National Gallery in Washington, dc (1969–92), and worked with
Berenson at I Tatti in 1956.
Brummer, Joseph
Joseph Brummer (1883–1947) was a Hungarian-born art dealer who studied in Munich before
starting on his own as an artist in Budapest.Together with his brothers Ernest (1891–1964) and
Imre (died 1928), he moved to Paris in 1905 to study sculpture under Rodin and Matisse, and
also attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1906, he and his brothers opened the
Brummer Gallery in Paris on the Boulevard Raspail, where they sold African art, Japanese
prints and pre-Columbian, mainly Peruvian art, as well as contemporary paintings and
sculptures. In 1914, Joseph moved to New York and opened a gallery specialising in medieval
and Renaissance European art, and classical, ancient Egyptian, African and pre-Columbian
objects, but also hosting some of the early exhibitions of modern European art in the United
States. It stayed in business until 1949. A major part of Joseph’s private art collection was
bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. A second part was sold in 1949 by Parke-
Bernet Galleries. The final part was sold in Zurich in October 1979. His collection included
the Guennol Lioness, a Mesopotamian statue 5000 years old found near Baghdad, Iraq.
Buschbeck, Ernst
Ernst H. Buschbeck (1889–1963) was an Austrian art historian. From 1921 to 1924 he was
entrusted with the reorganisation of the Austrian museums, and he successfully negotiated with
the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that Austria should keep the principal
museum masterpieces. He was the director of the Picture Gallery at the Kunsthistorisches
Museum in Vienna, from 1922. In 1939, he emigrated to England where he lived until 1946.
He died in Portugal in 1963, following an accident.
Byron, Robert
Robert Byron (1905–1941) was a writer, critic and historian who travelled widely in the
Middle and Far East. An Etonian, he was ‘sent down’ from Merton College, Oxford, for
licentious behaviour. He died in 1941, en route to Egypt, when the ship on which he was
travelling was torpedoed by a U-boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland. In 1929, he published The
Byzantine Achievement and reviewed the Byzantine Exhibition for the Burlington Magazine in
July 1931. His best-known, and still widely revered, book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), is an
account of his ten-month journey to Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan in 1933–4.
Dramatis Personae 519

Cain, Julien
Julien Cain (1887–1974) was the son of Jewish printer from Lorraine. He studied at the École
du Louvre. Seriously injured in the First World War, he became a civil servant, first in the
office of the president of the Chamber of Deputies,then in 1930 as Administrateur Générale
for the Bibliothèque Nationale, which became his lifelong passion and career. By 1935, he
had set in train a complete reorganisation and rebuilding programme, and was credited with
a national reorganisation of the administration of literature in France. He joined the Front
Populaire in 1936. In the Second World War, he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to
Buchenwald but survived, and in 1945 returned to his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale,
from which he retired in 1964.
Carandini, Nicolo
Nicolo Carandini (1896–1972) was the Italian ambassador in London from November 1944
to autumn 1947. He was a politician who campaigned for democracy in the 1920s, retiring
from politics when the fascists came to power. Keeping a low profile and turning his attention
to the development of modern agriculture, he nevertheless kept contact with liberal groups,
and in 1944 he became a minister in the anti-fascist Bonomi government. On his return from
London in 1947, he became embroiled in the ever-changing pirouettes of post-war Italian
party politics, finally retiring in 1962. From 1948 to 1968, he was the president of Alitalia. In
1926, he married Elena Albertini (1902–1990), the daughter of the director of the Corriere della
Sera who had been removed from power by Mussolini in 1925.
Chambrun, Jacques Aldebert de
Jacques de Chambrun (1876–1951) was a descendant of General Lafayette. Brought up in the
usa – his father was a member of the French diplomatic service and was posted to New York
– he married Clara Eleanor Longworth (1873–1954) from a wealthy Ohio family in 1901.
Her father became the Speaker of the House of Representatives (1925–31), and her brother
Nicholas married Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. Clara was
one of the founder members of the American Library in Paris and won the Bordin Prize of
the Académie Française for a book on Shakespeare written in French. The Berensons met
Count de Chambrun on their visit to North Africa in 1931 when he was the commanding
general of the French garrison at Tunis.
Clark, William
William Andrews Clark (1839–1925) was an American politician and entrepreneur, who made
his fortune in the gold rush in Montana. He then turned to banking and made a further
fortune with smelters, electric power companies, newspapers, railways and other businesses.
His long-standing dream of becoming a us Senator resulted in scandal in 1899, when it was
revealed that he had bribed members of the Montana state legislature in return for their
votes. Clark is reported to have said, ‘I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.’ He died aged
eighty-six in his Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York which had 121 rooms,
four art galleries,Turkish baths, a vaulted rotunda 36 feet high and its own railway line to bring
in coal. Clark’s art collection, which contained works by (or attributed to) Degas, Rubens,
Rembrandt,Titian, van Dyck, Gainsborough and Corot, was donated to the Corcoran Gallery
in Washington, dc (the Metropolitan in New York having declined it), with a proviso for the
construction of a new wing to be named after him.
Clarke, Ashley
Sir Ashley Clarke (1903–1994) was descended from a family whose baronetcy was created in
1617. He was a professional and hard-working diplomat who was appointed the ambassador
in Rome in 1953 (succeeding Sir Victor Mallet) at a time when the British were unpopular
owing to their stance over the Trieste dispute. Good-looking and speaking Italian, he
Dramatis Personae 520

immediately told the Italians that they were ‘at the heart of Europe’ and he and his wife soon
became the most popular and respected post-war occupants of the British Embassy.
Clary-Aldringen, Alphonse
Prince Alphonse (or Alfons) Clary-Aldringen (1887–1978) was descended from two families
of the Holy Roman Empire. The von Clarys were lords of Riva del Garda in Upper Italy, and
the von Aldringens were Catholics from the Spanish Netherlands. They intermarried in the
early seventeenth century and were allowed by imperial decree to adopt the name and arms
of both families. The Princes von Clary-Aldringen were a prominent family in the Austrian
Empire. Their principal seat was at Teplitz in Bohemia (now Teplice, Czech Republic). In
1945, when the Czechoslovak communist regime confiscated their Bohemian estates, the
family continued to live in Germany and Italy. Of Prince Alphonse Clary-Aldringen (who
lived quietly in an apartment in Venice), Berenson wrote: ‘Nearly eighty years of reading
have left in memory so many questions that I am eager to have answered or at least discussed
that I pounce on anyone who can offer help. Thus the present Prince Clary turns out to be
a repository of information on almost any event or partaker in events of the ex-Hapsburg
Empire of the last hundred and fifty years. No problem, no personality, he cannot illuminate
and penetrate with an intimacy and precision of almost personal experience’ (diary entry, 16
March 1952).
Clutton-Brock, Alan
Alan Francis Clutton-Brock (1904–1976) was the son of Arthur Clutton-Brock (1868–1924),
who was a notable essayist and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Educated
at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Alan first sought to establish himself as a painter of
pastiches of Italian Renaissance artists, and landscapes influenced by Constable and the French
Impressionists. He was more successful as a writer of popular art books, and as an art critic
and reviewer for The Times and the TLS. He and his first wife (who died in a car accident in
1936) were given to a bohemian lifestyle. After the war, he held the Slade Professorship of Fine
Art at Cambridge and was appointed a trustee of the National Gallery. In 1955, he inherited
Chastleton House in Oxfordshire from a cousin.
Cockerell, Sydney
Sydney Cockerell (1867–1962) under whose directorship (1908–37) the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, was transformed from an untidy provincial museum into a pioneering interna-
tional institution, was a man of consummate taste, shaped by the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic
Movements and a disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris. He was also a pragmatist and
a shrewd businessman, cajoling collectors into giving, and playing the art market. He had
boundless energy, infectious enthusiasm and a passionate belief in the role of museums as
catalysts of social progress. Famously, he said of the Fitzwilliam, ‘I found it a pig sty; I turned
it into a Palace.’
Colefax, Sibyl
Sibyl Colefax (1874–1950) was a notable interior decorator and a sought-after London hostess
with a particular talent for bringing people of all ages together. She was married to a patent
lawyer, Arthur Colefax, who supported her activities and attended her dinner parties, but said
very little. Born into a society family, Lady Colefax’s extensive contacts came into their own
after she lost most of her fortune in the Wall Street Crash and thereafter had to earn a living.
She purchased a Mayfair decorating business which she first ran with Peggy Ward, Countess
of Munster, and after 1938 with John Fowler. She was a member of the British executive
committee for the Italian Exhibition in 1930.
Dramatis Personae 521

Connolly, Cyril
Cyril Connolly (1903–1974), the gifted literary critic and writer, was a lifelong rolling stone –
professionally, politically, socially, intellectually and maritally – who remained a close friend of
Clark from the time they were at Oxford together. Through Clark’s introduction he became,
for a short while, a secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith and his company pleased Berenson, who
invited him to stay at I Tatti on several occasions.
Constable, W. G.
William George Constable (known as ‘WG’; 1887–1976) was a distant relation of the famous
landscape painter. He trained initially as a barrister, painter and later, without formal training,
moved over to museum curatorship and art history. He joined the staff of the National Gallery
in 1923 and rose to the post of Assistant Director. In 1932, he was appointed as the first director
of the newly founded Courtauld Institute. Then he was a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston from 1938 to 1957. He was on the selection committee of the Burlington House
Italian Exhibition of 1930. A shy and retiring character, his principal scholarly work was a two-
volume catalogue raisonné of Canaletto.
Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro
Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878–1955) was an Italian art dealer whose principal
client between the wars was Samuel Kress and who, therefore, was instrumental in building
up the collection that the Kress Foundation (established in 1929) later distributed to museums
throughout the us. Contini-Bonacossi first began collecting and dealing in stamps while
working for an American chemicals firm in Barcelona. Returning to his native Italy and
settling in Rome in 1918, he expanded his dealing business to encompass works of art,
furniture, antiquities and sculpture, as well as paintings. It was here that he met Roberto
Longhi, who acted as his chief advisor and collaborator until the Second World War. He
was awarded the title of Count on becoming a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1939. He
continued to pursue his art dealing throughout the war, which led to an investigation as to
the nature of his dealings with Goering’s agents in Italy. Berenson spoke in his favour and
subsequently entered into a contract with Contini-Bonacossi on a similar basis to that which
he had had with Duveen. As well as dealing, Contini-Bonacossi, with his wife, had amassed a
large and fine personal collection, some of which was eventually bequeathed to the state in
1969. It now forms part of the Uffizi collection in Florence.
Conway, Martin
Martin Conway (1856–1937) was a complex individual who managed to practise as an art
critic, politician, cartographer and mountaineer.The son of a vicar, he was educated at Repton
School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. He was honoured
by the French state and the Royal Geographical Society for his pioneering mountaineering
expeditions in the Alps, Scandinavia and the Andes, and was knighted in 1895 for his efforts in
mapping 5180 sq km of the Karakoram Range in the Himalayas. Conway was the Professor
of Art at University College, Liverpool, and Slade Professor at Cambridge (1901–4). He
represented the Combined English Universities in Parliament in 1918–31 (when the seat
existed), for which services he was given a peerage as 1st Baron Conway of Allington, in
1931. He was the first director of the Imperial War Museum and a trustee of the National
Portrait Gallery. His collection of photographs became the nucleus of the Conway Library
at the Courtauld Institute. He married an American railway heiress in 1884. On her death he
married, in 1934, the widow of Reginald Lawson, who lived at Saltwood Castle, which Clark
later purchased.
Dramatis Personae 522

Cook, Herbert
Sir Herbert Cook (1868–1939) was a neighbour of the Clarks in Richmond. He inherited
the encyclopaedic collection of pictures that was formed by his grandfather, Sir Francis Cook
(1817–1901). Sir Francis had been one of the richest men in England, his fortune deriving
from a flourishing business of linen drapers which sold goods to the British Empire Stores.
He had started to collect pictures with the able and shrewd advice of John Charles Robinson
(1824–1913), who had been a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Surveyor of
the Queen’s Pictures in 1880–1901. Herbert Cook was a founding member of the National
Art Collections Fund and the Burlington Magazine. The Cooks lived at Doughty House on
Richmond Hill, a fine eighteenth-century house with magnificent views to which was added
a long gallery in 1885 to house the art collection. The house was damaged by bombs in the
Second World War, as a result of which Cook’s son moved to Jersey with 30 paintings from
the collection. Mary Costelloe (as she then was) introduced Berenson to Cook in 1890 and
they became good friends. Cook introduced Berenson to a number of British country-house
collections. Cook also paid for the publication of Berenson’s commentary on the exhibition
of Venetian paintings at the New Gallery in London in 1895, in which Berenson denied and
disproved the attributions given to many of the paintings – to the consternation of their
owners and the dealers.
Cooper, Douglas
Douglas Cooper (1911–1984) was a colourful and extremely able art historian of substantial
independent means derived from his Australian relations, who had made a fortune out of
sheep-dip. An early encounter with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo enthused him
with a lifelong passion for the art of Picasso (whom he came to know in the South of France)
and for early modern, especially Cubist, art, of which he built up a notable collection. During
the war, he was with Royal Air Force Intelligence in Egypt and his famously waspish and
combative temperament gave him great success in extracting information from the enemy.
He then became a skilled sleuth in tracking Nazi-looted art and in exposing the dealers and
collectors who had collaborated and benefited. More skilled in making enemies than friends,
and with a hatred of England and the English establishment (including Clark, with whom he
had quarelled about Cubism in 1935), he settled in the South of France where his sexual tastes
were more tolerated – although he only narrowly escaped being murdered in 1961 by a young
Algerian whom he had picked up. Highly talented and with a good eye, his opinions always
ran ahead of his discretion.
Courtauld, Samuel
Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947) was the general manager and chairman of the family business
which became an international name and commercial success through the development and
sales, after 1905, of cheap artificial silk (rayon). The Courtaulds were of Huguenot descent
with expertise in silversmithing and silk, and it was Samuel’s father who developed the large-
scale industrial production of fine textiles. Samuel took on responsibility for the firm in 1921.
Advised by Roger Fry, he started to collect French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
pictures in the 1920s, which he displayed in his eighteenth-century town-house in Portman
Square, London. Shortly before his wife died in 1931 – she shared his passion for art – he founded
the Courtauld Institute of Art (in 1930), giving to it both his house and his art collection.
Croft-Murray, Edward
Edward Croft-Murray (1907–1980) was one of the most spirited museum curators in England
who became the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. His principal
publication was a definitive two-volume catalogue, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837
(London: Country Life, 1962 and 1970). He was a keen musician, party-giver and man of taste.
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Dixon, John Pierson

John Pierson Dixon (1904–1965) became one of Britain’s most distinguished post-war
diplomats. He escaped a difficult upbringing and childhood via a scholarship to Pembroke
College, Cambridge, and seemed destined for a life of scholarship. However, in 1929 he joined
the Foreign Office and worked as Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Rome in 1938–40.
During the war, he was the Principal Private Secretary to Anthony Eden and was present at
many of the critical conferences between the Allies, including Yalta and Potsdam. He was
Britain’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations at the time of the Suez Crisis of
1956, following which, with a knighthood, he was appointed the ambassador in Paris (1960) at
the time of Britain’s overtures to join the Common Market – which were famously rejected
by General de Gaulle.
Douglas, Robert Langton
Robert Langton Douglas (1864–1951) was born in Suffolk and educated at New College,
Oxford. From 1895 to 1900 he lived in Italy and came to know the Berensons, becoming an
authority on Fra Angelico and Sienese art. He claimed to be a co-equal discoverer, with the
Berensons, of Sassetta as an artistic personality and in recognising the authorship of the panels
from the San Sepolcro Altarpiece which the Berensons bought. In a varied and peripatetic
career he was, in 1916–23, the director of the National Gallery of Ireland, and settled in New
York in 1940. The Berensons and Douglas fell out early on and became bitter enemies, Mary
describing him as ‘a scrubby little Professor’ (letter to her mother, 27 October 1900, quoted
in Machtelt Israëls, ed., Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2009,
p. 11).
Duveen, Joseph
Joseph Duveen (1869–1937) was born above a shop in Hull, East Yorkshire, the son of a dealer.
The House of Duveen was created by his father, Joseph Joel Duveen, and his uncle, Henry
Duveen. The Duveens were a Dutch family who emigrated to England and made a living
from selling blue and white Delft pottery. Duveen’s father married an English pawnbroker’s
daughter, and from Delftware expanded into furniture and objets d’art, so successfully that
they moved the firm to Oxford Street in London. His uncle Henry, after a brief apprenticeship
in Hull, was sent to America where he too had success and moved from Boston to New York,
becoming the friend and adviser to such men as Benjamin Altman, the elder J. P. Morgan,
Widener and Huntington. In London, Joseph Joel caught the fashion for tapestries and
through it came to the notice of the future Edward vii and some of the Prince’s closest friends.
Joseph Joel arranged much of the decoration of Westminster Abbey for Edward’s coronation
(it earned him a knighthood). Henry had a passion for stamp collecting which he shared with
George v and thus became a friend of the king. At seventeen, Joseph Duveen joined the family
firm in London and shortly afterwards was sent to America to gain experience from his uncle
Henry. Shortly after arriving in New York, he had moved Henry out of his small premises to
a fashionable location on 5th Avenue at 56th Street. Duveen realised that the real money was
to be made, not in porcelain and tapestries, but in pictures and fine art, and he re-focused the
family business with a sensational series of deals in 1906 and 1907, when he bought the Oskar
Hainauer Collection in Berlin and the Rodolphe Kann and Maurice Kann Collections in
Paris. Duveen possessed a charismatic personality and, with his hunger for a deal, established
himself as the pivotal figure in the commercial fine art world, the pace-setter for deals between
the European aristocracy (who were keen to sell their treasures) and the self-made American
industrial millionaires who were keen to buy. However, he lacked expertise in art and so
bought it from others such as Dr Wilhelm von Bode from Berlin and Berenson. He first
met the Berensons in 1922 and Mary in particular was fascinated and attracted by what
he offered. Duveen operated in a climate in which there was a plentiful supply of works
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of art, eager buyers with plenty of money and eager sellers; there were also many, such as
Arthur Lee of Fareham, who speculated in works of art as investments, and many scholars
who were willing to write certificates of authenticity for a fee. Duveen paid the Berensons
substantial fees for advice and information, certificates of authenticity and the prestige of
Berenson’s authority. Both went to great lengths to keep the nature of their commercial
relationship secret, although many in the art world knew, or suspected, that Berenson was in
Duveen’s pay.The Berensons’ lifestyle would not have been possible without the income from
Duveen, and its continuation was a constant anxiety. Their commercial relationship ended
in 1937 when Duveen requested an attribution to Giorgione on the Allendale Adoration and
Berenson refused to give it. Duveen held many public appointments, including trusteeships
of the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the British Museum and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York.
Finley, David
David E. Finley (1890–1977) was the first director of the National Gallery in Washington,
dc. From a prominent South Carolina family, he practised as a lawyer and in 1921 joined
the us Treasury where he came to the attention of the Secretary to the Treasury, Andrew
Mellon. He became a confidant of Mellon and advised him on his art collection and the
building of the National Gallery. After Mellon died in 1937, Finley as the director oversaw
the completion of its building and the opening in 1941. He was instrumental in persuading
many prominent collectors to donate their collections to the Gallery. Quiet and softly spoken,
with old-fashioned Southern courtesy, he had an iron resolve and was brilliant in the art of
persuasion. He retired in 1956. In 1931, he had married Margaret Morton Eustis (1903–77), a
Washington heiress, sculptor and architect.
Forest Divonne, Philomène de la
Philomène de la Forest Divonne (née Levis Mirepoix) (1887–1978) was a talented but
undisciplined writer whom Edith Wharton attempted to re-train. They had lived next door
to each other on the Rue de Varenne in Paris in 1912. In 1920 they met again and Wharton
undertook to re-introduce her into intellectual society, but she felt thwarted by Philomène’s
literary fads and wayward style of writing. However, it seems that between them Wharton
and Berenson eventually succeeded in getting her to develop a style which turned her into
one of the better-known writers and journalists in France under the nom de plume Claude
Sylve. She wrote a prize-winning novel, Bénédiction (1935), which was translated into English
by Robert Norton.
Frankfurter, Felix
Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) was an Associate Justice of the us Supreme Court. He was born
into a Jewish family in Vienna which emigrated to New York when he was twelve. A graduate
of Harvard Law School, he served as a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,
was later a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the
Supreme Court in 1939. He was a noted advocate of restraint in judicial oversight as regards
government departments and agencies. He and Berenson were both friends of the jurist Judge
Learned Hand.
Frey, Karl
Karl Frey (1857–1917) was a German art historian specialising in the Florentine Renaissance
and sixteenth-century historiography. His early publications on the writings of Vasari appeared
in the 1880s. Later, Frey turned his attention to the letters of Michelangelo, beginning with
Michelagniolos Jugendjahre in 1907. Further publications on Michaelangelo’s drawings appeared
in 1909–11 but much of his work remained unpublished at his death in 1917.
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Frick, Henry Clay

Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) was a man of immense wealth and power who controlled coke
and steel companies and played a major role in the formation of the u.s. Steel conglomerate.
He also financed the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad and owned extensive real-
estate holdings in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was noted for his ruthlessness, and lack
of morality in business. At his death, he bequeathed the Frick Mansion in New York and his
extensive collection of paintings and fine furniture, in trust, to create the celebrated Frick
Collection and Art Museum. He bought shrewdly through dealers, mostly from Knoedler’s.
Friedländer, Max
Max Jacob Friedländer (1867–1958), Berlin-born, was an art expert and art historian, especially
of Netherlandish art, who believed in connoisseurship and, like Berenson, that from a close
visual examination of a work of art it would be possible to deduce the identity of its creator,
and gain a deeper understanding of it.The son of a banker, he studied in Munich and Florence.
He joined the paintings department of the newly opened Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin,
becoming the deputy director under Wilhelm von Bode in 1904 and the director in 1924.
On his retirement in 1939 he settled in Amsterdam, his spiritual home, and became an art
dealer. Although a Jew by birth, he evaded arrest due to the personal intervention of Goering,
whom he had advised on acquisitions for his collection.
Fry, Roger
Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a painter, art critic and art historian who made his scholarly
reputation in the field of Italian Renaissance painting. Principally remembered now as one
of the leading lights in the Bloomsbury Group, he was the first to bring the more recent
developments in French painting and modern art to the attention of the public in Britain. He
developed his own philosophy of art which emphasised the formal properties of paintings, and
was influenced by Berenson’s books on Italian art. Fry and Berenson were of the same age and
they first met in 1899, forming a close working friendship and freely exchanging information
and ideas. However, professional competitiveness soon set in and soured their relationship,
notably in connection with articles for the Burlington Magazine, of which they were both
founders. When the Berensons were in London in 1927, Bogey Harris organised a lunch
party to which he invited, without prior knowledge on either side, both Berenson and Fry.
The risky strategy paid off and resulted in a rapprochement after years of antagonism. Clark
was an admirer of Fry and his writings, describing him as ‘incomparably the greatest influence
on taste since Ruskin . . . in so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed
by Roger Fry’ (Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge
University Press and New York: Macmillan, 1939, p. ix).
Goldschmidt, Adolph
Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944) was a Jewish-German art historian, born in Hamburg. After
a short business career he studied history of art at the universities of Jena, Kiel and Leipzig. His
chief interest was the medieval art of north-east Germany and German thirteenth-century
sculpture. He also had expertise in early Milanese art. He left Germany in 1934 for Switzerland.
Goloubev, Victor
Victor Goloubev (1878–1945) came from an aristocratic Russian family. Educated in St
Petersburg and Heidelberg, he was a virtuoso violinist and collected Chinese and Persian
miniatures, on which he was an expert. In 1910, he travelled to India and Ceylon. He met
Berenson in Paris in 1914. Tragically, all of his seven sons were killed in the First World War.
Dramatis Personae 526

Gray, Basil
Basil Gray (1904–1989), who joined the British Museum in 1929, was a leading Islamic scholars
(although he spoke no oriental language) and was the head of the Oriental Department at
the British Museum from 1946 to 1968, following which he became the principal librarian
and acting director. His speciality was the relationship of the arts of Persia and China. In 1933,
he married Nicolette Binyon (1911–1997), the daughter of his departmental head, Laurence
Binyon. Nicolette was a medieval scholar and an exponent of the art of calligraphy.
Greenlees, Ian
Ian Greenlees (1913–1988) was an heir to a Scottish whisky fortune. A lifelong bachelor, he
lived in Italy, where he became a friend of Benedetto Croce and taught in Rome before 1939.
He served gallantly in the army in the war and was responsible for propaganda broadcasts to
the Italians. After the Allied invasion of Italy, he ran a free radio station in Bari. From 1947
to 1954 he worked for the British Council in Rome and from 1958 to 1981 was the director
of the British Institute in Florence. He bought the Villa Fraita on Anacapari from the writer
Frances Brett Young.
Gulbenkian, Calouste
Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955) was born in Constantinople. His father was an
Armenian oil importer-exporter who sent him to King’s College, London to study petroleum
engineering. He then worked in the Russian oil industry at Baku. In 1896, the Gulbenkian
family fled the Ottoman Empire and found refuge in Egypt. Their new contacts in Cairo
included Sir Evelyn Baring. Gulbenkian moved to London and, in 1907, helped arrange
the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum with Shell Transport and Trading, Gulbenkian being
allocated 5 per cent of the shares. In 1912, Gulbenkian was instrumental in setting up Turkish
Petroleum, which was a consortium of the largest European oil companies seeking exclusivity
for oil exploration in Iraq. Gulbenkian acquired the entire Iraqi oil concession in 1929 but
promptly sold it, becoming immensely wealthy. With this fortune, he built his art collection
which he kept in his house on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. He was appointed the Iraqi minister
in Paris and followed the French government when it fled to Vichy in 1940. As a consequence,
despite having gained British citizenship in 1902, he was declared an enemy alien and his uk
oil assets sequestered – although returned with compensation at the end of the War. He settled
permanently in Lisbon in 1942. At his death, his art collection and a large part of his fortune
were bequeathed to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which was established in Lisbon as
a charity for educational, artistic and scientific purposes.
Haig, Dawyck
Dawyck Haig (1918–2009) was the son and heir of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (later Earl
Haig), the charismatic and popular First World War commander who led the offensive at the
Battle of the Somme. Baptised George Alexander Eugene Douglas, he was always known as
Dawyck (pronounced ‘Doig’), his courtesy title being Viscount Dawick, until he assumed the
earldom. He was a painter in a politely expressive figurative style. He was a friend of Derek
Hill. Hugh Trevor-Roper introduced him to Berenson by letter in December 1948. His
sister, Alexandra, married Trevor-Roper in 1954, after divorcing her first husband.
Hamilton, Jamie
Jamie Hamilton (1900–1988), often referred to as Hamish Hamilton, was half-American, half-
Scottish. He studied law and languages at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and became
a noted rower, representing Great Britain in the 1928 Summer Olympics. He founded the
publishers Hamish Hamilton in London in 1931, publishing promising British and American
writers, many of whom were personal friends. In 1940, he married Countess Yvonne Vicino
Pallavicino.They lived in style in St John’s Wood, London, where they hosted elegant and well
Dramatis Personae 527

attended receptions and recitals. He sold his firm to the Thomson Organisation in 1965. From
1947 he was a frequent correspondent with Berenson.
Harris, Bogey
Clark recalled Henry ‘Bogey’ Harris (c. 1870–1950) with particular affection in his
autobiography. Henry Harris ‘did nothing and said nothing’ but was a friend of all the socially
and artistically great. His house in Bedford Square, London, was decorated by Roger Fry and
Vanessa Bell. A rich and handsome Etonian, he became a friend of the Prince of Wales and
a member of the Marlborough House set. He lost heavily at gambling and in 1914 took up
residence in Italy where he had a villa in Florence. A Catholic, he made friends with Pope
Pius x and was given a small sinecure at the Vatican (secretary to the British Legation). A
melancholy, Proustian figure of exquisite taste and refined scholarship, in Florence he had
made friends with the collector Henry Horne, under whose influence he put together a
collection of modestly priced Italian pictures and objets d’art, which Clark said ‘gave one as
much pleasure as any collection that I can remember’ (Clark APW p. 181). A friend of Ramsay
McDonald (though not a political sympathiser), he was appointed a trustee of the National
Gallery (1934–41) and Clark met him on the committee of the Italian Exhibition of 1930.
When the Berensons were in London in 1927, Bogey organised a lunch party for Berenson
and Roger Fry which resulted in a rapprochement after years of antagonism. His collection
was sold at Sotheby’s shortly after his death in 1950.
Hartt, Frederick
Frederick Hartt (1914–1991), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an art historian with
a particular expertise in the Italian Renaissance. After studying with Erwin Panofsky, at
Princeton, he took his masters at New York University. He served in the us Army Air Force
during the war and was an officer in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Division of
the us Army in Italy, helping to repatriate art and libraries looted by the Germans. These
experiences he later published in book form in 1949, Florentine Art under Fire. He returned to
academe after the war, teaching at the universities of Washington, dc, New York, Pennsylvania
and Virginia. The author of numerous books, his History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting,
Sculpture and Architecture, published in 1969, remains the best-known among general readers.
He was a regular visitor to I Tatti. When the River Arno flooded Florence in 1966, Hartt
helped to evaluate and prioritise the restoration efforts.
Havemeyer Family
Based in Brooklyn, the Havemeyer family made their fortune through sugar refining in the
second half of the nineteenth century. Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847–1907) developed
the companies so successfully that he came to control sugar refining in the usa. He and his
second wife, Louisine, became passionate art collectors – ivory figures, Japonaiserie, textiles
and old and modern pictures. His taste was personal and his purchases impulsive. Louisine
had a passion for French Impressionists, travelling frequently to Europe, and was a close friend
of Mary Cassatt who advised her on her purchases. Their three children were also dedicated
collectors. When Louisine died in 1929, the greatest beneficiary of the Havemeyer Bequest
was the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who were given free rein to choose what they
wanted and received nearly two thousand works of art.
Hearst, William Randolph
William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), the celebrated American newspaper publisher, built
the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. A voracious collector, he acquired
Greek vases, Spanish and Italian furniture, oriental carpets, Renaissance vestments, manuscripts,
rare books and autographs, paintings and sculptures. His mansion, Hearst Castle in California,
overlooking the Pacific Ocean, was donated to that state in 1957.
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Hendy, Philip
Sir Philip Hendy (1900–1980) had no formal training in art history but he became an Assistant
Keeper and Lecturer at the Wallace Collection in London in 1923. His contributions to their
catalogue and his articles for the Burlington Magazine so impressed the trustees of the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Collection in Boston that, in 1927, they funded a three-year research trip to
Italy, during which he catalogued their collection.This led to him being appointed the curator
of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1930. He resigned after being heavily
criticised for purchasing Matisse’s early nude, Carmelina, in 1933. In 1934, he was appointed
the director of Leeds City Art Gallery. He served as the director of the National Gallery from
1946 to 1967, a record tenure of more than twenty years.
Heydenreich, Ludwig
Ludwig Heydenreich (1903–1978) was a Dresden-born art historian, specialising in Italian
Renaissance architecture. He began his studies at Dresden’s military academy and was
expected, like his father, to join the officer class. But Germany’s defeat in the First World
War forced the academy’s closure and Heydenreich was obliged to look for other areas of
interest. He initially studied art history at the University of Berlin but quickly changed to
Hamburg in 1919 in order study with Erwin Panofsky. He met Berenson in Hamburg in
1927. In the 1930s, when many intellectuals were fleeing the Nazis, Heydenreich’s career
developed rapidly. He was appointed to a chair at the University of Berlin in 1941 and became
the director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Florence) in 1943. While there, he advised
Berenson to hide as many of his possessions as he could so as to keep them out of the hands
of Goering’s agents, and he subverted orders to have other works of art sent to Germany. After
the war, Heydenreich helped found, and became the first director of, the Zentralinstitut für
Kunstgeschichte in Munich, a research centre devoted to art history, which was located in the
former Nazi headquarters.
Hill, Derek
(Arthur) Derek Hill (1916–2000) was a portrait and landscape painter. Born into a wealthy,
sugar-trading family in Hampshire, he first achieved success as a theatre designer in Leningrad
in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he became successful and sought-after with fashionable clients.
He was also a keen collector and traveller. In 1981, he donated his home in Ireland, with his
paintings by Picasso, Degas, Braque, Sutherland and J. B. Yeats, to the Irish state. He and his
family spent five winters at the Berensons’ Villino, from 1948 to 1953. In Hill’s own words: ‘it
was more than friendship. I was completely devoted to [Berenson] and to Nicky Mariano. . . .
both my parents died in the early fifties . . . they became my family . . . he had an infallible
sense of the weak spot in any painting, even if, as was often the case, one disagreed with his
reasoning as to why it was weak’ (Grey Gowrie, Derek Hill: An Appreciation, Quartet Books,
London, 1987 pp. 104–6). Jane Clark did not like him.
Hinks, Roger
Roger Hinks (1903–1963) was the Assistant Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the
British Museum from 1926 to 1939. He resigned following a formal reprimand for dereliction
of duty over the cleaning of the Elgin Marbles (now the Parthenon Marbles). The cleaning
had been authorised by the head of the department (who then became the director of the
museum) and paid for by Duveen. It caused the sculptures to be scrubbed and abraded.When
this came to light there was a public scandal and an official enquiry. Hinks’s superiors, who
were ultimately responsible, either ran for cover or pleaded sickness, leaving Hinks to take the
blame. In 1939, he accepted a position at the Warburg Institute where he lectured on medieval
art but then, with the advent of war, Hinks was posted to Sweden under the auspices of the
British Council but actually working in intelligence. He was there at the time of Clark’s
Dramatis Personae 529

wartime visits to Sweden. After the war, Hinks joined the British Council and was head of
the British Institute in Rome in 1945–9. A lifelong bachelor, and inclined to gloom, he had a
wide circle of intellectual and literary friends and connections, and was a compulsive diarist.
He and Clark became good friends during Clark’s years with the Ashmolean in Oxford. Clark
thought Hinks had been shamefully treated by the British Museum and the board of inquiry.
Hinks made several visits to I Tatti, both before and after the war; his stimulating company was
welcomed by Berenson.
Hirsch, Robert von
Robert von Hirsch (1883–1977) was born in Frankfurt, into a well-to-do, industrialist family
of iron founders who first made their money in the leather trade. Robert and his elder brother
Paul (1881–1951) were both avid collectors. From 1917, Robert was in charge of the family
business which also had a branch in Switzerland. At the age of twenty-four (1907), driven by
a strong aesthetic sense, he began to build his own art collection and was especially active in
the 1920s and 1930s, voraciously acquiring paintings, prints and drawings, porcelain, furniture,
metalwork and medieval works of art. In 1933, both Robert and Paul left Germany, Paul to
Cambridge – his library of musical literature was bought by the British Museum for the
nation in 1946. Robert emigrated to Basel, taking his treasures with him, never to return to
Germany. With a childless marriage, when he died, his collection was dispersed at auction in
1978, by Sotheby’s, in a sale comprising four separate catalogues. In a letter to Nicky Mariano
of 28 September 1922, Berenson recorded meeting von Hirsch in Frankfurt: ‘a young man in a
beautiful house, full of splendid books, carpets, tapestries and objets d’art. Among the pictures
a darling little diptych of early 13th century, all but Byzantine.’
Holmes, Charles
Sir Charles John Holmes (1869–1936) was a man of many parts. Educated at Eton and
Brasenose College, Oxford, his first interest was as a practising artist – paintings, drawings
and etchings – largely self taught, but taking lessons from Charles Ricketts and William
Strang and influenced by Walter Pater. He also undertook art criticism and was asked by
Roger Fry, in 1906, to take on the editorship of the recently founded, but financially ailing,
Burlington Magazine, which he fulfilled with success. In 1904, he became a member of the New
English Art Club and the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. In 1909, he became the director
of the National Portrait Gallery and in 1916 of the National Gallery. He re-hung the former
to acclaim but struggled with the trustees of the latter, and retired in frustration in 1928. His
approach was that of an artist rather than an art historian; he was a good administrator and
sought to open his museums to wider public access.
Hope-Johnstone, Charles
(Charles) John Hope-Johnstone (1883–1970) was an eccentric member of the Bloomsbury
Group who advised Mr and Mrs Frank Stoop about art. He was for a short time the private
tutor to the children of the artist Augustus John and was the co-editor of The Gramophone
with Compton MacKenzie and then, briefly, the editor of the Burlington Magazine in 1919–20,
until sacked by Roger Fry. Hope-Johnstone was an accomplished photographer. In 1939 he
was appointed a lecturer at the University in Peking (Beijing) and in 1943–8 he lectured at
the University in Istanbul. According to Clark, he had walked, as a young man, to Persia (Iran),
pushing his belongings in a perambulator. He married Audrey Petit-Hampson who petitioned
for divorce on the grounds of nullity in 1929.
Huxley, Aldous
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a humanist, pacifist, and sometime mystic, who expressed
his views in a number of famous novels such as Brave New World (1932). Disqualified from
Dramatis Personae 530

service in the First World War because of illness, he spent much of his time at Lady Ottoline
Morrell’s Garsington Manor near Oxford (working as a farm labourer), meeting members of
the Bloomsbury set such as Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. In 1919, he married a Belgian,
Maria Nys (1899–1955). They lived in Italy part-time in the 1920s with their son Matthew
(1920–1955).
Huyghe, René
René Huyghe (1906–1997) was a prolific French writer on the history, psychology and
philosophy of art. He was also a curator in the department of paintings at the Louvre (from
1930) and a professor at the École du Louvre. Huyghe was one of the first people in France
to make films on art. During the Second World War, he organised the evacuation of the
Louvre’s paintings into the Unoccupied Zone and took charge of their protection until the
liberation of France. In 1974, he became the director of the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.
He served on the Conseil Artistique des Musées de France at the same time as Clark. Huyghe
was elected a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie Française.
Jamot, Paul
Paul Jamot (1863–1939) was the assistant director and curator of the department of painting
at the Louvre, before becoming the director of the Rheims Museum (1927–39). He was also
noted as an archaeologist and poet and was a dedicated collector of paintings from the mid-
nineteenth century (Courbet and Corot) to Picasso and Renoir, and also of Lalique glass.
When he died, he left his collection to various museums in Paris. A room at the Louvre is
named after him.
Kahn, Addie
Addie Kahn (1875–1949), née Wolff, was the American wife of Otto Hermann Kahn (1867–
1934), a German-born Jew who came to work at Deutsche Bank in London in 1888 and
became a British citizen in 1893. They married in 1896 in the usa (where he had gone to
work for Speyer and Co.). She was the daughter of Abraham Wolff, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb
and Co, which Otto then joined after a year’s honeymoon in Europe. In 1917, he renounced
his British citizenship and became a us citizen. He made a fortune out of, inter alia, the
railways. The Kahns lived in some style on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (91st Street) and on
a 443-acre estate which they built on Long Island, the gardens designed by Frederick Law
Olmsted, at the heart of which was the second largest private residence in the us. They were
also patrons of the arts, backing George Gershwin and Toscanini, theatre and opera in New
York, and investing in Hollywood films.
Kerr, Philip
Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882–1940), was a politician and diplomat who, at
various times, was Lloyd George’s private secretary, served in the South African government,
was Under Secretary of State for India and the British ambassador in Washington in 1939–40.
With Berenson he was also involved in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unmarried, and
with no direct descendants, he bequeathed Blickling Hall, Norfolk, to the National Trust on
his death.
Kessell, Mary
Mary Kessell (1914–1978) was an artist whom Clark met when she was young; they had an
affair lasting fourteen years, starting in the 1930s. She studied at Clapham School of Art in
1935–7 and the Central School in 1937–9. In 1945, she spent six months in Germany as an
Official War Artist, where she made drawings at Belsen and Berlin. Her first solo exhibition
was at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1950.
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Krautheimer, Richard
Richard Krautheimer (1897–1994) studied in Munich, Berlin and Marburg, specialising in
Byzantine and Renaissance art. His major project in the 1920s and 30s was a handbook of
churches in Rome, which he worked on with Rudolf Wittkower. It eventually ran to five
volumes and was completed in 1977. He and his wife, Trude Hess, who was also a noted
art historian, were forced to flee Germany in 1933. They settled in Rome but changing
circumstances there forced them to flee again, to the usa, in 1935. In America, he took up
various posts, including a permanent position at New York University in 1952. His book on
Ghiberti, which was co-authored with his wife, was published by Princeton and Oxford
University Presses in 1956.
Kress, Samuel H.
Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), the businessman and philanthropist, was the founder of S. H.
Kress & Co., the five- and ten-cent store chain. Kress used his fortune to put together one of
the best collections of Italian Renaissance and European works of art. In 1929, he established
a Foundation which, in the 1950s and 60s, donated 776 works to 18 regional art museums and
23 universities across the us. The Foundation was a major donor to the National Gallery in
Washington, dc, from its inception (376 paintings, 94 sculptures, 1307 bronzes, 38 drawings).
Lapsley, Gaillard
Gaillard Lapsley (1868–1949) was a Harvard-educated (Class of 1893) American who became
a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a special interest in medieval history. He was a tutor
and Reader in Constitutional History.
Learned Hand, Judge Billings
Billings Learned Hand (1872–1961) was a Harvard graduate (philosophy and law) who was
appointed a Federal District Judge in Manhattan at the age of thirty-six. He rose to become
Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the second circuit but was always passed over for
appointment to the Supreme Court. Judge Learned Hand was of a scholarly and detached
frame of mind, with a noted mastery of the English language. His well-crafted judgements
and his robust defence of civil liberties continue to be cited as precedents. Berenson met him
and his wife Frances through Walter Lippmann in the early 1920s and they became close
friends and regular correspondents. Clark claimed that Learned Hand was the only person
who argued with Berenson with impunity and that, although Berenson much admired him,
the judge did not admire Berenson.
Lee, Arthur
Arthur Hamilton Lee (1868–1947), who became Viscount Lee of Fareham in 1918, was the
youngest son of an impoverished country vicar who died when he was two. He was mostly
brought up in a regime of tyranny by a spinster who took in the children of poor gentlefolk.
A clever boy, he was sent away to boarding school where he was miserable and bullied. He
joined the army where he progressed rapidly and, through an appointment as military attaché
to the us Army, he formed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. In 1899, he married
Ruth Moore, the daughter of a leading New York banker. He became a Conservative mp in
1900. Supposedly charming and easy to get on with, and with a reputation as a brilliant and
persuasive administrator, holding many military, ministerial and diplomatic posts, he could
nevertheless be hysterical and bullying when thwarted. Although he was a dedicated member
of the House of Commons, he did not achieve the high office he might have hoped for. His
marriage was childless and he and his wife turned to art collecting to fill their country house,
Chequers. Lee absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the arts but his purchases were not
always judicious. He and his wife gave the Chequers estate and their first art collection to
the nation in 1917, with an endowment, as a permanent country residence for British prime
Dramatis Personae 532

ministers. It was Lee who conceived the idea of setting up an institution for the study of the
arts. Whereas his friend Samuel Courtauld had it in mind simply to leave his pictures to the
National Gallery, it was Lee who persuaded him to create and fund the eponymous institution.
Lee gave his second art collection to the Courtauld. He also expeditiously arranged for the
transfer of the Warburg Institute and Library from Hamburg to Britain shortly after the Nazis
came to power in 1933. He was a trustee of the National Gallery in 1926–33 and 1941–7 and
the chairman in 1931–2. Lady Lee died in 1966.
Lehmann, Rosamond
Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) was a novelist and playwright whose writings and private
life were considered by many to be scandalous. Her father was an English mp, her mother from
New England. Educated at Cambridge, she was first married, unhappily, to Leslie (Viscount)
Runciman. Her first novel explored lesbian relationships and was a critical and popular success.
Friendly with the leading members of the Bloomsbury Group, she married, secondly, a left-
wing artist, Wogan Philipps, who left her and their children in order to fight in the Spanish
Civil War. After an affair with the writer and academic Goronwy Rees, she embarked on a
‘very public affair’ with the Anglo-Irish poet (and future Poet Laureate), Cecil Day-Lewis. It
was a troubled romance and Day-Lewis eventually left her to marry the actress Jill Balcon.
Leigh, Vivien see Laurence Olivier
Lewis, Sinclair
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was a highly successful American novelist, short-story writer
and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Highly strung and hyperactive, he was constantly on the move round the us and
Europe and easily succumbed to melancholy and drink. His sharply observant works are
wittily critical of middle American society and values. In 1949, he was briefly resident in
Florence and he and Berenson had a number of friends and acquaintances in common. He
died in Rome in 1951 from alcohol poisoning.
Lippmann, Walter
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) was a journalist and philosopher, from a New York German-
Jewish background. Harvard-educated, his interest lay in reconciling liberty with democracy
and in exploring the role the journalist plays in the dialogue between policy-makers and the
electorate. His syndicated newspaper column ‘Today and Tomorrow’, which he wrote between
1934 and 1964, appeared in more than 250 us newspapers and more than 25 international
publicatons. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. Berenson first met Lippmann when
they were both at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (at which Lippmann assisted Woodrow
Wilson to draft his Fourteen Points). They became immediate friends and Lippmann and his
second wife, Helen Byrne Armstrong, were regular visitors to I Tatti in the post-war years.
Longhi, Roberto
Roberto Longhi (1890–1970) was an art historian and art critic. He first taught at a high
school in Rome, where Umberto Morra was his pupil (see Appendix 1). His principal
scholarly interests were Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca but he also took a keen interest
in modern art. In the 1920s, he became part of the circle of the collector and art dealer,
Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, who funded Longhi’s travels and helped launch
his career as a connoisseur. In 1934, Longhi was appointed to the chair of art history at the
University of Bologna and in 1939 he acquired the Florentine villa Il Tasso. Longhi was an
influential teacher, more an advocate for connoisseurship than the history of art, and he was
accused of authenticating fakes to pay gambling debts. Berenson had a high regard for him,
and encouraged him as a young man, but then there was a quarrel, possibly more to do with
Mary than Berenson himself, and for nearly forty years, until 1956, they did not meet or speak.
Dramatis Personae 533

Loria, Arturo
Arturo Loria (1902–1957) was born in Capri, the son of a maker of straw hats. The family
moved themselves and their factory to Florence in 1912. Although left with a limp by polio as
a young boy, he travelled widely and found success as a writer of short stories and poetry. In
1936, he first met Berenson who welcomed him into his inner circle. He and his family (his
father was Jewish) suffered hardship and difficulties in the Second World War, resulting in the
loss of many original manuscripts and books. After 1945, he became the principal translator
of Berenson’s works into Italian. Berenson dedicated his Essays in Appreciation (1958) to Loria.
Lubbock, Percy
Percy Lubbock (1879–1965) came from a family of Norfolk bankers, was educated at Eton and
Cambridge and made a name for himself as an essayist, critic and biographer. Well-connected
socially and intellectually, he settled in Italy and in 1926 married Lady Sybil Cutting, the
mother of Iris Origo. A member of the Berenson circle, he was a close friend of Henry James,
whose letters he edited, and of Edith Wharton until he fell out with her over his marriage.
He wrote a biography of Wharton which was published in 1947.
MacCarthy, Desmond
Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), the literary critic and writer, was a friend of Bertrand
Russell and Logan Pearsall Smith. He became a journalist in 1903, with moderate success, and
during the First World War spent some time in Naval Intelligence. He joined the New Statesman
as their drama critic in 1917 and in 1920 became the literary editor. In 1928, he started a new
literary journal, Life and Letters, which continued until 1935. Clark was a contributor to it.
Maclagan, Eric
Sir Eric Maclagan (1879–1951), the son of an Archbishop of York, was the director of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 1924 to 1945, having joined the staff as an assistant
keeper in his mid-twenties. An expert on textiles and sculpture, his first love was Renaissance
sculpture. He was a good scholar and administrator with a quick and lively intellect. His warm
personality was matched with an expressive face and gleaming prominent teeth. He opened
up the museum to a wider public through exhibitions, popular publications, fresh ideas and
exemplary leadership of his staff. In 1918 he headed the British Ministry of Information in
Paris, where he met Edith Wharton and Berenson.
Mahon, Denis
A lifelong bachelor, Denis Mahon (1910–2011) was a collector and connoisseur of independent
means, an heir of the Guinness Mahon banking dynasty. He was educated at Eton and while
at Oxford was befriended by Clark, who was then the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean
Museum. Mahon’s particular interest was in the once neglected field of seventeenth-century
Italian Baroque art and Clark steered him in the direction of Nikolaus Pevsner, who was then
teaching at the newly established Courtauld Institute. Clark also made him, with John Pope-
Hennessy, an honorary attaché of the National Gallery when he was the director. As well
as an astute and passionate collector, Mahon was a respected scholar and connoisseur with a
remarkable eye for quality. He collected Italian Baroque art between the mid-1930s and late
1960s, when such art was entirely out of fashion, and he is said never to have paid more than
£2000 for a painting. He was committed to the public good, giving his collection to public
galleries in the uk (including 26 works to the National Gallery) in 1989, and fighting vigorous
and vociferous campaigns against the passing of Acts of Parliament which sought to allow the
National Gallery to sell works of art (1950s), and later against the imposing of entry fees to
public collections (1970s). He was twice a trustee of the National Gallery.
Dramatis Personae 534

Mallet, Victor
Sir Victor Alexander Louis Mallet (1893–1969) was the British ambassador in Rome in 1947–
53. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford. His father was a godson of Queen Victoria. He
married Christiana Jean Andreae in 1925 and they had three sons and a daughter. Mallet was
the minister in Stockholm in 1940–45, where he and Clark met during Clark’s two wartime
diplomatic missions. His book, Life with Queen Victoria, was published in 1968. Berenson wrote
in his diary of 29 November 1953 that Lady Mallet treated him ‘as if I were a bad smell’.
Marchig, Giannino
Giannino Marchig (1897–1983), who was born in Trieste, moved to Florence in 1915 and
was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts as a promising pupil. During the 1920s, he
became a well-established painter and traditional draughtsman. In 1929, he was appointed
as the professor of drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. While there he became
part of the Berenson circle. However, the economic circumstances of the 1930s caused him
to take on restoration commissions. A number of books from the I Tatti Library were given
to him for safe-keeping in the summer of 1942. Marchig, along with Alda von Anrep and
Geremia Gioffredi (Berenson’s factor), brought back the books and re-hung the pictures at I
Tatti for Berenson’s return to I Tatti in September 1944. His studio in the Lungarno suffered
in the bombardment of 1944 and, after the war, in part because of the personal crisis brought
about by the war, and in part because of his belief in the importance of conserving beauty, he
turned away from painting and devoted himself to restoration. In 1949, he met Jeanne, a young
Swedish girl who was holidaying in Italy and some twenty years his junior. They married and
settled in Geneva, where Jeanne inspired him to return to painting.
Margheri, Clotilde
Clotilde Margheri (1897–1981) was a talented writer from Naples whom Berenson first met in
1926 and with whom he maintained an intense and flirtatious relationship and correspondence
until the end of his days.Their 1100 surviving letters, written between 1927 and 1955, came to
light in 1981, when Margheri published a selection translated into Italian.
Maugham, William Somerset
William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), the playwright, novelist and short-story writer, was
one of the most popular writers of his day. Born in Paris, where his father was a lawyer with
the British Embassy, he was by far the youngest of four boys. French was his first language
and his early years were enlivened by frequent guests from the worlds of literature and the
arts, including Guy de Maupassant. He was devastated when his mother died of tuberculosis
when he was only eight. Two years later, his father died of cancer and he went to live with
his aunt and uncle who was a vicar in Kent. He attended the King’s School, Canterbury,
before travelling to Germany aged sixteen to study literature and philosophy at Heidelberg
University. He then studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified as a
doctor but never practised. His first novel was published in 1897 and was such a success that
from then on he devoted his life to writing. He moved between London and Paris until
the First World War, when he volunteered for the Red Cross. There he met Gerald Haxton
who became his lover and loyal companion and secretary. In 1917, he married and had a
daughter, Syrie, who became a celebrated interior decorator. The marriage was dissolved in
1929. During the Second World War he worked for British intelligence in Switzerland and
Russia. When Haxton died in 1944, Alan Searle became his lover and secretary. Maugham
bought the Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat in the South of France in 1928, where he lived and
entertained until his death.
Dramatis Personae 535

Meiss, Millard
Millard Meiss (1904–1975) who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a historian of late medieval
and early Renaissance art. He sought to incorporate traditional connoisseurship with social
history and Erwin Panofsky’s iconography. Meiss was among the first American scholars to
benefit from the influx of German scholars to the us, fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, and was
considered among their best students. In 1953, he moved to Harvard to be the professor of
art and curator of painting at the Fogg Art Museum, noted for its collection of early Italian
paintings assembled by Edward Forbes.
Molyneux, Edward
Edward Molyneux (1891–1974), of Huguenot ancestry, was a fashionable and successful
couturier, with establishments in Paris, London and Monte Carlo. He was a friend of Noel
Coward and dressed such stars as Greta Garbo, Gertrude Lawrence and Vivien Leigh and
European royalty. His hallmark style was classical, with a soft look and tailored line. He
collected Impressionist and modern art – Monet, Manet, Renoir, Picasso – and was an
important influence on Derek Hill. His collection was bought in its entirety by Ailsa Mellon
Bruce, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He served with distinction
in the First World War.
Monckton, Walter
Walter Monckton (1891–1965; 1st Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) was a highly successful
lawyer, an adviser to Edward viii during the abdication crisis, friend of Winston Churchill and
a cabinet minister in the post-war government of 1951. Ambitious to be Lord Chief Justice,
in the end, he accepted the chairmanship of the Midland Bank. His second wife, whom he
married in 1947, was Biddy, Lady Ruthven of Freeland (who was able to inherit her title from
her father since the Ruthven peerage was Scottish and predated the Act of Union of 1707).
Moorhead, Alan
Australian-born Alan Moorhead (1910–1983) was a war correspondent covering the campaigns
in the Middle East, Asia the Mediterranean and north-west Europe in the Second World War.
He wrote about his war experiences and had considerable success with popular histories,
notably The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). In 1945 he published Eclipse, the story
of the rise and fall of Germany in the war, followed in 1946 by a biography of Field-Marshal
Montgomery. He and his family lived in England and Italy from 1937 onwards. He suffered a
paralysing stroke in 1966.
Moravia, Alberto
Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) was born in Rome into a well-to-do middle-class family. His
father was Jewish, an architect and painter; his mother was Catholic. On his father’s side, his
two Rosselli cousins who were staunchly anti-fascist were murdered on Mussolini’s orders.
On his mother’s side, in contrast, was an uncle who was a high-ranking official in the fascist
party. At the age of nine, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone and was bedridden for five
years. Although he published his first novel in 1927, he had to find strategies to thwart fascist
censorship and harassment, living a shadowy existence until the ending of hostilities in 1944.
This was the time when he became firm friends with Umberto Morra and came to Berenson’s
notice. Moravia was a prolific writer with a dry, unadorned style, his themes encompassing
love and marriage, boredom, alienation, politics and contemporary life. He was the master of
psychological observation and detached description. A member of the Communist Party, he
became one of the most highly regarded authors of post-war Europe.
Dramatis Personae 536

Morelli, Giovanni
Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) trained as a doctor but established his reputation as an art
critic. He thought, not without some justification, that by applying the principles of medical
diagnosis, the characteristic hand of a particular artist could be best detected by examination
of minor details such as ears or fingernails which, because they are not important, the artist
tends to reduce to a formula and always to execute in the same manner. He published his
theory in 1880 under the pseudonym Ivan Lermolieff. The book had a significant influence
on the young Berenson.
Morgan, Jack
John Pierpont ‘Jack’ Morgan (1867–1943) was the son of John Pierpont ‘J. P.’ Morgan (1837–
1913), the American financier, banker, philanthropist and art collector, who dominated
corporate finance and industrial consolidation in the electricity and steel industries. His
father was a voracious and eclectic collector, notably of books and incunabula, paintings
and drawings, furniture, tapestries, precious objects and gems. J. P. was the president of the
Metropolitan Museum in New York and a powerful force in its establishment. After his father
died in Rome, leaving the fortune and the business to him, Jack donated 7000 objects to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, created the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1924 as a memorial
to his father, and disposed of much of the remainder of his father’s art collection at auction.
Like his father, he disliked publicity. In his inheritance was the bank J. P. Morgan, which, in
the First World War, was the official purchasing agent for the British government, managed
Germany’s reparation payments after the war and became a major lender to Germany and
Mussolini. In 1920, he gave his London residence, 14 Princes Gate, to the us government for
use as its embassy.
Morshead, Owen
Owen Morshead (1893–1977) was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he
became a fellow and the Pepys Librarian. In 1926, he was appointed the Royal Librarian at
Windsor Castle, thanks to the patronage of the Prince of Wales who had been at Cambridge
with him and with whom he had served in the First World War. At Windsor, Morshead
organised a series of catalogues of the drawings. Clark’s volumes on Leonardo were the first
in the series and by the time of Morshead’s retirement in 1958 a total of fourteen volumes
had been published. Of a sunny disposition, Morshead was more of a communicator than an
academic and he was responsible for many guide-books, lectures and broadcasts. He served on
many public bodies inside and outside the field of art and enjoyed a long and close friendship
with Queen Mary.
Mortimer, Raymond
Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980), the literary and art critic, was best known for his reviews in
the New Statesman (of which he was the editor from 1935 to 1947). He then became the chief
reviewer for the Sunday Times (1948–52).
Mostyn-Owen, William
William (‘Willy’) Mostyn-Owen (1929–2011) spent six years working with Berenson in the
1950s and had a close rapport with him. Cambridge-educated, he was the youngest son of a
British military family. His elder brothers were both killed in the war and, as a consequence,
he came into a substantial inheritance, including estates in Scotland and Shropshire. He
was introduced to Berenson by Rosamond Lehmann. While at I Tatti, he compiled a
bibliography of Berenson’s writings and edited the new English edition of Lorenzo Lotto and
(with Luisa Vertova Nicolson) revised Berenson’s publications on Venetian and Florentine
painters. He was then a director of the ‘Old Master’ picture department at Christie’s for almost
Dramatis Personae 537

thirty years. His reminiscences of Berenson and Clark were delivered at the I Tatti Convegno
to mark the 50th anniversary of Berenson’s death, in 2009.
Murray, Gilbert
George Gilbert Aimé Murray (1866–1957) was an outstanding classical scholar and public
intellectual, with influence and connections in many areas, including Liberal politics. A
leading authority on the language and culture of ancient Greece, he was appointed the Regius
Professor of Greek at Oxford in 1908 and in 1925–6 he was the Charles Elliot Norton Lecturer
at Harvard University. He and Berenson first met at the turn of the century.
Nicolson, Benedict
Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) was the elder son of Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-
West. He was brought up at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, and educated at Eton and Balliol
College, Oxford. In the late 1930s, he worked for Clark at the National Gallery as an assistant.
From 1939 to 1947 he was the Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, at first under Clark
and then under Anthony Blunt. He resigned this position in 1947 to become the editor of the
Burlington Magazine, a post he held until 1978. His brother Nigel was a well-known writer,
politician and co-founder of the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Nicolson, Luisa Vertova
Luisa Vertova (1920–) is the daughter of an Italian philosopher and educator. She studied art
history at the University of Florence and joined the I Tatti household in 1945. She was one
of Berenson’s most valued assistants and translators. In 1955, she married Benedict Nicolson.
They divorced in 1962.
Noailles, Charles and Marie Laure de
Charles de Noailles (1891–1981) and his wife, Marie-Laure (née Bischoffsheim; 1902–1970),
were, in the 1920 and 30s, leaders of fashion in Parisian society and important patrons of
modern art, particularly Surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí
and Luis Buñuel and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures from Picasso,
Cocteau, Balthus, Giacometti, Brâncusi, Miró and Dora Maar. In 1923, they commissioned
the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the South of France, in the hills
above Hyères, close by Edith Wharton’s villa.
Norton, Robert
Robert Norton (1868–1939) was educated at Cambridge. He was the Private Secretary to
Lord Salisbury when Prime Minister in 1900. Norton made enough money in the City to
retire and paint watercolours. He was a close friend of Edith Wharton and of Martine-
Marie-Pol de Béhague.
Offner, Richard
Dr Richard Offner (1889–1965) specialised in the early Florentine Renaissance and was
a professor at New York University. He was born in Vienna but his parents emigrated to
America in 1891. He studied art history at Harvard, graduating in 1912. Offner advocated
an approach to art history based on connoisseurship and dedicated his Studies in Florentine
Painting (1927) to Berenson, whose method he had followed and whose company he had
sought in the 1920s. Later, their friendship cooled after he disputed the authorship of various
paintings that had been authenticated by Berenson and were for sale at the Duveen Galleries.
Offner’s major work, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, which appeared in 14
volumes during his lifetime, sought to identify previously anonymous artists and, in many
cases, refuted former attributions to better-known names. His re-assessment of the St Francis
Legend in Assisi, hitherto attributed to Giotto, caused great controversy.
Dramatis Personae 538

Ojetti, Ugo
Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946) was a well-known and influential Italian writer, essayist, journalist and
art critic. He founded the art journal Dedalo (1920–33) and was the editor of the Corriere dell
Sera in 1926–7. Ojetti organised important exhibitions – he had been the first to float the idea
of an Italian exhibition in London – and wrote novels as well as many books on art. He and
his wife Fernanda lived in the Villa Salviatino, Maiano, south of Fiesole, overlooking Florence.
In 1925 he was a signatory of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals and was nominated to the
Italian Academy in 1930.
Olivier, Laurence
Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), the celebrated actor, director and producer, and his second
wife, the actress Vivien Leigh (1913–1967), who won two Oscars, were married in 1940 and
divorced in 1960 after an increasingly stormy and difficult relationship. The Clarks became
close friends, and Clark was fascinated by Leigh, whom he first met in 1940, supporting her
through her many illnesses, bouts of depression and breakdowns. The Oliviers’ country house
was a half-derelict Gothic ruin called Notley Abbey, on the Buckinghamshire–Oxfordshire
border near Thame. When Colin Clark decided on a career in film-making after university, in
1957, he became a personal assistant to Olivier.
Oppenheimer, Henry
Henry J. Oppenheimer (1859–1932) was an American banker and patron of the arts.
He collected widely and knowledgeably, his areas of interest ranging from engravings to
Renaissance jewellery, drawings to antiquities. Especially notable was his collection of
drawings, with examples by Michelangelo and Leonardo. As well as bequeathing works of art
to national institutions in his lifetime, his collections were sold at Christie’s, London, in 1936,
the drawings in three sales in July. He was honorary treasurer of the National Art Collections
Fund. Oppenheimer came to England as a young man, joining Speyer Brothers’ banking firm.
Generous and kindly, friends called him ‘Hen Opp’. He laid the foundation of his drawings
collection when he made an extensive purchase from the Heseltine Collection. Cultivating
the friendship of art experts like Sir Charles Holmes, the director of the National Gallery,
who could never understand how ‘a man of such essential goodness could have amassed a
fortune in the City’, Oppenheimer became himself an expert. When war broke out in 1914,
Speyer Brothers went out of business and ‘Hen Opp’ retired.With limited funds at his disposal,
he bought little to add to the collection. At the height of the Zeppelin raids over London in
1917, Holmes’s thoughts turned to ‘Hen Opp’, who had helped finance the Underground, and
they arranged to store, in the unused station in the Strand, some nine hundred pictures from
the National Gallery, with selected works from great private collections.
Origo, Iris
Iris Origo, Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (1902–1988), was the daughter of a wealthy American
socialite (Bayard Cutting) and Lady Sybil Cutting, the neurotic daughter of Lord Dysart.
After Cutting died in 1910 from tuberculosis, Iris and her mother settled in Italy, at the Villa
Medici in Fiesole, and became close friends of the Berensons. Lady Sybil, after an affair with
Berenson, married again twice, each time to friends in the Berenson circle: first to Geoffrey
Scott (1918–26) and then to Percy Lubbock. She died in 1943. Iris married Count Antonio
Origo in 1924 and they bought the run-down estate of La Foce, near Siena, and devoted a
lifetime to rehabilitating the estate, creating a famous garden and attending to the welfare of
the local peasants. During the Second World War they stayed at La Foce looking after refugee
and peasant children, even though they were on the front line of the fierce fighting between
the Allies and the retreating Germans. A meticulous writer, who published painstakingly
researched biographies, Iris kept a diary of these extraordinary events, which she published in
1947 as War in the Val d’Orcia.
Dramatis Personae 539

Paget, Violet
Violet Paget (1856–1935), whose pseudonym was Vernon Lee, was a writer of supernatural
fiction and of works on aesthetics. She was an early follower of Walter Pater and wrote many
essays on art, music and travel. Paget spent the majority of her life on the Continent and lived
in the Villa Il Palmerino near Fiesole until her death. Of an excessively nervous disposition,
she had long-term passionate friendships with Mary Robinson and Kit Anstruther-Thomson.
She and Berenson had a close and combatively stimulating intellectual relationship during
his early years in Florence, although eventually they quarrelled when he suggested that she
and Thomson had stolen some of his unpublished ideas on aesthetics and were intending to
promulgate them as their own. Later the friendship resumed in a lower key, and both Mary
Berenson and Nicky Mariano were fond of her.
Panofsky, Erwin
Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) was a German art historian celebrated for his work on the
symbols and iconography within works of art. He divided his time between the University of
Hamburg and New York University from 1931, settling permanently in the usa after Hitler’s
rise to power in 1934. He took a particular interest in Dürer. Berenson was antagonistic
towards his iconographic approach to art history.
Parker, Karl Theodore
Karl Theodore Parker (1895–1992), ‘KTP’, was the son of an English surgeon and an American
mother. His family moved to Germany in 1912. Parker studied chemistry at the University of
Freiburg and then wrote a dissertation on Milton at the University of Zurich. His passion was
for drawings and in 1925 he was appointed assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum. He edited the quarterly magazine Old Master Drawings from
1926 until its demise in 1940. Parker succeeded Clark as Keeper of the Department of Fine
Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1934, and was Keeper (director) of the Ashmolean
from 1945 until his retirement in 1962. He helped to create there one of the best collections
of drawings in the world. Lugubrious with an inclination towards melancholy, he was not
without humour and had a strong gift for friendship.
Pater, Walter
Walter Pater (1839–1994) was the godfather of the Aesthetic Movement and a significant
influence on Oscar Wilde, Berenson, Clark, Roger Fry, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats and
T. S. Eliot. He was born in London, the son of a physician, and educated at King’s School,
Canterbury, and The Queen’s College, Oxford. He did not shine academically but eventually
obtained a classical fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford, thanks to his ability to teach
modern German philosophy. He wrote fluently and passionately about the arts. His most
influential works were Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean
(1885). At the heart of his philosophy was the idea that everything should be experienced
as intensely and as subjectively as possible, whether it be a fleeting physical sensation or
an intellectual insight. Marius the Epicurean is an imaginary portrait of a young Roman, of
moral principle, who wishes to pursue an ideal aesthetic life, centred on intensity of sensation
combined with self-discipline and self-denial. The book had a profound influence on
Berenson. Pater believed that moments of vision, however transient, and however simple in
origin, counted among the most exquisite of human experiences. His philosophy met with
much hostility and many considered his views to be undesirably amoral and hedonistic.
Peake, Charles
Sir Charles Peake (1897–1958) was a strong opponent of Appeasement. In 1939, at the
beginning of the war, he was serving in the news department of the Foreign Office and
was chief press adviser to the Ministry of Information; he was then posted to the embassy in
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Washington, dc. On his return in 1942, he was appointed as the British Representative with
the French National Committee in London. Between October 1943 and May 1945 he was the
political adviser to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, with the personal
rank of minister. He continued his career as a diplomat after the war as the consul in Tangier,
ambassador in Belgrade and ambassador in Greece (1951–7).
Phillips, Duncan and Marjorie
Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), with his painter wife, Marjorie (1894–1985), whom he married
in 1921, took a deep interest in modern art and those historic artists, such as El Greco and
Goya, who they thought had been a vital influence on its development. Having started
with a small collection in the family home in Washington, dc, they expanded the collection
substantially after the deaths of Duncan’s father and brother in 1917 and 1918. In 1930, they
moved to a new house and turned the family residence into a public art museum. Always
innovative in their taste, and encouraging of young and unknown artists, they constantly re-
arranged their galleries in ways that disregarded chronology and tradition, in order to bring
out visual connections between works of art.
Pichetto, Stephen
Stephen Pichetto (1887–1949) was a highly influential art restorer, consultant and adviser.
Although little is known about his early education and training, he had established a restoration
studio in Manhattan by 1908. He had a close relationship with Lord Duveen and was the
principal adviser and sole restorer to Samuel Kress. He was also a consultant restorer at both
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
maintaining a studio in each museum as well as continuing his private practice. Pichetto was
also one of the first to recognise the contribution that scientific analysis could make to the
understanding of pictures.
Pinsent, Cecil Ross
Cecil Ross Pinsent (1884–1963) was an English architect and landscape garden designer. With
Geoffrey Scott (who married Lady Sybil Cutting in 1918), Pinsent moved to Florence in 1907
and they both were invited to join the Berenson circle. As a result, he and Scott became the
principal architects of the Villa I Tatti whose restoration commenced in 1909. Pinsent, having
worked in an architect’s office, had some knowledge of the technical aspects of restoration
work (he had a particular interest in drains); Scott had no such training and his interest in
architecture was principally aesthetic and historical. Their work at I Tatti brought them fame
,and Pinsent went on to specialise in gardens in the Italian Renaissance style. His masterpiece
is considered to be the Villa La Foce, designed and constructed for the Origos from 1927 to
1939. Among other works are the Villa dell’Ombrellino at Bellosguardo (1926).
Placci, Carlo
Carlo Placci (1861–1941) was one of Berenson’s earliest Italian friends. A colourful and
cosmopolitan character, novelist, traveller, politician, incorrigible social climber, and bon viveur
with an uproarious sense of fun, he was adored by both Berensons and was an integral part of
the Florentine Anglo-American community. The son of an Italian banker who had married a
Mexican, he was brought up by an English governess and was a passionate Anglophile. In the
Fascist era he became a vociferous nationalist, which led to fierce arguments with Berenson,
but they always buried the hatchet and their friendship survived.
Planiscig, Leo
Leo Planiscig (1887–1952) studied art history in Vienna with Max Dvorak and took his degree
in 1912. He became the artistic advisor to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, after his assassination
at Sarajevo, he moved the Archduke’s collection to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The author of many scholarly articles, he became the director of sculpture and decorative
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arts at the museum in 1933. Planiscig survived a bombing raid on his house, but suffered
mental problems as a result, and in 1938 moved to Florence to pursue private research, writing
monographs on Italian sculptors and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance bronze sculptures.
Pope, Arthur Upham
Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) was an American archaeologist and historian of Persian
art. In 1925 he became an art adviser to the Iranian government. He and his wife Phyllis
Ackerman were pioneers in the study of the arts of Asia and in 1925 they established the
American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, which later became the Asia Institute, in
New York. Pope and Ackerman spent their final days in Iran and on their deaths they were
honoured with a magnificent mausoleum built in the Professor Pope Park, on the banks of
the Zayandeh River, in their beloved city of Isfahan.
Pope-Hennessy, John
Berenson first met the already scholarly and imperious John Pope-Hennessy (1913–1994) in
Salzburg in 1936. He described the future Renaissance art historian and director of both the
Victoria and Albert and British Museums as ‘the budding or rather dawning new grand lama
of British art criticism’ (Samuels ML p. 424). Pope-Hennessey visited I Tatti and Vallombrosa
on several occasions and was fulsome in his admiration of both Berenson and Clark, personally
and professionally. Of Berenson he wrote: ‘the main thing I learned from him was honest-
mindedness . . . our relationship seemed entirely natural. There was no faking on either side.
It is to this that my devotion is due.’ Of Clark he wrote: ‘he was the greatest director of the
[National] Gallery in this century’ (Pope-Hennessy pp. 151 and 300). Pope-Hennessy was
the son of a career army officer and diplomat; his mother was a noted writer (Una Birch). At
Oxford as an undergraduate, he met Clark when he was the Keeper at the Ashmolean and
Clark also took him on as an attaché (with Denis Mahon) when he was the director of the
National Gallery. With no formal training in art history, Pope-Hennessy joined the Victoria
and Albert Museum in 1938 (in the engraving, illustration and design department) and after
the war returned there to the department of sculpture, where he made his reputation as a
connoisseur and scholar, and as an acerbic and impatient colleague. He was appointed director
in 1967, retiring in 1974 when he took on the directorship of the British Museum. Pope-
Hennessy’s younger brother James was a successful biographer who lived a louche existence,
careless with money and over-fond of drink and rough young men: he was murdered in his
London flat by three of them in 1974. Much disturbed by the episode, John Pope-Hennessy
moved to New York in 1977 in a role as ‘Consultative Chairman’ of the Metropolitan Museum.
He retired to Florence in 1986.
Preston, Stuart
Stuart Preston (1915–2005), unmarried and with a fund of arcane knowledge, was a charming
and erudite American and a legendary society figure who was the art critic of the New
York Times from 1949 to 1965. He was sent to London in 1942 to work on Eisenhower’s
staff in intelligence and while there made close friendships with the principal figures among
London’s literati, such as Harold Nicolson, Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell,
Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh. In 1944, he was sent covertly to France with the Fifteenth
Army to save works of art and track German plunder. After the war, he returned to New York
but, in the early 1970s, feeling himself to be no longer at the centre of the art world, he exiled
himself to Paris.
Read, Herbert
Herbert Read (1893–1968) was a poet and a critic of art and literature, with an interest in
anarchism and existentialism. He championed modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben
Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Read was the professor of fine art at the
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University of Edinburgh in 1931–3 and then the editor of the Burlington Magazine in 1933–8.
He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. Read
became a trustee of the Tate Gallery and in 1947 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary
Art with Roland Penrose. He was also the Norton Professor at Harvard University in 1953–4.
Ricketts, Charles
Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) was an artist, illustrator, author and printer, best known as a
book designer and typographer and as a set and costume designer. He was a member of the
selection committee of the Italian Exhibition of 1930. At the City & Guilds Technical Art
School, Lambeth, which he entered as a student in 1882 following the death of his parents,
he met Charles Shannon (1863–1937), a painter and lithographer, who became his lifelong
partner. Clark claimed that he died of a broken heart after Shannon developed a passionate
hatred for him as the consequence of falling off a ladder and becoming insane.
Riegl, Alois
Alois Riegl (1858–1905) was an Austrian art historian, one of the major figures in the
establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline. Riegl put forward the
thesis that art is not the imitation of reality but the expression of a desired reality. He proposed
that it was possible to penetrate to the essence of a culture or an era through formal analysis
of the art that it produced.
Roberts, Laurance Page
Laurance Page Roberts (1907–2002) was a distinguished orientalist and museum curator. He
was the director of the Brooklyn Museum (1938–42) and of the American Academy in Rome
from 1946 to 1960. Roberts was held in high regard not only as a curator but also as an
authority on oriental art. He and his wife, Isabel, whom he married in 1937, were inseparable.
He was responsible for the catalogue of The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa
I Tatti (1991).
Ross, Janet
Janet Ross (1842–1927) was the daughter of Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, who had been the
friend of Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson and other such literary luminaries. In 1860,
aged eighteen, she had married Henry Ross, aged forty, who lost most of his considerable
fortune in the Egyptian banking crisis of 1867. They moved to Italy, purchasing the medieval
castle of Poggio Gherado. Boccaccio, who had grown up on the same hillside, is said to have
lived there during the plague of 1348 and he used Poggio Gherado as the setting for the first
three days of The Decameron. Janet Ross managed the estate in the manner of an ‘autocratic
empress’, selling its produce, dealing in art, and writing articles and classic cookery books. She
entertained constantly and was on intimate terms with the Berenson household – indeed,
Berenson had lived with ‘Aunt Janet’ while he and Mary undertook the restoration of I Tatti
with the help of a loan from her in 1900. Lina Waterfield was her niece and ward.
Ruhemann, Helmut
Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973) was one of the leading picture restorers of his generation.
Born in Berlin, he studied painting in Germany and Paris and, during the First World War, in
Spain. He practised as a freelance picture restorer from 1921, becoming the chief restorer in
1929 at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, where he was among the first to use x-rays for
analysis. He left Germany in 1933, coming to England where he already had clients among
leading London art dealers, including Duveen. Ruhemann restored paintings for the National
Gallery from 1934 and worked on paintings evacuated to Wales from the National and Tate
galleries in 1939. He was appointed as a consultant restorer at the National Gallery in 1946 and
chief restorer until 1972. Ruhemann’s cleaning methods favoured complete varnish removal
and led to public controversy in 1947 when Clark’s successor as director, Philip Hendy,
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mounted an exhibition of recently cleaned pictures at the National Gallery, giving rise to
vociferous complaints that many paintings had been ruined by Ruhemann.
Ruspoli, Marthe
Marthe-Marie de Pineton de Chambrun (1899–1984) married, in 1924, Alessandro Edmondo
Eugenio dei Principi Ruspoli (1895–1975), the third son of Mario Ruspoli, 2nd Prince of
Poggio Suasa. Oxford-educated, she was a writer, linguist, scholar of mysticism and a patron
of the arts.
Sachs, Paul Joseph
A Harvard graduate, Paul Sachs (1878–1965) joined the family firm of Goldman Sachs,
becoming a partner in 1904. While a student he became a firm friend of Edward Forbes who,
after his appointment as the director of the Fogg Art Museum in 1909, persuaded Sachs to
become his assistant curator in 1914. In addition to war service with the American Red Cross,
Sachs taught art history at both Wellesley and Harvard Colleges during the First World War
and, from these lectures, went on to develop what was the first course in museum curatorship,
using his business acumen to teach students administrative, as well as curatorial, skills. His
approach was much in the Berensonian style, which he himself termed ‘connoisseur-scholar’.
Many of his students had distinguished careers as museum directors.
Salles, Georges
Georges Salles (1889–1966), an art historian specialising in oriental art, was the director of
the museums of France from 1945 to 1957. At the Louvre he undertook many far-reaching
reforms to restore the historic continuity of the building in order to ensure that its collections
were displayed in the best possible setting; his policy was to attempt to make museums more
accessible to the public at large. His mother was the daughter of Gustave Eiffel, the famous
engineer, and much of his early years were spent at his grandfather’s house where he met
many distinguished French people of the day. He served with distinction in the First World
War, gaining the Croix de Guerre twice. In 1926, he joined the staff of the Louvre which then
became the centre of his life. In the Second World War, he played an active part in the French
Resistance, and was successful in ensuring that the French national collections did not suffer
damage or destruction. Himself a collector, he supported and encouraged young and living
artists. His private collection contained works by Picasso and Matisse, both of whom he knew
personally, and he commissioned works from them and from Braque and Mirò to decorate
public buildings. A passionate anglophile, he was made an honorary kbe in 1954. In a diary
entry in August 1956, Berenson wrote: ‘had not seen him in six years, found him changed
from a still youngish Frenchman to a white haired elderly Jew . . . member of “Charm
Incorporated”, like Johnnie Walker, like Robert Berenson . . . who no doubt have capacities,
and even merits, but nothing like (equal to) the rewards they gain . . . Georges a sugarplum
for hungry but beautiful women his life long, and still so, I dare say. What a successful career.’
Sassoon, Philip
Philip Sassoon (1888–1939) was the only son of Sir Edward Albert Sassoon, mp, and Aline,
the daughter of Gustave Samuel de Rothschild. The Sassoons were descended from an Iraqi-
Jewish family from Baghdad, who migrated to India in the eighteenth century and made an
immense fortune as Bombay merchants. In the late nineteenth century, various members of the
family settled in England where they became successfully assimilated into English society at
the highest level. Sassoon was educated at Eton and Oxford and his sister, Sybil, married Lord
Rocksavage, later the Marquess of Cholmondeley, so becoming chatelaine of one of England’s
great country houses, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, which she brought back to life after decades
of slumber. Siegfried Sassoon was a cousin, although the two families rarely, if ever, met. Aline
took a passionate interest in the arts and enjoyed a romantically intense attachment to Bernard
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Berenson shortly after he married Mary in 1907. It was she who introduced the Berensons
to Joseph Duveen at about the same time. Philip and his sister, Sybil, stayed at I Tatti when
they were children. Thus, Philip inherited immense wealth, a vivid and eclectic interest in the
arts and a galaxy of social, political and financial connections. His father had been a part of
the then Prince of Wales’s inner circle and Philip cultivated friendship with the next Edward,
Prince of Wales. Unmarried, he enjoyed entertaining on a lavish scale at his London house, 25
Park Lane, and at his mansions at Port Lympne, Kent, and Trent Park, Hertfordshire. His artistic
tastes ranged from the opulently vulgar, to fashionably modern, to traditional English Grand
Tour and chintz, to luxurious French eighteenth-century furniture and objets d’art, as well
as paintings. He indulged his artistic interests, social connections and wealth to the full. Like
his father, he sought a career in politics. Speaking nine languages, he was the private secretary
to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in 1915–18 and in attendance at many international
conferences. He became the mp for Hythe in Kent (his father’s constituency) and was the
Under Secretary of State for Air in 1924–9 and 1931–7. After 1937, he was appointed the First
Commissioner for Works, responsible for all government-owned properties, including the
royal palaces. He was the chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery in 1933–5 and a
trustee of the Tate Gallery and Wallace Collection. Energetic, charismatic and accustomed to
getting his own way in matters aesthetic, he included the Clarks in his circle of friends and
they rented a house, Bellevue, at the entrance to Port Lympne, from Sassoon, as their out-of-
town residence. His health began to decline in the 1930s and, neglectful of it, he died suddenly
from influenza which turned into a fatal chest infection (there were no antibiotics in 1939) at
the age of fifty-one. He requested that his body be cremated and that his ashes be taken up in
his private aeroplane and scattered over the airfield which he had built at Trent Park, with a
Royal Air Force squadron providing an escort.
Shapley, Fern
Fern Shapley (1890–1984) was the curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, dc, from 1947 to 1960. She was the daughter of Ralph Rusk, a professor of
English at Columbia University. She married John Shapley, the professor of art history at
Brown University. In 1925 she worked at I Tatti on The Florentine Drawings. In 1936, Ralph
Rusk, then a professor at the University of Chicago, used his income and connections there to
secure the publication of The Florentine Drawings by the university press, in 1938, at a modest
and subsidised price. She joined the National Gallery of Art as a research assistant in 1943.
Smith, John Hugh
(Arnold) John Hugh Smith (1881–1964), Cambridge-educated, was a merchant banker with
Hambros Bank and knowledgeable about Anglo-Russian finance. He was a friend of Percy
Lubbock, who introduced him into Edith Wharton’s circle in 1908. Smith was an ardent
admirer of Wharton, with whom he entered into a flirtatious correspondence, remaining a
lifelong friend. He married late, in 1941, Adriana Pelleccione. Smith was the treasurer of the
National Art Collections Fund. A keen collector of paintings and sculpture, on his death he
gave works of art to three museums in England via the Fund, including a Renoir still life to
the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Sprigge, Sylvia
Sylvia Sprigge (1903–1966) and her husband Cecil Sprigge (1896–1959) were correspondents
for English newspapers in Rome (she for the Manchester Guardian 1928–33 and 1945–1953;
he wrote for the Catholic Herald and was Reuters’s chief correspondent 1943–6). Berenson
and Sylvia met in 1945 when she came up from Rome to I Tatti, becoming thereafter a
frequent visitor. Berenson enjoyed her company and the news she brought of political events.
Nevertheless he much regretted his half-hearted acquiescence in a proposal that she write
about him – he conceiving the proposal as not more than a personal memoir but she as a full-
Dramatis Personae 545

blown biography. Her book, which two publishers backed out of, was eventually published in
1960, a year after Berenson died. Sylvia was killed in a motoring accident in 1966.
Stark, Freya
Freya Stark (1893–1993) was a celebrated writer, notably of travel books. She was born in
Paris to an English painter father and an Italian mother, spending much of her childhood
in northern Italy. She was often ill and found an outlet in reading: at the age of nine, she
read One Thousand and One Nights and became fascinated with the Middle East. She learned
Arabic and Persian and studied history in London during the First World War. Between 1927
and 1931, she travelled in Lebanon, Iran and Arabia, being one of the first Western women to
travel alone through the Arabian deserts. During the Second World War, she joined the British
Ministry of Information and contributed to the creation of the propaganda network Ikhwan
al Hurriya (Brotherhood of Freedom), aimed at persuading Arabs to support the Allies or at
least remain neutral. She wrote more than two dozen books based on her travels. In 1947, she
married Stewart Perowne (1901–1989), an orientalist, historian and archaeologist, whom she
had met when she was posted to Aden, in 1939, to act as his assistant to his role as information
and political liaison officer.
Stoclet, Adolphe
Adolphe Stoclet (1871–1949) was a Belgian railway engineer and financier who, on the death
of his father, took control of the Société Générale de Belgique, one of the largest industrial
and banking companies in Europe. While in Vienna to oversee the construction of a railway,
Stoclet became fascinated by the art and architecture of the Vienna Sezession and shortly
after 1900 he commissioned Josef Hoffmann to design a villa in Brussels to be the exemplar
of what a modern bourgeois house should be: a comfortable residence for the family; a place
to entertain guests and friends; a haven for artists and musicians; and a suitable setting for
his substantial art collections, which included Egyptian and Chinese sculpture, late medieval
Italian painting, medieval metalwork, enamels and relics, Byzantine art, pre-Columbian art and
Japanese, Cambodian and Tibetan art. Hoffmann was given not only unfettered artistic licence
for the design but also an unlimited budget; he left much of the interior decoration of the
Palais Stoclet to Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff.
Strachey, Lytton
Giles Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) was one of the ten children of General Sir Richard
Strachey, a colonial administrator who had spent much of his life in India, and his wife Jane, a
passionate woman with a love of conversation and French literature. Life in the Strachey family
was intellectual and eccentric. Strachey was at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met
Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, G. E. Moore, the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell. Strachey became a
prominent figure in the Bloomsbury Group. He is best known for his book, Eminent Victorians.
His private life was complicated and unconventional, involving interlocking emotional and
sexual relationships with men and women.
Suida, William
William Suida (1877–1959) was, from 1947, the head of the department of art historical
research at the Kress Foundation, advising on art purchases for Samuel Kress and later
helping to disperse the collection to museums across the United States. Born and brought
up in Vienna (his mother was related to Richard Wagner), he studied art history there and
at Heidelberg, and in 1902–4 was an assistant at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut in
Florence. In 1905, he completed his studies there with a monograph on Florentine painting.
In 1911, he was appointed a professor of art history at the university in Graz and managed
the picture gallery of the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz. He served in the First World
War. Suida developed an expertise in Lombard and Venetian art, and his career took him to
Dramatis Personae 546

Austria and Italy in 1934 but, following the annexation of Austria in 1938, he emigrated, first
to England and then to the United States. His daughter Bertina studied art history at New
York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, marrying a fellow student, Robert Manning. Suida
gave his son-in-law a position as a curator for the Kress collection. Bertina was a curator at the
Chrysler Collection.The Suida family’s collection of Baroque art was donated to the Blanton
Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1999.
Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf
Oscar Fredrik Wilhelm Olaf Gustaf Adolf (1882–1973) succeeded to the throne of Sweden
in 1950. A modest man who disliked pomp and ceremony, he was an accomplished and well
respected archaeologist and was interested in architecture, botany, and Far Eastern art and
history. In addition, he was a keen gardener and sportsman (tennis, golf, fishing). He was
in regular correspondence with Berenson from the mid-1920s and a visitor to I Tatti. He
married first Princess Margaret of Connaught (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), in 1905
at Windsor Castle; she died following an operation in 1920. In 1923, he then married Lady
Louise Mountbatten, the sister of Lord Mountbatten (and aunt of the Duke of Edinburgh).
Clark met the Crown Prince in Sweden in 1942 and they established an immediate and warm
friendship.
Toesca, Pietro
Pietro Toesca (1877–1962), a specialist in medieval and early Renaissance art, was the professor
of art history at the University of Rome from 1926 to 1948, formerly at the Universities
of Turin (1907–14) and Florence (1914–26). Berenson was in close sympathy with Toesca’s
writings on art history and paid him a warm tribute in Studies in Mediaeval Art, published in
1930.
Tolnay, Charles de
Charles de Tolnay (born Karoly Vagujhely Tolnai; 1899–1981) was a Hungarian who later
became a professor at Columbia University, New York. He studied art history at Berlin
and Frankfurt Universities (his post-doctoral ‘Habilitation’ in 1929 was on Michelangelo’s
architecture) and became a noted Michelangelo scholar, closely associated with many of the
leading German and Austrian art historians (such as Dvorak and Panofsky). A Protestant
by religion, he left Germany for Paris in 1933 and emigrated to the usa in 1938, where he
worked at Princeton. His five-volume analysis of Michelangelo was completed in 1960.
Trevelyan, Robert and Julian
R. C. (Robert) Trevelyan (1872–1951), ‘Trevy’, was the second son of Sir George Trevelyan
(1838–1928), and the brother of the celebrated historian, G. M. Trevelyan. A ‘rumpled, eccen-
tric poet’, he was a follower of Logan Pearsall Smith and close to the Bloomsbury Group.
Having been impoverished, he inherited a fortune after the death of his mother in 1928.
Like Clark, he had attended Wixenford Preparatory School. Trevy’s only child, Julian (1910–
1988), became a painter and printmaker, much influenced by Surrealism in the 1930s, and an
influential teacher in London art schools in the post-war period.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh
Hugh Trevor-Roper (Baron Dacre of Glanton; 1914–2003) was a distinguished but
controversial historian who became the Regius Professor of History at Oxford and Master of
Peterhouse, Cambridge. During the Second World War, he served in the Secret Intelligence
Service, working on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service. In
November 1945, he was ordered to investigate the circumstances of Hitler’s death and to rebut
the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. Trevor-Roper interviewed
the last people to have been present in the bunker with Hitler and the investigation resulted
in The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Trevor-Roper turned the complex and confusing evidence
Dramatis Personae 547

into a literary masterpiece, rich in sardonic humour and drama. The book became an instant
best-seller and earned him a small fortune which he used, in part, to buy a grey Bentley
in which he drove out to Italy in July 1947, commissioned by The Observer to report on
the Italian Communists’ electoral strategy. He had become friendly with Logan Pearsall
Smith and it was Logan’s sister Alys Russell who suggested to Trevor-Roper that he call on
Berenson. They became devoted correspondents from 1947 onwards, Trevor-Roper writing
long, carefully crafted letters full of waspish and witty gossip about academia and society. The
correspondence was published posthumously in 2006.
Tyler, Royall
Royall Tyler (1884–1953), who married a Florentine, Elisina Palamadessi di Castelvecchio,
was an authority on Byzantine art and helped to organise the Paris exhibition of 1931. Born
into a wealthy Boston shipbuilding family, he was educated in England at Harrow School
and Oxford. Charismatic and always elegantly dressed, he pursued a glittering and varied
career, not only in the arts but also as a soldier, banker and diplomat. He advised Robert and
Mildred Bliss on the formation of their collections and the Byzantine Research Library at
Dumbarton Oaks.Tyler was a friend of Edith Wharton and Berenson doted on him as ‘a real
scholar and man of taste’. He committed suicide in Paris in 1953 while working on a history
of the Emperor Charles v. An ancestor was another Royall Tyler (1757–1826), who was the
first significant American playwright.
Venturi, Adolfo and Lionello
There were two Venturi art historians, father and son. Adolfo (1856–1941) pioneered a modern
approach to art history in Italy and was the professor of medieval and modern art at the
University of Rome (1896–1931). In 1888, he had been appointed the general inspector of the
Belle Arti at the Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome, where he instituted formal training
on conservation and initiated a catalogue of the national artistic heritage. He supported
Duveen and Berenson in the famous court case in New York over the authenticity of a
version of a supposed Leonardo painting, La Bella Ferroniere. Lionello (1885–1961), his son,
was the professor of art history at the University of Turin (1919–31) and a specialist in Italian
Renaissance and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. He was exiled from Italy
for refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to Mussolini, and was appointed a professor at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He later became the professor of art history at
the University of Rome (1945–55).
Waley, Arthur
Arthur David Waley (1889–1966) was the Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts
at the British Museum from 1913 to 1929. British-born but of German-Jewish heritage, he
changed his surname to his paternal grandmother’s maiden name in 1914. He taught himself
Chinese and Japanese to help catalogue the paintings in the Museum’s collection. After 1929,
he devoted his time exclusively to literary and cultural interests. In 1918, he met Beryl de
Zoete, the dance critic and writer, and they lived together until her death in 1962. He was on
friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group. His translations of Chinese poetry were much
admired in the Berenson household.
Walker, John
John Walker (1906–1995) was born into a wealthy Pittsburgh family with many worldly goods
but he contracted polio when he was thirteen which confined him to a wheelchair for several
years. He turned this adversity to his advantage by studying the paintings in the Metropolitan
Museum in New York from his wheelchair, claiming that a sitting position gave the best
vantage point for viewing them. He studied at Harvard with Paul Sachs, graduating summa
cum laude. He then went to I Tatti to work with Berenson, following which he was appointed
Dramatis Personae 548

the professor of fine arts at the American Academy in Rome, in 1935–9. While there, he met
and married ‘Margie’ Drummond, the eldest daughter of the 16th Earl of Perth who was the
serving British ambassador. In Rome, in 1937, he learned of the proposal to create a National
Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, funded by Andrew Mellon, whose son Paul was a boyhood
friend from Pittsburgh. He wrote to Paul to ask if there might be an opening for him and
in January 1939 he was appointed the Chief Curator. He remained there for the rest of his
working life, thereby dashing Berenson’s hope that he might become the first director of I
Tatti, if and when Harvard took it on. Walker was endowed with diplomatic skills as well as
scholarship, and he formed easy and genuine friendships with many collectors, who in turn
became supporters of, and donors to, the National Gallery. In 1956, he succeeded David
Finley as the director. From the beginning, he helped plan the National Gallery’s layout, its
construction and the installation of the gallery’s initial group of thirty-eight paintings donated
by Samuel Kress. Through his influence, the gallery became a world-class institution. He
always acknowledged his debt to Berenson and, by extension, Berenson’s influence on the
formation of the National Gallery. Walker retired in 1969 and settled with his wife (who died
in 1987) in Amberley, near Arundel, Sussex, spending the winters in Florida.
Walton, William
Sir William Turner Walton (1902–1983) was one of the most distinguished composers of his
generation, writing music in all classical modes, as well as film scores and operas. The son of a
musician, he was a chorister and undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. He was taken up by
the Sitwells who nurtured his talents. From 1934, he had a long-standing affair with a woman
twenty-two years his senior. She was Alice, the wife of Lord Wimborne, from whom she
separated amicably in 1930. When Alice Wimborne died in 1948, the music publisher Leslie
Boosey persuaded him to be a British delegate to a conference on copyright in Buenos Aires
in order to alleviate his grief. While there, he met Susana Gil Passo (1926–2010), the daughter
of an Argentine lawyer, twenty-four years his junior. They were married in December 1948
and from then on spent half the year on the Italian island of Ischia, moving there permanently
in the mid-1950s.They purchased a property on Zaro, a hill in an attractive but barren, volcanic
corner of the island. They built a house carved into the rock, Susana Walton creating at La
Mortella (named after the wild myrtles which grew in profusion) one of the great gardens
of Europe. Walton’s widespread sexual escapades were legendary, and he and Jane Clark were
rumoured to have planned to run away together in the war.
Warburg, Abraham
Abraham (‘Aby’) Warburg (1866–1929) was born in Hamburg into a family of German-Jewish
bankers but his interests were always in literature and history. He was a rebel in a conservative
family and agreed to forfeit his right to inherit the family bank, as long as his younger
brother, Max, provided him with books. Warburg studied art history in Bonn, Munich and
Florence, developing an interest in applying scientific methodology to the study of art. After
receiving his doctorate in 1892, he studied medicine and psychology in Berlin and, in 1895,
travelled extensively in the us where he became fascinated by American-Indian rituals and
symbolism. Returning to Europe, he married in 1897 Mary Hertz, the daughter of a Hamburg
senator, a Lutheran. They settled in Florence where he researched the living and business
circumstances Renaissance artists. He rejected Berenson’s aestheticism and initiated the study
of iconography.
Waterfield, Caroline (‘Lina’)
Lina Waterfield (1874–1964), born Lina Duff Gordon, was Janet Ross’s niece and ward and
she was brought up at Poggio Gherado. She became a successful writer of popular travel books,
the London Observer’s Italian correspondent between the wars, and one of the founders of
Dramatis Personae 549

the British Institute in Florence. She married the painter Aubrey Waterfield in 1902 and they
pursued an independent, bohemian lifestyle. When in Italy, they divided their time between
their own castle at Aulla (in the Massa Carrara in the far north-west of Tuscany) and Poggio
Gherado. Her eldest son Gordon was a friend of Clark at Oxford. On Janet Ross’s death in
1927, Poggio Gherado was left to Lina’s younger son John, with a life interest to Lina, thereby
disinheriting Ross’s only son Alick whom she regarded as a spendthrift, like her brother
Maurice, Lina’s father.
Waterfield, Gordon
Gordon Waterfield (1903–1987) was the eldest son of Lina and Aubrey Waterfield. He was at
Oxford at the same time as Clark and on graduation went to Egypt to learn about the cotton
trade with a view to joining a family firm but almost immediately abandoned this career for
journalism, obtaining a post on the Egyptian Gazette and then becoming the correspondent
for the London Times. He was engaged to Jane Martin, also an Oxford contemporary, but it
was Clark whom she married in 1927. In 1929 he married Kitty Hornsby (1908–1989), the
daughter of the governor of the National Bank of Egypt. The only interruption in his career
as a journalist was service in the army during the Second World War. Before the war, he
worked in Paris and Rome, and after was the first head of Eastern and Arabic services of the
bbc. Born near Canterbury, Kent, he retired to live a few hundred yards from Saltwood Castle.
A large, courteous, kindly man, he showed no rancour or bitterness over Jane’s breaking of
their engagement and her marriage to Clark, but to the end of his days he carried in his breast
pocket the letter Clark wrote to him on the evening of his marriage to Jane.
Waterhouse, Ellis
Ellis Waterhouse (1905–1985) was an eminent English art historian with a penetrating eye and
strongly held, often controversial, opinions. He specialised in Roman Baroque and English
painting. Educated at Oxford and Princeton, he was appointed an assistant keeper at the
National Gallery, London, in 1929. In a long and distinguished career, he became the director
of the National Galleries of Scotland (1949–52), Slade Professor at Oxford (1953–5), Barber
Professor of Fine Art at the University of Birmingham and the director of the Barber Institute
(1952–70), and adviser to the director of the new Yale Center for British Art (1970–73). Of
his many publications, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 (1953), remains the standard text on the
subject.
Wharton, Edith
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born into a wealthy family of descendants of English and
Dutch colonists, whose fortune derived from shipping, banking and real estate. As a girl, she
lived in Europe for six years with her family. When they moved back to the us they lived
in a fashionable area of Manhattan. She was educated at home by governesses, her thirst for
knowledge assuaged by reading books from her father’s library. In 1885, she married Edward
Robbins Wharton (‘Teddy’), a banker from Boston but with little interest in intellectual
pursuits or the arts. In 1905, she published the book that made her famous, The House of Mirth.
In 1907, she discovered that her husband had taken money from her in order to establish a
mistress in Boston.This revelation, together with a desire to continue to write full-time, led to
divorce in 1912. A prolific writer, and much influenced by her friend Henry James, her novels
portray the manners and morals of New England society at the turn of the century. The Age
of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921. She also wrote short stories, poems,
articles, translations and reviews. Wharton was a relief volunteer in France during the First
World War. She lived for most of the time in France, dividing her time between her houses at
Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt in the northern suburbs of Paris and at Hyères in the South of France.
The same age as Berenson, she first met him in 1903 but without any rapport; however, a
Dramatis Personae 550

carefully orchestrated second meeting in Paris in 1909 bore fruit, and she became one of
Berenson’s closest friends. Clark first met her at I Tatti in early 1931. She died following a
stroke in 1937 and is buried in the American Cemetery at Versailles.
Whittemore, Thomas
Thomas Whittemore (1871–1950) was a distinguished Harvard Byzantine scholar who
discovered important mosaics at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. In 1911, Whittemore became the
American representative for the (British) Egyptian Exploration Fund, participating in the
archaeological digs at Abydos and Balabish. He inherited wealth which he used to establish
the Byzantine Institute in Boston, with a research centre in Paris and a field office in Istanbul.
Wilde, Johannes
Johannes Wilde (1891–1970) was born in Hungary and studied in Vienna under Max Dvorak.
He settled in Vienna, working in the museum service and becoming the keeper of the
Gemäldegalerie in the early 1920s. A Roman Catholic, he married a Jew and they left for
Holland in 1939, from where they went to Britain at the invitation of Clark. He worked
principally with Italian Renaissance paintings but is also remembered for his pioneering use
of x-rays to examine paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In Britain, he
worked on cataloguing pictures at the National Gallery, drawings at the British Museum and
at Windsor Castle. In 1940, he went to Aberystwyth and was asked to work with A. E. Popham
on a catalogue of the Italian drawings in the British Museum.While there, he was erroneously
accused of signalling to German submarines and subsequently deported to Canada. He
returned to England, taking British citizenship, and joined the staff of the Courtauld Institute,
eventually becoming the deputy director. Wilde believed in the first-hand study of the object
and was especially noted for his scholarship on Michelangelo and Venetian art.
Wind, Edgar
Edgar Wind (1900-1971), German-born and educated, studied with Erwin Panofsky and
Aby Warburg. He was instrumental in arranging for the Warburg Library to move from
Hamburg to London in 1933. From 1940, he lived and taught in the us. In 1955, he was
appointed as the first professor of art history at Oxford (in the Faculty of Modern History). A
classicist and Renaissance expert, he nonetheless defended modern art. He made his reputation
through research in exploring the uses of allegory and pagan mythology during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. His Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance was published in 1958. On 14
November 1958, Clark made a radio broadcast on the bbc’s Third Programme with the title
The Concealed God, in which he discussed Wind’s book.
Witt, Robert
Sir Robert Clermont Witt (1872–1952) was one of the most prominent and influential men
in the London art world. Oxford-educated, he trained as a solicitor and became the senior
partner of one of London’s law firms (Stephenson, Harwood and Tatham). Of Spartan habits,
but with great energy, he had a passionate interest in the cause of art, being a founder and
the first honorary secretary, and later chairman, of the National Art Collections Fund. He
was a trustee of the National Gallery (1916–23 and 1924–31) and the Tate Gallery (1916–31).
Witt had an encyclopaedic knowledge of works of art and their whereabouts, and he and
his wife gave to the Courtauld Institute their collection of more than 750,000 photographs
and reproductions of works of art. Witt had helped found the Courtauld Institute and served
on its management committee. He was a prime mover behind the Burlington House Italian
Exhibition of 1930.
Dramatis Personae 551

Wittkower, Rudolf
Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971) was a German art historian, born in Berlin, who moved to
London in 1934: his father was British and he held British citizenship throughout his life.
He taught at the Warburg Institute from 1934 to 1956, after which he moved to America,
becoming the chairman of the department of art history and archaeology at Columbia
University, New York.
Wölfflin, Heinrich
Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) was a pioneering Swiss-born art critic and historian
celebrated for developing the vocabulary and methodology of formal analysis of works of
art. The first of his hugely influential books was Renaissance und Barock (1888); in 1915 he
published Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) in which he identified
and contrasted five pairs of precepts in form and style, such as linear and painterly. Berenson’s
‘tactile values’ was not part of his vocabulary. He taught at the Universities of Basel (1897–
1901), Berlin (1901–12) and Zurich (1912–24) and is said to have pioneered the use of twin
slide projectors so that images could be compared side by side.
Worth, Irene
Harriet Abrams (1916–2002), whose professional name was Irene Worth, was a theatrical star
with a talent for high comedy. Born in Nebraska and educated in California, she moved to
Britain in 1944. Her crowded career included commercial successes in London and New York,
and her breakthrough came with T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party in 1949–50. Following this,
she was invited to join the Old Vic Company, notably as Portia and Lady Macbeth, both in
1953. She then joined Alec Guinness and Tyrone Guthrie for the first pioneering season of the
Shakespeare Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario. In the 1950s she performed with most of
the leading actors of the day and in the early 1960s formed a rewarding association with the
Royal Shakespeare Company.
Yugoslavia, Prince Paul of
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia (1893–1976) was educated at Oxford and had many British friends.
In 1923, he married Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark, the sister of Princess Marina,
Duchess of Kent. The future George vi was his best man. In 1934, he became Regent of
Yugoslavia following the assassination of his cousin King Alexander. A kind and happily
married man, he was a keen art collector and a disciple of Berenson whom he had met before
1919, and with whom he maintained a close lifelong friendship, evidenced by many letters
and mutual visits to I Tatti and Prince Paul’s properties in Yugoslavia. He donated a significant
number of masterpieces by artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, the French Impressionists and
Picasso to the Serbian people, and these are to be found in the National Museum of Serbia
in Belgrade.
Selected Bibliography

The books in the first section below are quoted in the editorial text and footnotes, where they are identified
by the author and abbreviated title (given here in parentheses) where appropriate.

Berenson, Bernard, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, Doubleday, New York, 1948 (Berenson A&H)
—, Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Pantheon, New York, 1949 (Berenson SSP)
—, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Phaidon, London, 1952 (Berenson IPR)
—, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1963
(Berenson S&T)
Clark, Colin, Younger Brother,Younger Son, Harper Collins, London, 1997 (Colin Clark)
Clark, Kenneth, Another Part of the Wood, John Murray, London, 1974 (Clark APW)
—, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait, John Murray, London, 1977 (Clark OH)
—, Moments of Vision, John Murray, London, 1981 (Clark MV)
—, Apologia of an Art Historian, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1951 (Clark AAH)
Glasgow, Mary, The Nineteen Hundreds: A Diary in Retrospect, Oxford University Press, 1986 (Glasgow)
Hadley, Rollin van N., The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, Northeastern
University Press, Boston, 1987 (Hadley)
Mariano, Nicky, Forty Years with Berenson, Knopf, New York, 1966 (Mariano)
Morra, Umberto, Conversations with Berenson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1965 (Morra)
Pope-Hennessy, John, Learning to Look, Heinemann, London, 1991 (Pope-Hennessy)
Samuels, Ernest, Bernard Berenson:The Making of a Connoisseur, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1979
(Samuels MC)
—, Bernard Berenson:The Making of a Legend, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Boston, 1987
(Samuels ML)
Strachey, Barbara, and Jayne Samuels, Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from her Letters and Diaries, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 1985 (Strachey)
Walker, John, Self-Portrait with Donors, Little Brown, Boston and Toronto, 1974 (Walker)

Acton, Harold, Memoirs of an Aesthete, Methuen, London, 1948

Beevor, Kinta, A Tuscan Childhood,Viking, London, 1993
Behrman, S. N., People in a Diary, Little, Brown, Boston, 1972
Bell, Clive, Enjoying Pictures, Chatto and Windus, London, 1934
Berenson, Bernard, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New
York, 1894
—, Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism, Putnam, New York, 1895; 3rd rev. edn, trans. Luisa
Vertova, Electa, Milan, 1955, and in English as Lorenzo Lotto, Phaidon, London, 1956
—, Venetian Painting, Chiefly before Titian, privately printed, 1895
—, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New York, 1896

552
Selected Bibliography 553

—, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Putnam, New York, 1897
—, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, George Bell, London, 1901
—, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and
Appreciation of Tuscan Art:With a Copious Catalogue Raisonné, John Murray, London, 1903
—, North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Putnam, New York, 1907
—, A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, Dent, London, 1909
—, Study and Criticism of Italian Art: Second Series, George Bell, London, 1914
—, Study and Criticism of Italian Art:Third Series, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1916
—, Venetian Painting in America:The Fifteenth Century, Frederic Fairfield Sherman, New York, 1916
—, Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, Frederic Fairfield Sherman, New York, 1918
—, Three Essays in Method, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927
—, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 1930
—, The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1932
—, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 3 vols, University of Chicago Press, 1938
—, Piero della Francesca o dell’arte non eloquente, Electa, Florence, 1950; Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent
in Art, Chapman & Hall, London, 1954
—, Del Caravaggio, delle sue incongruenze e della sua fama, Electa, Florence, 1951; Caravaggio: His Incongruity
and his Fame, Chapman and Hall, London, 1953
—, L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma, Electa, Florence, 1952; The Arch of Constantine: or,
The Decline of Form, Chapman and Hall, London, 1954
—, Echi e riflessioni, Arnoldo Mondadori,Verona, 1950; Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, Constable,
London, 1952
—, Vedere e sapere:Versione dal manoscritto inedito di Luisa Vertova, Electa, Milan, 1951; Seeing and Knowing,
Chapman and Hall, London, and Macmillan, New York, 1953
—, Disegni di Maestri Fiorentini del Rinascimento in Firenze, Radio Italiana, Turin, 1954
—, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places,
Venetian School, 2 vols, Phaidon, London, c. 1957
—, Essays in Appreciation, Macmillan, New York, 1958
—, Essays in Appreciation, Chapman and Hall, London, 1958
—, The Passionate Sightseer: From the Diaries 1947–56, Simon and Schuster and Abrams, New York, 1960
—, One Year’s Reading for Fun, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1960
—, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, Harcourt Brace & World, New York, 1963; Hamish
Hamilton, London, 1964
—, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New York, 1984
Berenson, Mary, A Modern Pilgrimage, Appleton, New York, 1933
Berlin, Isaiah, Enlightening Letters 1946–60, Chatto and Windus, London, 2009
Biocca, Dario, Letters of Bernard Berenson and Clotilde Marghieri, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1989
Bosman, Suzanne, The National Gallery in Wartime, National Gallery, London, 2008
Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 1995
Brown, David Alan, B. Berenson and the Connoisseurship of Italian Painting, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, dc, 1979
Caygill, Marjorie, The Story of the British Museum, British Museum Press, London, 1992
Clark, Alan, ed., ‘A Good Innings’:The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, John Murray, London,
1974
Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival, Constable, London, 1928
—, A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King, at Windsor
Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1935
—, 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, National Gallery, London, 1938
—, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1939
—, Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge University Press and
Macmillan, New York, 1939
—, More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, Trustees of the National Gallery, London, 1941
Selected Bibliography 554

—, Florentine Paintings, Faber Gallery Series, Faber and Faber, London, 1945
—, Leon Battista Alberti on Painting: Annual Italian Lecture of the British Academy 1944, Cumberlege,
London, 1945
—, Landscape into Art, John Murray, London, 1949
—, Piero della Francesca, Phaidon, London, 1951
—, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, John Murray, London, and Pantheon, New York, 1956
—, Looking at Pictures, John Murray, London, 1960
—, Ruskin Today, John Murray, London, 1964
—, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance, John Murray, London, 1966
—, Civilisation: A Personal View, bbc, London, and Harper and Row, New York, 1969
—, Moments of Vision, John Murray, London, 1981
—, The Art of Humanism, John Murray, London, and Harper and Row, New York, 1983
—, and Lord Balniel, eds, A Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Italian Art held in the Galleries of
the Royal Academy, Burlington House, Oxford University Press, 1931
Cohen, Rachel, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade,Yale University Press, New Haven and
London, 2013
Conlin, Jonathan, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, Pallas Athene, London, 2006
Connors, Joseph, and Louis Waldman, eds, Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage,Villa I Tatti Series 31,
Harvard University Press, Boston, 2014
Constable, W. G., Art History and Connoisseurship, Cambridge University Press, 1938
Davenport-Hines, Richard, Letters from Oxford, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2006
Dunn, Richard M., Geoffrey Scott and the Berenson Circle, Edward Mellen Press, Lewiston, Queenston,
Lampeter, 1998
Fowles, Edward, Memories of Duveen Brothers, Times Books, New York, 1976
Gimpel, René, Diary of an Art Dealer, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1966
Goldman-Price, Irene C., and Melissa McFarland Pennell, eds, American Literary Mentors, University Press
of Florida, Gainesville, 1999
Goldstein, Malcolm, A History of Art Dealing in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2000
Gonzáles-Palacios, Alvar, Persona e maschera: collezionisti, antiquari, storici dell’arte, Archinto, Milan, 2014
Goodman, Susan, Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994
Haskell, Francis, The Ephemeral Museum,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000
Hazzard, Shirley, Greene on Capri,Virago, New York, 2000
Hinks, Roger, The Gymnasium of the Mind, Michael Russell, Salisbury,Wiltshire, 1984
—, and Naomi Royde-Smith, Pictures and People,Victor Gollancz, London, 1930
Howard, Jeremy, Colnaghi. Established 1760:The History, Colnaghi, London, 2010
Hugh Smith, Craig, and Peter M. Lukeheart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, Princeton
University, 1993
Israëls, Machtelt, The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece,Villa I Tatti, Florence, 2009
Jebb, Louis, Leonardo da Vinci’s Miniature Madonna: Arthur Hungerford Pollen and the Virgin and Child with a
Cat, privately printed, 2013
Kiel, Hannah, The Bernard Berenson Treasury, Methuen, London, 1964
Kinglake, Alexander William, Eothen, Macmillan, London, 1932
Lacey, Robert, Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, Warner Books, London, 1998
Landow, George, Victorian Types,Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980
Lebrecht, Norman, Covent Garden, Simon and Schuster, London, 2000
Lees-Milne, James, Ancestral Voices, Chatto and Windus, London, 1975
Lewis, Richard W. B., Edith Wharton, Constable, London, 1975
Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, London, 1922
Lindsey, Anne H., Four Years, privately printed, 1930
McComb, A. K. The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson, Hutchinson, London, 1965
Macgregor, Arthur, The Ashmolean Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2001
Major, Norma, Chequers, Harper Collins, London, 1996
Selected Bibliography 555

Mariano, Nicky, An Inventory of Correspondence on the Centenary of the Birth of Bernard Berenson,Villa I
Tatti, Florence, 1965
Millar, Oliver, The Queen’s Pictures, Chancellor Press, London, 1977
Moorhead, Alan, The Villa Diana, Charles Scribner’s, New York, 1951
Moorhead, Caroline, Iris Origo, John Murray, London, 2000
Mostyn-Owen, William, Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson, Burt Franklin, New York, 1972
Origo, Iris, A Need to Testify, John Murray, London, 1984
—, War in the Val d’Orcia, Jonathan Cape, London, 1947
—, Images and Shadows, John Murray, London, 1970
—, ‘The Long Pilgrimage: One Aspect of Bernard Berenson’, Cornhill Magazine, no. 1023 (Spring 1960),
pp. 139–55
Panofsky, Erwin, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Penguin, London, 1970
Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Macmillan, London, 1873
—, Marius the Epicurean (1885), Dent, London, 1934
Pope-Hennessy, John, On Artists and Art Historians, Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 1994
Popham, A. E., Italian Drawings exhibited at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London, 1930, Oxford
University Press, London, 1931
Popham, Margaret, Boring – Never!, Johnson, London, 1968
Saumarez Smith, Charles, The National Gallery, Frances Lincoln, London, 2009
Secrest, Meryle, Being Bernard Berenson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1980
—, Kenneth Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984
—, Duveen: A Life in Art, Knopf, New York, 2004
Shone, Richard, and John-Paul Stonard, The Books that Shaped Art History, Thames & Hudson, London,
2013
Simpson, Colin, Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, Macmillan, London, 1987
Spalding, Frances, Roger Fry, Paul Elek Granada, London, 1980
Sprigge, Sylvia, Berenson, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1960
Stansky, Peter, Sassoon:The World of Philip and Sybil,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003
Strachey, Barbara, Remarkable Relations:The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family,Victor Gollancz, London,
1980
Sunday Times, The, Encore:The Sunday Times Book, Michael Joseph, London, 1962
Tooley, John, In House: Covent Garden, 50 years of Opera and Ballet, Faber and Faber, London, 1999
Trevelyan, Julian, Indigo Days, MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1957
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Letters from Oxford, Phoenix, London, 2007
Trewin, Ion, Alan Clark:The Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2009
Vane, Francis, Walks and People in Tuscany, Bodley Head, London, 1910
Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance, Appleton, New York, 1934
Witt, Robert Clermont, How to look at Pictures, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1925
Wright, Adrian, Foreign Country:The Life of L. P. Hartley, André Deutsch, London, 1996
Index

note: Page numbers followed by n refer to Amarna, Egypt (Tel-el-armena) 16

information in a footnote; those in bold refer to Anderson, Domenico 148n
main entries in the Dramatis Personae section. Anderson, James 148
Locators for the illustrations in the plates section ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’ (BB’s art historical
appear after the regular locators. Plates 1- 20 are fiction) 173
placed between pages and 112 and 113; plates 21- Angerstein, John Julius 148n
41, between pages 272 and 273. Anrep, Alda von 138, 471, 509, pl. 8
BB’s artworks at Borgo San Jacopo in Florence
Abbott, Senda Berenson (née Berenson, BB’s during WWII 228
sister) 88, 133, 353, 509 and BB’s death 467
Aberconway, Christabel 322n, 323 letter to KC 268–9
Aboriginal art in Australia: KC’s enthusiasm for as member of I Tatti staff 110, 229, 239, 316,
306–7, 308 509, 534
Ackerman, Phyllis 541 care of Library and BB’s researches 4, 352,
Acton, Harold: Memoirs of an Aesthete 2–3 418
Aesthetic Movement 99, 127, 472, 486 visits KC and Jane in England 418
Agnew, Colin 297, 301 Anrep, Cecil von 4, 60, 138, 509
Agnolo di Donnino 41, 43 Anrep, Baron Egbert von (Bertie) 4, 138, 229, 239,
Agostino di Duccio 410 509
Ajanta Caves, India 151, 152, 429, 430–1 anti-fascist movement in Italy 138n, 228, 519,
Albany, Piccadilly, London: KC’s London flat 402, 535
513 BB’s sympathies with 58–9, 131, 226, 241, 242,
Alberti, Gugliemo degli 110, 283, 490 490
Alberti, Leon Battista 74 Morra’s sympathies and role in viii, 59, 490–1,
KC’s first edition gift to BB 316, 318 491, 492, 511
KC’s lecture on 254, 255 Antique in English Culture lectures 78
KC’s plans for paper on 254, 255 Antonello da Messina: Christ Crucified 143, 145
Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk 287, 345, 370n Ardizzone, Edward 224
Alexander of Aphrodisias 75–6 Ardnamurchan, Scotland: KC’s family estate 14n,
Alexander of Tunis, Lord 391 23
Allen, Reginald Clifford, Baron Allen of Arles, France 92–3
Hurtwood 118 Arnold, Miss 207
Allendale, Lady 82 Art in the Dark Ages exhibition (1930) 83, 84
Allendale,Viscount 75, 77, 78, 82 Art Fund 80
Duveen and Adoration of the Shepherds see also National Art Collections Fund
attribution 129, 482, 524 art history
Alnwick Castle, Northumberland: Sebastiano del and BB’s legacy for I Tatti 494–5
Piombo fresco 152 BB’s post-war writings on his theories of art
Altamura fantasy 384, 422 281–2, 475

556
Index 557

and BB’s scholarship and connoisseurship Baker, Collins 73, 123, 125, 515
484–6 Baker, Sir Herbert 192n
KC’s comparative view of 485–6, 502–3 Baker, Walter C. (?Harold) and collection 426–7
KC’s impatience with recent writing on 362 Baldass, Ludwig von 184, 515
KC’s reputation as art historian 484–5, 487, 488, Baldwin Brown, Gerard 81
513–14 Balfour, Archie 121n
KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ on BB’s role in 472–7 Ballets Russes 194n
limited opportunities for study in Britain 2 Balniel, David Alexander Robert Lindsay, Lord
new German scholarship and BB’s dislike for (later 28th Earl of Crawford) 75, 90, 105, 149,
127–8, 151, 162–3, 215, 308 206, 278, 295, 302, 305, 312, 443, 515, pl. 35
art market as context for BB’s career 481–4, 500, appendicitis on return from Italy 273, 274
501 and Harvard institute at I Tatti 496
Arts Council of Great Britain 224–5, 243–4, 339, KC visits in Scotland 393
354, 370n as National Gallery trustee 124, 177, 192n, 243,
KC and Chairmanship of 225, 279, 382, 390, 335
450, 462 sale of Rembrandt to National Gallery 222
Arundel Society, The 233–4 visits to I Tatti 108–9, 110, 456
Ashby St Ledgers manor house, Balniel, Robin 301, pl. 35
Northamptonshire 193n Barber Institute, Birmingham 297, 298
Ashmole, Elias 97–8 Barberini, Cardinal Antonio 209–10
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1, 2, 142, 321, 449 Baroque: KC’s plans for book on 40–1, 44
background and founding collections 97–9 Bassiano, Marguerite Caetani 355
BB and KC’s research at 22, 23 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 379
BB’s donation of painting 1 see also Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth
Charles Bell at 1, 2, 38, 67n, 94, 97, 104, 109, 516 Clark
Dürer’s St Jerome in the Wilderness on show at Bearsted,Viscount 124, 158n
450–1 Beaton, George see Brenan, Gerald
Henry (Bogey) Harris’s bequest 334 Beccafumi, Domenico 36
KC as Keeper of Fine Art 97–121 Becker, Thieme 41
acquisitions 120–1, 137 Beerbohm, Max: Rossetti and his Circle 9
ambivalence about post 100 Béhague, Martine-Marie-Pol de, Comtesse de
BB’s reservations about post 103, 487 Béarn 185, 424, 515–16, 537
departure for National Gallery 136, 137, 140 Beistegui, Carlos de and collection 397
lecturing duties 117–18 Bell, Charles 6, 9, 14, 32, 167n, 278, 516
loan to fund new wing 120, 137 Italian tour with KC and meeting with BB 1,
offer of post and acceptance 94–5, 103–7 481
settling into post and move to Oxford 109 as Keeper of Fine Art at Ashmolean 1, 38, 67n,
Ashton, Sir Frederick 313 94, 97, 104, 109, 516
Ashton, Sir Leigh 29–30, 94–5, 216–17, 515 encouragement of KC’s studies 2
Asscher, Martin 358, 359 retirement and commemorative gift 111
Associated TeleVision see ATV Bell, Clive 435, 438, 503, 516
Athens, Greece Bell,Vanessa 226
Berensons in 43 Bellevue, Port Lympne, Kent: KC and family rent
KC and Jane in 188, 362 house at 192, 214, 225, 544
ATV (Associated TeleVision) Bellini, Giovanni 105n, 182, 208, 297, 298, 300,
KC’s programmes for 301, 311
early broadcasts 382, 453, 455, 457, 464, 513 attributed works or works in school of in KC’s
Five Revolutionary Painters series 382 collection 405, 409
Auden, W. H. 288 (?)Pagan Rite 263, 265, 442
Augustine, St 92 double portrait of and KC’s Degas copy 263,
Australia 313, 409, 412
KC lectures in 280, 281, 285, 299, 301, 304, 306 exhibition in Venice (1949) 312, 314, 346
KC’s enthusiasm for Aboriginal art 306–7, 308 Prudence 64
Avignon, France: Palais des Papes frescoes 92 Resurrection 16
Benozzo see Gozzoli, Benozzo
Index 558

Benozzo Sketchbook 68, 70 KC’s view of 484

Benson, Reginald Lindsay (Rex) 301 legacy in American collections 488
Benson, Robert 66n negative perceptions of relationship with
Berenson, Abraham (Abie) (BB’s brother) 134, 509 dealers 481, 483
Berenson, Albert (Alter Valvrojenski, BB’s father) New Gallery Exhibition (1895) review 473,
507, 509 500, 522
Berenson, Bernard (Bernhard) ix–x, xii–xiii, opinion on KC’s Michelangelo drawing 36n
507–9, pls 5, 7, 10, 19, 30 see also Lists and scholarship below
American Academy of Arts election 135 and cats 322
analysis of correspondence with KC 478–87 character and comparison with Morra 493
appearance and dress 476 classical preferences in art 267
on appreciation of art 485 and plans for book on classical and medieval
in later life 346–7 art 503, 504
archive of personal papers xiv–xv concerns over transporting artworks 56, 80
art collection 183, 508 ‘conoscing’ as favourite hobby 386
Sassetta altarpiece panels 129, 149n cultivation of young friends 131, 245
war damage to works removed to Florence death and funeral 387, 467–8
239, 250–1 KC’s memorial address 468, 481, 497–506,
wartime removal and dispersal for safe- pl. 41
keeping 228–9, 239, 250–1 KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article 468, 472–7
assessment of KC and his career in Sunset and obituary xii, 468
Twilight 479, 480 on delight of old age 300
attitude towards Germans and Jews 127, 151, demands on assistants 20, 501
162–3, 183, 236, 308 demands as friend 479
and attractions of museum director role 97 diaries and publications from 227, 229, 240, 258,
background in Lithuania and upbringing in US 264, 282, 283, 479, 480
63, 127, 472 ‘enemy-friends’ 479
parents’ lives in America 482, 507, 509 enjoyment of conversation and letters 226–7,
as student at Boston and Harvard 99, 472, 235, 283, 474–5, 505
497, 507, 507–8, 508, pl. 1 and Exhibition of Italian Art 56, 67, 70–1, 80,
wartime conditions and American national- 478, 479
ity 228, 242, 249 fame and legendary status after survival of war
biographies of 240, 241, 242, 283–4, 476
KC’s proposed account of life and work 354, favourite tree on walks 401, pl. 16
355, 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 457, 480 financial situation
KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article for Sunday arrangement with Duveen 22, 58, 129, 130,
Times 468, 472–7 482, 484
Sylvia Sprigge’s biography 385, 403, 452–3, in comparison to KC’s 480
454, 544–5 creation of wealth through advisory work
career and reputation as adviser and authority 473–4, 481–2
on Renaissance art 3, 100, 472–3, 508–9 impact of Wall Street Crash 58
as adviser to Duveen 22, 58, 129, 135, 482, post-war arrangement with Wildenstein
483, 484, 509, 523, 524–30, 537, 547 241–2, 248, 482
as adviser to Wildenstein 241–2, 248, 482 problems in 1930s 130, 501
and Allendale Adoration attribution 129, and French modern art 503
482, 524 friendship with and influence on KC 478–9
attributions and risk to reputation 482 BB’s reflections on and KC’s response 190,
commitment to connoisseurship in youth 192
498 disapproval of KC’s acquaintances 246
in context of art market and dealers 481–4, disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21,
500, 501 25–7, 416
creation of wealth through advisory work influence in career 486–7
473–4, 481–2 influence on KC’s writing style 278
decline in advisory work 1930s 474, 475, 501 and KC’s acceptance of Ashmolean post 103,
defenders of integrity of BB’s advice 483–4 487
Index 559

KC’s acknowledgement on BB’s 90th KC’s encyclopedia article and review of work
birthday 415 53, 62, 63, 64, 66
KC’s acknowledgement and dedications to on KC’s Landscape into Art 319, 334, 337
BB 278–9, 325, 326, 373, 374, 404, 428–9, language studies at Harvard 472, 497, 498, 507
431, 432, 433 later life and commitment to friends and
KC’s first visit to I Tatti 1, 5, 481 writing 385–6, 407
and lack of time to spend together 199–200 Lists 24, 28, 37, 39, 60, 73, 82, 85, 281, 473,
master–pupil relationship 190, 192, 487 502–3, 508
mutual friends 56, 245–6 attributions and reputation 482, 483
request for photograph 216, 218 detailed research for 19–20
thoughts after visit from KC and Jane 202–3 finality of and flaws in 499–500
health 78, 196, 305, 353, 365, 371 KC’s ongoing supply of information 104,
constraints on life in later years 284, 311, 346, 106–7, 143, 153, 160, 405, 409
369, 385, 434 as legacy 488
fall and painful osteoporosis 387, 388, 389, preparation of new editions in later life 386,
408, 410–11, 455, 456, 471 405, 407, 409, 501, 504
hay fever attacks 36, 331, 345 publication as The Italian Pictures of the
illnesses late in life 387, 398, 434, 436, 438, Renaissance 101, 113, 283, 450, 501–2
440, 452, 467, 476 published prefaces and theory of art 503–4
problems with teeth and dental treatment love of Italy and Italians 505–6
190, 320 marriage see Berenson, Mary: marriage to
strain of constant visitors 91–2, 267, 360–1, Berenson
442 and Mary’s death 252, 253
homes in Italy see Casa al Dono; I Tatti; Il and Mary’s illness 159
Villino on Morra’s friendship 490
honours and awards name change 143n
at end of life 389 newspapers and magazine reading at I Tatti
freedom of city of Florence 241, 285, 288n, 118, 179
477, 506 on KC’s The Nude 350, 374, 392, 433, 436,
medals 288n 454
for services to Italian government 241, 285, Oxford University term in residence 99–100
288n comparison of Oxford and Harvard 100
Italian politics and anti-fascist sympathies 58–9, post-war accusations of collaboration 242
490–1 post-war recommencement of life at I Tatti
post-war accusations of collaboration 242 239–41, 248, 250–3
and post-war fame and popularity 241, 242 religious faith 127, 508
and situation before and during WWII 131, reputation see career and reputation as adviser
146, 219, 226, 226–37, 475, 505–6 and authority on Renaissance art above
KC as assistant on The Drawings of the Florentine Ruskin sighting in Venice 272
Painters 1–2, 3, 19–53 scholarship 484–6, 500–1
arrangements for arrival and initial visit 6–17, aesthetic and humanist approach to art 3, 99,
478 100, 127, 242–3, 281, 472, 473, 485, 486,
enormity of task 20 498–9, 503–4
friendship as result of 56, 478 antipathy towards new German scholarship
instructions for KC in Rome 42–3 127–8, 151, 152, 162–3, 215, 308
KC’s work on in Britain 33, 36–7 and attribution of Oppenheimer/Clark
publication and acknowledgement of KC Michelangelo drawing 162
198–200 KC’s appreciation in memorial address
response to news of KC’s marriage to Jane 498–506
21, 25–7, 478 KC’s comparative view of 485–6, 502–3
termination of arrangement 22, 46–8, 49–53, post-war writings on theories of art 281–2
56, 478, 479 writing appears in Read’s English Prose Style
termination and KC’s ongoing contribution 114, 115
75, 81–2, 84, 105, 113 see also photographs and BB’s research and
on KC’s communicative skills with public 454 Lists above; writings/publications below
Index 560

Second World War and difficulties for 226–37, Caravaggio: His Incongruity and his Fame 282,
475 337
70th birthday letter in The Times 167 Central Italian Painters 19, 473, 503, 504
supporting staff for life and activities 386, 387, Corriere della Sera articles 386, 387, 437n
434 Dedalo articles 20, 136
as translator in First World War 509 Del Caravaggio delle sue incongruenze e della sua
travels and cultural interests 5, 22, 23, 24, 39–40, fama 282, 337
46, 60, 61, 101, 131–2, 133, 134, 135, 137, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903)
pls 3–4, 6 20, 473, 474, 488, 500, 508
Asia Minor (Turkey) 195 The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (revised
considers visit to Russia 174–5, 176, 178 edition 1938) 1–2, 3, 20, 49–50, 84, 105,
Constantinople 24, 39, 175, 195 113, 127, 134, 157, 169, 178, 198–9, 421, 544
constraints in later years 311, 346, 369 Florentine Painters 19, 473, 503
constraints in wartime 226–7, 230–1 Italian Painters of the Renaissance (four vol-
European trip after university 508 umes) 19, 60, 61, 114, 283, 476, 485, 488,
in France and Paris 286, 331, 332, 333 508
interest in Near East 190 Italian Pictures of the Renaissance (published
in Italy 213, 249, 284, 285, 286, 287, 290, 291, Lists) 101, 113, 283, 450, 501–2
293, 363–4, 377, 386, 388, 389 Lorenzo Lotto 365, 366, 377, 409, 434–5, 508,
Libya trip in last years 386, 388, 414 536
North Africa 58 Missing Pictures articles 88
plans for and stays in Rome with KC 266–7, North Italian Painters 19, 473, 503, 505
363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397, 398 One Year’s Reading for Fun 240
plans for and visits to England 116, 155, 156, Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art
170, 172, 178, 183, 184, 333 281–2, 328, 329, 330–1
in Rome with Nicky Mariano 101, 134, 207, Placci article 258
226, 235–6, 240, 249, 265, 273–4, 286, 287, Rumour and Reflection 227, 258, 283, 326–7,
388, 392, 397 364, 368, 369, 505
Spain 59, 60, 66, 69, 70 Seeing and Knowing see Vedere e sapere below
Switzerland 285, 298 Sketch for a Self-portrait 227, 281, 314, 315, 351,
writing 474, 475–6, 498, 503, 505
account of process 282–3 Studies in Medieval Painting 61
articles for press and magazines 283 The Study and Criticism of Italian Art 508
assistants in post-war years 283 Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries 1947 to
KC on BB’s writing style 504–5 1958 227, 283, 479, 480
as occupation in wartime 227, 281, 475 Three Essays in Method 20, 23, 498–9, 501
‘supplementary essays’ 300, 319 Tiepolo articles 347
on theories on art in post-war period 281–3 Vedere e sapere (Seeing and Knowing) 282, 348,
weighty commitments in last years 421, 351
434 Venetian Painters 19, 473
writings/publications Viaggio in Sicilia 417
Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts 227, see also KC as assistant on The Drawings of the
281, 282–3, 297, 298, 300n, 307–8, 310–11, Florentine Painters above
313, 475, 504, 505 Berenson, Bessie (Elizabeth) (BB’s sister) 353, 467,
Alberto Sani: Un artista fuori del suo tempo 282, 509, pl.18
325, 331, 348 Berenson, Julia (Eudice Mickelshanski, BB’s
‘Altamura’ article 384, 422 mother) 507, 509
‘Andrea di Michelangelo e Antonio Mini’ Berenson, Lawrence 242, 310n, 496
article 173 Berenson, Mary (formerly Costelloe, née Pearsall
L’Arco di Constantino (The Arch of Constantine) Smith, BB’s wife) xiv, 3, 509–10, 522, pls 3–5
282, 373, 374, 474, 504 appearance and personality 476, 510
article on art of seeing (Iterum Censeo) 446 art collection and purchase of Sassetta
Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson (by Mostyn- altarpiece panels 149n
Owen) 417 background and family 476, 509–10,
Bollettino d’arte articles 138, 147 pl. 2
Index 561

and BB’s contemplation of museum Berlin, Isaiah 337, 343, 480, 516
directorship 97 Berlin: KC’s visits 16, 65, 173, 174
contribution to Berenson’s career and art Bertoldo di Giovanni 81, 84, 259n
research 476, 500, 504, 508, 510 Beuttler, Jane see Clark, Jane (née Beuttler)
critiques of BB’s writing 282, 505 Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome 44, 65
instructions for KC’s research on Florentine Biddle, Francis 355
drawings 33 Biddle, George 355n
and Lists 19 Biddle, Katherine (Katherine Garrison Chapin)
reservations over KC’s capabilities as BB’s 355
assistant 47n Big Chilling, Hampshire 48, 53, 74, 511
correspondence with Jane Clark 48–9 Binyon, Cicely (née Powell) 79
correspondence with KC xv, 4, 25–36, 42, Binyon, Laurence 167n, 516, 526
120–1, 165–6, 181–2 Binyon, Nicolette see Gray, Nicolette
and A Modern Pilgrimage 120, 136 Bliss, Mildred 375–6, 516–17, 547
and arrangements for arrival at I Tatti 6, 7–17 Bliss, Robert Woods 375–6, 516–17, 547
and marriage to Jane and tour of France and Blochet, Edgard 78–9
Italy 25–9 Blunt, Anthony 243, 496
settling in London and birth of Alan 30–6, Bode, Wilhelm von 84, 500, 503, 517, 523, 525
35–6 Bode Museum, Berlin see Kaiser Friedrich
death 240, 248, 251 Museum
burial with BB at I Tatti 468 Bodkin, Thomas 257, 517
disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 25–7 Bodleian Library, Oxford 98, 99
and Duveen 60, 61, 101, 129, 133, 524 Italian Illuminated Manuscripts exhibition ( 1948)
in England 60, 65, 135, 154 293, 297, 298
outbreak of war and return to I Tatti 219, Bodmer, Heinrich 117, 495
226, 230, 232 ‘bodyline’ bowling controversy 118
visits Clarks at Richmond 101, 109–10 Boethius, Axel 496
health 23, 78, 134, 138, 140, 147, 181, 182, 510 Böhler, Julius and collection 68
final deterioration and death 250, 252 Böhler, Julius Wilhelm 68n
operation and illness after 101, 111, 112, 113, Bolletino d’arte (Italian journal) 138, 147n
115 Bologna, Italy
serious decline in 1930s 130–1, 155, 156, 157, KC and Jane visit after marriage 27–8
159, 161, 163, 197, 200, 211, 213, 226 KC’s stay at I Tatti and visit to 324, 326, 327
Vienna sanatorium and tubercular diagnosis Bompiani (Italian publishers) 334, 337, 339
167, 169–70, 172 Bonacossi, Count Contini see Contini-Bonacossi,
wartime confinement and German occupa- Count Alessandro
tion of I Tatti 229 Bonnard, Pierre 266
introduction of Nicky Mariano to I Tatti 511 Bonner, Paul Hyde 305
marriage (first) to Costelloe 510 Bonnet, Georges 209
marriage (second) to BB Borenius, Tancred 45, 257, 517
first meeting and move to Italy on marriage Borghese Gallery, Rome 267
508, 510 Borrow, George 69
later accommodations 4, 131, 240, 510 Bos, Charles du 66, 186, 517
travels and cultural interests 5, 22, 23, 24, 39–40, Bosch, Hieronymous 157
46, 58, 60, 61, 66, pls 3–4 Boston, Massachusetts
writings BB’s early life and career in 127, 482, 507, 508
Across the Mediterranean 181 KC and Jane visit 389, 422, 463–4
A Modern Pilgrimage 120, 136 KC’s views on museum 463–4
A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast 24, 60, Boston University: BB as student 507, 508, pl. 1
65, 133 Boswell, James 113
Berenson, Rachel see Perry, Rachel Botticelli, Sandro
Berenson, Richard Arthur 63, 510 BB’s evaluation in Lists 502
Berenson, Robert 241, 543 BB’s purchases for Isabella Stewart Gardner
Berenson, Senda see Abbott, Senda Berenson Collection 464
Berkeley, Mollie 444 Birth of Venus in Exhibition of Italian Art 55
Index 562

Descent of the Holy Ghost 459 Burlington House, London see Royal Academy,
Giuliano de’ Medici 425 London
Lee’s purchase of The Madonna of the Veil 77, Burlington Magazine 94, 182, 183, 528, 529
78, 87 BB and Fry as founders 63, 525
in National Gallery 149, 460 BB’s ‘Zanobi Machiavelli’ 335
drawing on back of Adoration of the Magi 179, KC’s article on ‘Giorgionesque’ panels 189
180, 182 KC’s article on Masolino panels 335
Botticini, Francesco 183 KC’s article on Piero della Francesca altarpiece
The Resurrection 42n in Lisbon 271
Bottrall, Ronald 274 KC’s review of BB’s Aesthetics and History 302,
Bournemouth see Toft, The, Bournemouth 303, 307–8, 310–11, 313
Bowes-Lyon, David 296 KC’s review of Krautheimer’s book on
Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth see Elizabeth, queen Ghiberti 456
consort Nicolson’s editorship 289, 290, 307, 537
Bowood House, Wiltshire 161 publication of KC’s address on death of BB 497
Bowra, (Cecil) Maurice 94, 278, 372, 399n, 408, on purchase of Sassetta panels for National
409, 419, 428n, 517 Gallery 149n, 158, 159, 164
Bracci family 110, 172, 490, 492 review of KC’s Leonardo catalogue 168
Bracken, Brendan 223 Burton, Gertrude 508
Bradman, Don 118n Buschbeck, Ernst H. 184, 518
Brahmins and division of life 257 Byron, Robert 94, 518
Brandi, Cesare 363 Byzantine art in Paris exhibition (1931) 93–4
Braun, Jean Adolphe 148
Brenan, Gerald (George Beaton): Jack Robinson
141, 142 Cahors, France 429–30
Brescia, Italy: La Pittura bresciana dei rinascimento Cain, Julien 194, 519
(1939) 213, 216 Cambiaso, Luca 339
Bretton Hall, nr Wakefield, West Yorkshire 75n Canada: KC and Jane visit 456, 459, 460, 461–2,
Brinckmann, Albert Erich 15, 518 463
British Academy 434 Capo di Monte, Hampstead Heath, London 225,
British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC 246
British Council and KC’s lecture tours 281, 382 Caracci, Agostino 429
British Museum, London Caracci, Anibale 429
BB and KC’s research for Florentine drawings Carandini, Elena 253, 519, pl. 7
22, 23, 41 Carandini, Nicolo 253, 519
Codex Siniaticus purchase 150 Caravaggio
confusion over photographs ordered from BB’s view of and book on 267, 282, 337
36–7 Beheading of St John the Baptist in Malta 414
Hinks and cleaning of Elgin Marbles 528, 529 exhibition in Milan (1951) 345–6
British Restaurants: Jane organises artworks for Cariani, Giovanni 409n, 411
226 Carmichael, Mrs 31
Bronzino, Il 149 Carracci, Ludovico 99, 267
Brown, J. (John) Carter 34n, 518 Carusi, Enrico 107
Brown, John Nicholas, II 356n, 496, 518 Casa al Dono, nr Vallombrosa 211, 256, 265, 314,
Brown, Oliver 45n 315, 328, 332, pls 17–18
Browning, Robert 371, 377 Cassatt, Mary 407
Brummer, Joseph 427, 518 Castagno, Andrea del
Bugiardini, Giuliano 162 attribution of works 41–2, 425
Bülow, Prince Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin The Crucifixion in National Gallery 183
von 79, 84 reference to ‘Flagellation’ in BB’s collection
Bundy, McGeorge 467 183, 250
Burckhardt, Jacob 418, 495 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista 41n, 495, 498,
Burlington Fine Arts Club, London 66, 69, 75, 502–3, 508
77, 410n Cellini, Benvenuto 207
Art in the Dark Ages exhibition (1930) 83, 84 Perseus 160
Index 563

Cesaro, Nina di 329 visits to I Tatti and meetings with BB 414, 428,
Cézanne, Paul 282 458
‘Chalandon Sassettas’ 129–30, 149–50, 151, 154, wedding and marriage to Jane Beuttler 384,
157–8, 160, 165, 484 389, 458, 459, 464–5
Chamberlain, Ivy, Lady 55 writing ambitions and publications 458
Chamberlain, Joseph 55 military histories 384, 464–5, 514
Chamberlain, Neville (Chambrella) 130, 197, 202, novels 384, 453
206, 209, 214, 221 Clark, Alice (Margaret) (née MacArthur, KC’s
Chambrun, Jacques Aldebert de 186, 519 mother) 29, 136, 164, 225, 512, pl. 24
Chambrun, Marthe-Marie de Pineton de see death 247, 249
Ruspoli, Marthe disapproval of KC’s career in art 6, 9–10, 53
Chantrey, Sir Francis 304 opposition to KC’s move to Richmond 57, 68
Charles I, king of England: paintings from Royal reliance on KC after husband’s death 118
Collection 32, 33 Clark, Colette (KC’s daughter) 368, 372, 380, 384,
Charteris, Sir Evan 124 420, 432, 450, 514
Chatsworth drawings collection 47, 67–8, 70 birth and childhood 101, 116, 118, 121, 140n,
Chéret, Jules 347 165, 206, 247, 301, 326, 345, pl. 26
Chesterton, G. K. 51, 84 at Coronation ball 393
Chilling see Big Chilling, Hampshire Italian holidays and stays at I Tatti 286, 287, 292,
Chiostro di San Martino, Italy: apartment near I 294, 297, 344, 347, 361, 362, 377, 388, 440, 443
Tatti 21, 26–7, 28–9, pl. 13 BB on Colette’s appearance and personality
Choiseul, Duchesse de 421 443–4
Chrysostom, St John 300n study stay at I Tatti and Villino with KC 399,
Churchill, Sir Winston 118n, 125, 214, 221, 379, 400
381, 391n jaundice 453
Churchill Club, London: Jane organises cultural lengthy pneumonia-type illness 436, 437, 439,
events 226 440, 441, 471
Ciano, Count 227 school and Oxford University 280, 336, 402–3
Cicogna, Anna Maria 386, 414n Clark, Colin (KC’s son) 361, 514
Cimabue birth and childhood 101, 116, 118, 121, 140n,
attribution of Frick ‘flagellation’ 350 165, 206, 247, 301, 326, 331, pls 26, 35
The Virgin and Child with Six Angels 158 career after school and RAF 280, 336, 339, 345,
Città di Castello, Master of 170, 171 348, 362, 368–9, 372, 384, 393
City of Manchester Art Gallery 451 career in filmmaking 453, 514
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark works for Olivier 441, 443, 444, 538
(BBC TV series) 128, 382, 487, 488, 513–14 on father’s love of writing 278
Clark, Alan (KC’s son) 303, 361, 362, 372, 432, 443, inheritance from godmother Edith Wharton
514, pl. 35 193n
birth in London 21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 35 Italian holidays and visits to I Tatti 287, 292,
as child 42, 49, 68, 72, 80, 88, 114, 206, pl. 26 294, 297n
unidentified illness 140, 141–2, 144, 147, meets BB in Rome with KC 370
148–9 night in police cells 372
misses trip to I Tatti and meeting BB 293, 294 Clark, Jane (Elizabeth Winifred) (née Martin, KC’s
ownership of Saltwood 514 first wife) 514–15, 548, 549, pls 27, 35–6
proposed legacy of Old Quarries 303n children see Clark, Alan; Clark, Colette; Clark,
Rye homes 453, 458 Colin
student at Christ Church College, Oxford 247, compiles index to KC’s The Gothic Revival 37
280, 301 correspondence with BB 70–1, 76–80, 112–13,
‘hair-raising’ European holiday 291, 293–4 140–2, 202–3, 205–7, 210–11, 214, 264–5, 270,
Swiss home in Zermatt 453 291–4, 295–6, 312–13, 322–4, 355, 356, 393–4,
trip to America after university 323, 324, 325, 397–8, 419–21, 440–5, 455–6
327 on BB’s 90th birthday 416
unsettled youth 384, 441, 452 on BB’s fall 408, 410–11
National Service confusion 325 BB’s thanks for gift of shawl 471
training for the Bar 336, 369 on Canada trip 461–2
Index 564

disappointment on missing visit to I Tatti connoisseurship and speculation in art 482,

447–8 486
during KC’s lecture trip to Australia 299–306 Cook Collection purchases 458–9
on joy of meeting with BB in Rome 397 Degas copy of Bellini double portrait 313,
and KC’s The Nude 431–2 409
news from Washington 425–6 Florentine plaque of Petrarch’s Triumph of
on operations and recovery 368–9, 370, 372, Death 409–10
377, 393 information for BB’s new editions of Lists
on visit to I Tatti 412–13 405, 407, 409
correspondence with Mary Berenson 48–9 interest in modern art and artists 126–7, 225
death 514, 515 items from sale of ‘Bogey’ Harris’s collection
and Florentine drawings research and travels 335, 336
36, 41, 43 Jacometto Portrait of a Woman 292n, 293, 294,
health 75, 76, 131, 196, 309, 331, 404, 429, 513 297
car accident 114 ‘Portrait of an Architect’ 327, 328
influenza bouts 43, 45–6, 80, 177, 307, 327, Renoirs 139–40
328, 419 Saltwood contents purchase 402, 403
lumbago and Abano cure 446, 447, 448 shares photographs of works with BB 265–6,
need for operations in early 1950s and recu- 271, 272, 293, 294, 321, 402, 403
peration 353, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, on art historian’s role 484–5, 485–6
363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 370, 393 artistic aspirations 126, 279
post-war illnesses and low moods 265, 266, assistantship to BB and The Drawings of the
270, 273, 274, 280, 336, 350, 352, 353, 384 Florentine Painters 1–2, 3, 19–53
wartime separation and unhappiness 225–6 arrangements for arrival and initial visit to
love of gardening 266, 289, 361, 368, 384, 393, I Tatti 6–17, 478
446, pl. 38 and later career and reputation 486–7
and making of Civilisation television series 513 learning German and stay in Dresden 5,
marriage 13–17
Berensons’ disapproval and move to apart- marriage to Jane and disapproval of
ment near I Tatti 20–1, 23, 25–7, 416, 478 Berensons 21, 25–7, 416, 478
birth of children 21, 29, 30, 31, 35, 101, 116, publication and appreciation of 198–200
118 research in Britain 33, 36–7, 40–2
in France and Italy after wedding 27–9 research in Rome 42–4
lifestyle and lack of contact with children 131 termination of arrangement 22, 46–8, 49–53,
London wedding 23, 25 56, 478, 479
marital problems 246, 280, 513, 514 termination and ongoing contribution 75,
and move to Saltwood 384, 407, 453, 461 81–2, 84, 105, 113
quieter life after KC’s retirement from background and family 512, pls 21–4
National Gallery 289 BB’s opinion of KC in Sunset and Twilight 479,
separation in wartime and problems 225–6, 480
231, 234–5 car and chauffeur 11–12, 14
public commitments 325 career see Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: KC
roles in fashion industry 280, 287, 388 as Keeper of Fine Art; National Gallery,
social circle in London 125 London: KC as Director; Oxford University:
wartime projects in London 226 KC as Slade Professor of Fine Art; Royal
Clark, Jane (née Beuttler, KC’s daughter-in-law) Collection: KC as Surveyor of the King’s
384, 389, 458, 459, 464, 514 Pictures and assistantship to BB above
Clark, Kenneth ix–x, xii–xiii, 512–14, 522, television career below
pls 28–9, 35, 37, 40 character 2–3
aesthetic sensibility 128, 245, 486, 512 BB’s reflections on nature of friendship 190,
and wartime storage of NG paintings 222 192, 203
analysis of correspondence with BB 478–87 Mary Berenson’s view of 47n
archive of personal papers xiv–xv Mary Glasgow’s summary of art and life
art collection 35–6, 225, 289, 292, 294–5, 313–14 dilemma 279
Index 565

natural habitat as socialite and connoisseur post-war family holidays in Europe 249, 262,
125–6 285, 286, 312, 362
perceived arrogance 21, 126 quieter life as Slade Professor 289, 293
children see Clark, Alan; Clark, Colette; Clark, reluctance to socialise 289, 457
Colin reservation in discussing Jane’s illness 352, 353
communication skills 278, 454, 457, 485, 488, separation in wartime and marital problems
513 225–6, 231, 234–5
death 514 servants and problems with 35, 37, 331
obituary xii tensions in marriage and female friendships
and death of BB 467–8 280, 349
memorial address 468, 481, 497–506, pl. 41 time spent with grown-up children 344, 345,
dedication of works to friends and family 347, 348
278–9 homes see Capo di Monte; Old Palace Place;
requests for and dedication of books to BB Portland Place; St Ermin’s Hotel; Saltwood
325, 326, 373, 374, 404, 428–9, 431, 432, 433 Castle; Tufton Street; Upper Terrace House
disinclination to read fiction 246 honours and awards 513
education and schools 3, 512 Honorary Degree from Oxford 428n
self-education in art 40–1, 67, 74 Knight Commander of the Order of the
and Exhibition of Italian Art Bath 193
co-authorship of catalogue 70–1, 71–2 life peerage 514
on selection committee 44–5, 53, 55–7, 67, lectures on art 93, 117, 145–6, 321, 340
71, 478, 479, 487 accessible style 278, 488
family business 8, 58, 131, 478, 512 on Alberti 254, 255
and father in America 164, 164n, 193, 245, 260, 280–1,
father’s disapproval of career in art 6, 7, 9–10 286, 336n, 337–8, 342, 348, 375–6, 377, 382,
inheritance on death 131 389, 404, 420, 421–2, 423, 426
KC’s assistance after ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ 8n ‘Art and Photography’ 329, 402, 403
financial security 131, 478, 480 in Australia 280, 281, 285, 299, 301, 304, 306
first meeting with BB 1, 5, 481 in Canada 462
friendship with BB 478–9 Edinburgh University address 348, 350
BB’s reflections on and response 190, 192 ‘English Romantic Poets and Landscape
mutual friends 56, 245–6 Painting’ 255
reflections on time spent at I Tatti and with French Romantic painting 307, 313
BB 422, 438, 469, 487 Hertz lecture on landscape art 167, 168
see also Berenson, Bernard: friendship with in India 280, 281, 382, 389
and influence on KC on Millet and Rodin at Phillips Gallery in
gardens at homes and enjoyment of 74, 95, 111n, Washington 420, 421–2, 423, 426
246, 361, 364 in Netherlands 346
health 177, 196, 197, 514 The Nude series 278, 280–1, 287, 348, 351,
heart problems 163, 291–2, 296 354, 373, 375–6, 377, 388, 402
impacted wisdom tooth 173 on Rembrandt 245, 293, 295, 337–8, 346,
influenza bouts 7, 71, 80, 205, 206, 419, 421, 347–8, 349–50
444 Romanes lecture ‘Moments of Vision’ 399,
jaundice 7 401, 404n, 405
whooping cough 291, 293, 295 Ruskin in Oxford inaugural Slade lecture
home life and family 131, 165, 184, 206, 246–7, 271, 272
258–9 and Slade Professorship 244–5, 258, 271, 289,
on Alan’s marriage to Jane Beuttler 458, 459, 293, 295, 321, 325
464–5 ‘The Study of Art History’ 420, 427
children’s schooling and start in world 280 in wartime 223
Cornwall holiday 285, 291, 293 worldwide demand for 280–1
domestic obligations 331, 359 library of books on art 289
Norfolk holiday 168, 171 marriages see Clark, Jane (née Martin); Clark,
Portugal holiday without Jane 262, 265, 285 Nolwen
Index 566

post-war board and committee posts 243–4, Italy in 1950s and Villino 351, 352, 353, 354
256, 279, 280, 354, 359, 370–1, 513 lectures in America 164, 245, 280–1, 286,
as Arts Council chairman 225, 279, 382, 390, 336n, 337–8, 342, 375–6, 377, 389, 404, 420,
450, 462 421–2, 423, 426
as chairman of ITA 379–82, 388, 389, 408–9, Paris visits and Conseil du Louvre 280, 285,
412, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 286, 302, 330, 331, 332, 336, 350, 397, 419,
reception and reviews of The Nude 434, 438 437, 440–1
religious beliefs 514 plans for and stays in Rome and Italy with
reputation as art historian 484–5, 487, 488, BB 266–7, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397,
513–14 398, 436, 437, 447
as reviewer of art history books 464, 465 Russia and Hermitage Museum 173, 174,
shortcomings as researcher 22, 37, 47n, 87–8, 89 176–7, 178
as society figure and social life in London 125, trips without Jane 384
280 views on life and culture in US 211–12, 336,
as student at Trinity College, Oxford 2–3, 6, 11, 340–1, 375–6, 405–6, 424–5, 426–7
512, 517 in wartime
Gothic Revival thesis plans 2, 11, 14 committee work on Home Front 222–5, 231,
graduation and trip to Italy 1–2 243–4
television and broadcasting career 128, 513–14 concern for BB and Mary and Nicky
as chairman of ITA 379–82, 388, 389, 412, Mariano 230–7
414n, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 protection of ‘enemy alien’ refugees 230–1
comparative success as ITA chairman 447 resumption of duties after war 243–4
early broadcasts for ATV 382, 453, 455, 457, see also under National Gallery, London: KC
464, 513 as Director
New York visit 406 writing plans and projects
radio broadcasts in 1950s 464 ambitions for art historical critical writing
radio broadcasts during WWII 223 217–18, 488
Shakespeare speech at Stratford-upon-Avon anthology of drawings 427
412–13, 414 BB’s influence on approach 278
taste and flair for broadcasting 457, 464, 513 plans for book on Baroque 40–1, 44
views on mass entertainment 417 plans for book on Classicism 40–1, 45, 47, 48,
wartime broadcasts from National Gallery 49, 50, 65, 68, 74
pl. 31 plans for papers on Piero della Francesca and
see also Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Alberti 254, 255
Clark post-war focus on writing 277–9, 325
travels 131–2, 315 proposes accounts of BB’s life and work 354,
America and New York 135, 164, 184–5, 198, 355, 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 457, 480
210, 211–12, 245, 258, 280–1, 286, 336, revisits The Gothic Revival 314
340–1, 375–6, 388, 389, 404, 405–6, 423–7, spare time as Arts Council chairman 390
463–4 writings/publications
Canada 456, 459, 460, 461–2, 463 The Age of Humanism 254n
England by car 136, 139 Another Part of the Wood (autobiography) 481,
in Europe 119, 133, 134, 135, 136–7, 139, 172, 511, 512, 514, 516
180, 183, 188, 189, 214, 249, 286 ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’ 484–5
France and Italy after marriage and later ‘Art and Democracy’ article 256
27–9, 92–3, 429 Burlington review of BB’s Aesthetics and
in Germany as language student 13–17 History 302, 303, 307–8, 310–11, 313
India 280, 281, 382, 428, 429–31, 432–3 A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da
Italy in 1920s with Bell 1 Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the
Italy in 1930s and I Tatti 200, 201 King 109, 110, 111, 117, 150, 165, 166, 168,
Italy in 1940s and I Tatti 261–2, 316–17, 169, 199
324–5 Civilisation (book of TV series) 514
Italy in 1950s and I Tatti 324, 326, 327, 328, encyclopedia article on BB 53, 62, 63, 64, 66
332, 344, 346, 348, 352, 353, 354, 360–1, 388, The Gothic Revival 2, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 37,
389, 396, 412, 413, 438, 447–8, 469 39, 42, 43, 244, 278, 314
Index 567

100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery Clark, William Andrews 427, 519
128, 196 Clarke, Sir Ashley 404, 438, 445, 519–20
introduction to Ruskin’s Praeterita 292, 295, Clary-Aldringen, Prince Alphonse (Alfons) 322,
296–7, 298, 299 520
John Constable:The Haywain with an Classicism: KC’s plans for book on 40–1, 45, 47,
Introduction by Sir Kenneth Clark 259 48, 49, 50, 65, 68, 74
Landscape into Art 277, 278, 316, 319, 320, 325, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA 376
334, 337, 514 Clutton-Brock, Alan Francis 166n, 168, 520
Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction Cockerell, Sydney 86, 89, 94, 520
by Kenneth Clark 171, 233 Codex Siniaticus 150
lectures see lectures on art above Codice Atlantico 87
Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Colefax, Jane 154n
Development as an Artist (Ryerson lectures Colefax, Sibyl 55, 125, 154n, 270, 288, 296, 313,
at Yale) 168, 193, 196, 214, 215, 217, 233, 314, 520
278 illnesses and concern of friends 301, 302, 303,
Listener article on Piero della Francesca 151, 304, 323, 324, 325, 330, 331
152 respite at I Tatti 311
Masterpieces of English Painting exhibition Collingwood, William Gershom 272
essays 245, 259 Colnaghi’s and BB’s advisory role 482
Moments of Vision lecture 404n, 481 Colston, Sir Charles 380
More Details from Pictures in the National Colvin, Sidney 86n
Gallery 217 Combe, Thomas 99
The Nude 278, 280–1, 361, 363, 364, 373, Commissione Vinciana see Reale Commissione
374, 376, 382, 399, 402, 404, 408, 420, 427, Vinciana
428–9, 431, 432, 433–4, 436–7, 438, 514 Connolly, Cyril 31–2, 34, 198, 204, 521
‘On the Development of Miss Sitwell’s Later Constable, John 177, 204, 259
Style’ article 262, 263 Constable, W. G. (William George) 46, 51, 72, 82,
The Other Half: A Self-Portrait 514 87, 114n, 123, 167n, 333, 403–4, 496, 521
Piero della Francesca 277, 323, 325, 329–30, 331, Constables (publisher) 24, 31, 32, 33, 44
340, 343 Constantinople
‘Piero della Francesca’s St Augustine BB in 24, 39, 175, 195
Altarpiece’ 266n KC and Jane in 188
Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance 514 Consuma see Poggio al Spino, Consuma, Italy
Ruskin at Oxford (Slade inaugural lecture) Contini-Bonacossi, Count Alessandro 242, 366,
271, 272 424–5, 482, 521, 532
Ruskin Today 278, 446–7, 450, 456, 514 Conway of Allington, Lady 383, 521
‘The Sage of Art’ article for The Sunday Conway, Martin 187, 400n, 521
Times 468, 472–7 Cook, Sir Francis 263, 522
Sunday Times articles on paintings 382, 445, Cook, Sir Herbert 90–1, 167n, 522
447, 453, 460 KC’s purchases from sale of collection 458–9
‘Venetian Drawings in Windsor Castle’ Coolidge, John 394
article 89 Cooper, Douglas 255–6, 446, 522
The Work of Bernard Berenson essay 481 Cornhill Magazine 404
Clark, Kenneth MacKenzie (KC’s father) 512, Coronation of Elizabeth II 390, 393
pls 21, 24 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da: in KC’s collection
death 101, 118n, 131 36, 38
disapproval of KC’s career in art 53 Corriere della Sera (newspaper): BB’s articles for
conditions for assistantship with BB 6, 7, 386, 387, 437n
9–10 Corsini drawings in Rome 42, 43–4
opposition to KC’s move to Richmond 57, Cortona, Italy viii–ix
68 Costelloe, Frank 4, 508, 510
‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ and KC’s assistance 8 Costelloe, Karin see Stephen, Karin
Clark, Margaret see Clark, Alice Costelloe, Mary see Berenson, Mary
Clark, Nolwen (formerly Rice, née de Janzé, Costelloe, Rachel see Strachey, Rachel (Ray)
KC’s second wife) 514 Coster, Charles Henry 496
Index 568

Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Dickey, E. M. O’R. 46

Arts (CEMA) 224 Divonne, Philomène de la Forest see Forest
Council of Industrial Design 223 Divonne, Philomène de la
Courtauld, Samuel 28, 146, 244, 303n, 522, 532 Dixon, John Pierson 235, 237, 523
as National Gallery trustee 124, 130 Diyarbakir, Turkey 195
Courtauld Galleries, Fitzwilliam Museum, Dodgson, Campbell 67n, 167n
Cambridge 94n Donatello marble reliefs 295, 299, 301
Courtauld Gallery, London 77n Douce, Francis and collection 410
Courtauld Insitute of Art, London 104, 123, 146, Douglas, Lord Alfred 99
522, 532, 550 Douglas, Robert Langton 164, 523
KC’s lectures on art 117 Draper, Ruth 329
Covent Garden Opera Trust 243–4, 266 drawings: difficulty of attribution 20
Cowdray House, West Sussex 395 Dresden, Germany
Cox, Geoffrey 429n KC’s stay for language study 5, 13–17
Cox, Trenchard 114n KC’s work in Kupferstich-Kabinett print room
craquelure (crackleure) on NG paintings 149, 151, 15–16
164 du Bos see Bos, Charles du
Crawford, Earl of see Balniel, David Duccio di Buoninsegna: attribution of Frick
Crawley, Aidan 381, 429n ‘flagellation’ 350
Credi, Lorenzo di 147 Duff, Lady Juliet 301
Portrait of Constanza Caetani attribution 163 Dulles, John Foster 470
cricket and ‘bodyline’ bowling controversy 118 Dürer, Albrecht 74, 85, 88, 363, 396
Cripps, Dame Isobel 302 St Jerome in the Wilderness panel 450–1
Cripps, Sir Stafford 302 Duveen, Henry 523
Crivelli, Carlo 69–70, 175, 212 Duveen, Joseph 24, 42, 349, 523–4, 528, 540, 542,
Croft-Murray, Edward 251, 522–3 544
Crowe, Sir Joseph Archer 41, 498, 502–3 BB as adviser on Renaissance art 22, 58, 130,
Crown Prince of Sweden see Gustaf Adolf 133, 473–4, 483, 484, 509, 523, 524, 537, 547
Cunard, Emerald, Lady (Maud Alice Burke) 118, Allendale Adoration and end of relationship
125, 225, 292 129, 135, 482, 524
Cust, Sir Lionel Henry 82 death 135
Cutting, Lady Sybil 533, 538, 540 effect of Wall Street Crash 58
and Mary Berenson 60, 61, 101, 129, 133, 524
as National Gallery trustee 124
d’Abernon,Viscount 124 donation of Hogarth picture 157
Dachau concentration camp 162 KC’s removal from board 130
Dale, Chester 424 and Sassetta panels 129–30, 149–50, 151, 154,
Daniel, Sir Augustus Moore 123 157–8, 484
Dante 12 peerage 102
David, Jacques-Louis 313 Duveen, Joseph Joel 523
Davies, Martin 192n, 222, 355n Dvořák, Max 308n
Davis, Robert Tyler 423
Day-Lewis, Cecil 288, 532
de Gasperi, Alcide 391 E-Leo (unidentified person) 28
De La Warr, ‘Buck’, Lord 224, 379, 381 Earle, Sir Lionel 82
de Pass collection 449 Eastlake, Charles 233n
dealers and art market and BB’s career 481–4, Eckermann, Johann Peter 113
500, 501 Eden, Anthony 124, 201, 206, 214, 381, 391
Dedalo (Italian art journal) 20, 136, 137, 538 Eden, Beatrice 201, 206
Degas, Edgar: copies of Italian art 313, 357, 409 Edgell, Harold 333
Delacroix, Eugène 307, 313 Edinburgh
Dennistoun of Dennistoun, James and collection KC’s discovery of drawing in Royal Academy
139, 265–6 390, 392
d’Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin see Entrèves KC’s research for Florentine drawings 33, 40,
Desmond, Shaw: ‘Children of the Sun’ 109n 41
Index 569

Edinburgh Festival BB and restoration and casting of Baptistery

KC and Jane attend 287, 393, 417–18, 446 Doors 291, 334
Monet exhibition (1957) 446 BB’s Corriere della Sera article on 437
Edinburgh University BB’s research on Florentine drawings in Uffizi
KC declines offer of chair 81 78
KC’s lecture on election as President of the bombardment in Second World War 229, 239
Associated Societies 348, 350 KC and drawing of Santa Croce fresco of St
Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) 124, John 390, 392
154 KC and Jane’s joy at post-war visit 262
Eisenhower, Dwight (Ike) 433, 470 KC’s memorial address for BB in 468, pl. 41
Elephanta Caves, India 430 KC’s research on Florentine drawings in Uffizi
Elizabeth II, queen of Great Britain 441 51–2
Coronation events 390, 393 Palazzo Strozzi exhibition (1949) and KC’s visit
Elizabeth, queen consort (Lady Elizabeth Bowes- 311, 317
Lyon) 206, 222, 443, pl. 32 post-war exhibition of French art (1945) 252,
Ellesmere, Lord 99 253
Ellora, India 429 Folkestone public library drawing 338, 339
Elsie (Edith Wharton’s maid) 121n Fonteyn, Margot 313
Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti food: standard of English cooks 35
(Enciclopedia Treccani) 62n, 66 Foppa,Vincenzo: Adoration of the Kings 171, 172n
Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin d’ 203, 490, 493 Ford, Richard 69
Estève, Augustin 267n Forest Divonne, Philomène de la 186, 264, 310,
Evans, Sir Arthur 98 524
Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900,The (Royal forgeries of Old Masters 77n
Academy, 1932) 114 Forster, E. M. A Room with a View 3
Exhibition of Italian Art,The (Royal Academy, 1930) Fox-Strangways, W.T.H. 98–9, 121n
BB’s interest in catalogue 70–1, 71–2, 108 France
KC co-writes catalogue 67, 71–2, 108 BB visits with Nicky Mariano 286, 331, 332,
KC on selection committee 44–5, 53, 55–7, 67, 333
71, 478, 479, 487 KC and Jane tour South of France 92–3
opening 60 KC lectures on French art 307, 313, 315
Oppenheimer drawings 107 search for drawings in 39
opposition to 56, 67, 80 see also Hyères, France; Paris; Sospel, France
visitor numbers and success of 55 Francis, Henry 467
Eyck, Jan van 64, 270, 406 Frankfurter, Alfred 245
Frankfurter, Felix 214, 340, 524
Fraser, Sir Robert 380
Fausto (BB’s dog) 76 Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC 341–2, 407
Ferrand, Beatrix Jones 169 Frey, Karl 145, 162, 524–5
Fesch, Cardinal Joseph 152 Frick, Henry Clay and collection 341, 350, 406,
Festival of Britain exhibition (1951) 339 525
Fiedler, Conrad 503 Friedländer, Max Jacob 65, 251, 525
film production in WWII under KC 222–3 Frizzoni, Gustavo 503
Finiguerra, Maso 86n Fry, Roger 77n, 106, 108n, 148, 503, 522, 525, 527
Finley, David E. 260, 280–1, 294, 376, 424, 425, 524 and Burlington Magazine 529
Fiocco, Giuseppe 327 influenza and stay with Clarks in Oxford 114,
Fisher, Sir Warren 202 115
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 86n, 94 KC on 525
Laocoön works 268 KC writes entry for DNB 271, 273
Five Revolutionary Painters (ATV series) 382 KC writes introduction to Last Lectures 171, 233
Fleming, Peter: ‘Under the Bandstand’ 109n Fulbright, Senator James 426
Florence
BB awarded freedom of city 241, 285, 288n,
477, 506 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 100, 508
BB on exhibitions in 268, 270, 311 collection and BB’s advice 464, 482, 528
Index 570

Gardner, John L. (Jack) 482 Goldschmidt, Adolph 295, 525

Garrett, Mary 512 Golf-Hotel see Sospel, France
Gasperi, Alcide de see de Gasperi Goloubev,Victor 151, 152, 525
Gazette des beaux-arts (journal) 62 Goya, Francisco José de 267
Geneva Gozzoli, Benozzo 68n, 91n, 116, 263, 265
BB at and Prado exhibition in 213, 215 Grandi, Ercole 212
KC and Jane in 214 Grant, Duncan 225, 226
George V, king of Great Britain 125 Gray, Basil 403, 526
George VI, king of Great Britain 206, 214, pl. 32 Gray, Nicolette (née Binyon) 403, 526
Géricault, Théodore 307, 313 Gray’s Inn, London: KC and Jane’s flat in 214,
Germany 216, 225
art historical scholarship Grayson, Cecil 254n
BB’s approach at odds with 127–8, 151, 152, Greenlees, Ian 119, 526
162, 215, 308 Greg, Sir Robert 195n
on Michelangelo 20, 151, 152, 373 Gregory, E. C. (Peter) 289–90
Dachau concentration camp 162 Gross, Catharine 121n
KC and Jane visit 64, 65, 68 Gsell, Stéphane 92
KC’s stay for language study 5, 13–17 Gualino, Riccardo and collection 27–8
Ghiberti, Lorenzo Guest, Alice 193n
I Commentarii 74 Guest, Ivor Churchill, 1st Viscount Wimborne
KC’s review of Krautheimer’s book on 446, 456 193n
Ghirlandaio, Domenico 147, 502 Guest, Ivor Grosvenor 193n
Portrait of Constanza Caetani attribution 163, 164 Guido Reni 451
Ghyka, Princess Giovanna 269n Guinness, Benjamin 158n
Giacometto see Jacometto Veneziano Gulbenkian, Calouste Sarkis and collection 130,
Gibson, William Pettigrew 197n 135, 246, 248, 526
Giglioli,Yule 205, 206 assists Alan at Portuguese border 291, 293–4
Gioffredi, Fiorella 467 Gulbenkian, Nubar 246
Gioffredi, Geremia 467, 534 Gustaf Adolf, Crown Prince of Sweden (later
Giorgione Gustaf VI) 245, 251, 252, 319, 320, 389, 428n, 546
and Allendale Adoration attribution 129, 482, Gwinn, Mamie 512
524
BB’s study of 394, 396
KC and National Gallery panels and attribution Haig, Dawyck (George Alexander Eugene
126, 186–7, 189, 191, 484 Douglas) (Hague) 305, 526
and KC’s art lectures 321 Haigh Hall, nr Wigan 90
KC’s discovery of work from collection of Halévy, Daniel: Décadence de la Liberté 110
Charles I 32, 33 Halifax, Lord 201
Moses and the Burning Bush (attrib.) 77, 78, 87, Hall, Chambers 99
327–8 Halpern, Barbara (née Strachey) 35, 133, 288, 510
The Tempest in Exhibition of Italian Art 55 Halpern, Roger 133, 182n, 510
Giovannetti, Matteo 92n Hamilton, Jamie (Hamish) 367, 452, 453, 457,
Giovanni (Givanni) di Paolo 251, 265 526–7
Giraldi, Gugliemo 298 Hammell (guest of Clarks in Oxford) 111–12
Giunti, Umberto 77n Hammond, Mason 203
Gladstone, W. E. 406 Hampton Court Palace, Surrey 65, 73, 153, 154,
Glasgow, Mary 279 155, 158, 221
Glasgow: KC’s research for Florentine drawings 41 Hand, Billings Learned see Learned Hand
Gleadowe, R. 46 Hanfstaengl, Franz 148
Gobetti, Piero 490, 492 Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert 317, 318
Goebbels, Joseph 162–3 Harris, Henry (Bogey) 86, 106, 124, 162, 225, 527
Goering, Hermann 162–3, 383, 521, 525 bequest of painting to Ashmolean 334
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 472, 473, 495, 503 KC writes appreciation on death of 332
Gogh,Vincent van 465 reconciliation of BB and Fry over lunch 525
Golden Urn,The (literary magazine) 384 sale of collection and KC’s purchases 335, 336
Index 571

Hartley, L. P. 404 Horovitz, Bela 277, 349n, 351, 407n

Hartt, Frederick 36n, 245, 251, 527 Houghton, Edmund 47n
Harvard University Howard, Francis 338
BB as student 99, 472, 497, 507–8 Hudson, Rob 210
Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies xiv, Huxley, Aldous 83, 151, 529–30
340 Huyghe, René 186, 312, 333, 397, 530
see also I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy: as gift to Hyde, Charlotte Pruyn 26
Harvard University Hyères, France 69n, 83
and Oxford University 99, 100 see also Wharton, Edith
Panofsky as Charles Eliot Norton Professor 128
Harvey, Oliver 397
Haslip, Joan 269, 270 I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy (BB’s villa) xiv, 474,
Havemeyer family and collection 406, 407, 527 pls 9–12, 15, 19–20
Haydon, Benjamin Robert 207 archive of BB’s papers xiv–xv
Hazlitt, William 321 BB’s death and burial at 467–8
Hearst, William Randolph 427, 527 and BB’s passion for ‘conoscing’ 386
Hemingway, Ernest 245 Berensons take lease on marriage 63, 508, 509
Hendy, Sir Philip 243, 244, 254n, 257, 335, 359, as gift to Harvard University 102, 133, 211, 488
528, 542–3 BB’s concerns and vision in ‘On the Future
Henry VII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey 390 of I Tatti’ 58, 128, 130, 387, 394, 424, 494–6
Hermitage Museum, Leningrad BB’s recommendations for trustees/advisory
BB considers visit 174–5, 176, 178 committee 204–5, 207, 387, 496
Giorgione’s Madonna 411 KC’s involvement 204–5, 387, 496
KC and Jane visit 173, 174, 176–7 KC’s suggestion for sponsoring students 415
Titians in 175 as lasting resource for students 495
Hertz, Henriette/Henriette Hertz Trust 44n, 167, prevarication from Harvard over terms 130,
168 242–3, 284
Hertziana library, Rome 44, 65 proposal of Johnnie Walker as director 59,
Hess, Myra 221–2 424, 496
Hess, Trude 531 transformation into Harvard Center for
Heydenreich, Ludwig 256, 528 Renaissance Studies 340
Hildebrand, Adolf von 503 wartime fears for scheme 227
Hill, (Arthur) Derek 299, 303, 305, 329, 343, 345, KC’s visits and stays at
361, 374, 399, 418, 526, 528, 535 arrangements for arrival as assistant 6–17
Hill, Charles 380, 381 as assistant to BB 19–53
Hill, George 167n first visit 1, 481
Hilliard, Nicholas 271, 272–3 KC and Jane visit in 1930s 200–1
Hind, A. M. 167n last visit 469
Hindus, Maurice 88–9 on post-war change in atmosphere 240
Hinks, Roger 46, 274, 528–9 post-war plans and visits with Jane 249,
Hirsch, Paul von 529 261–2, 269, 270, 273, 291, 292, 294–5, 296,
Hirsch, Robert von and collection 297, 529 314, 344, 348, 396, 412, 413, 436, 437, 438,
History of Art Society: KC’s proposals for 45, 46 447–8, 459
Hodson, Harry 468 reflections on time spent at 422
Hofer, Philip 496 regular visits in post-war years 280, 285, 286,
Hoffmann, Josef 545 315–16, 324, 326, 327, 328, 332, 344, 348,
Hogarth, William 157 352, 353, 354, 360–1, 388, 389, 399, 400,
Holder, William 222 401, 413, 438, 447–8
Holford family and collection 31n, 34n, 38 Library 19, 295, 473, 474, 475, pl. 11
Holford Sales in London 31, 34 Mary employs Nicky Mariano as librarian
Holland see Netherlands 511
Holmes, Sir Charles John 123, 167n, 168, 245, 529, post-war extension 283, 285, 352
538 in wartime 228, 251
Holroyd, Sir Charles 123, 515 Morra’s connection and visits ix, 489, 492
Hope-Johnstone, Charles John 141, 142, 529 as Renaissance court 19, 476
Index 572

supporting staff for BB’s activities 386, 434 Jacometto Veneziano: Portrait of a Woman 292n,
visitors and open house atmosphere 91–2, 260, 293, 294, 297, 298n
302–3, 305, 328–9, 385 James, Henry 117, 533, 549
KC arranges visits for friends and acquain- James, William 472, 473, 498, 507
tances 108–9, 110, 119, 289–90, 312, 406 Jamot, Paul 185, 530
lack of room for KC and Jane to visit 194–5 Janzé, Comte de 514
post-war fame of BB and increase in 283–4, Jarvis, Alan 455–6
476 Jebb, Gladwyn 441
post-war visitors and news 240–1, 248 Jirmounsky, Myron 310
strain on BB’s health 91–2, 267, 360–1 Joad, C. E. M. 376n
wartime difficulties for Berensons at 226–37, Joannides, Paul 162n
475 John, Augustus 207
BB and Nicky Mariano in hiding at Villa La Johnson, John G. and collection 341
Fontanelle 228, 229, 239–40 BB and published catalogue 281
occupation by Germans 228, 229, 239 Johnson, Lionel 99
removal and dispersal of art and books for Johnstone, Hope 29–30
safekeeping 228–9, 239, 250–1 Justi, Carl 354
return and post-war recommencement of
life at 239–41, 248, 250–3
icons: KC on Russian trip 176, 177 Kahn, Addie (Mrs Otto Kahn) (née Wolff) 203,
Incorporated Society of London Fashion 260, 341, 530
Designers: Jane as president 280, 287 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin (KFM, later
Independent Television Authority see ITA Bode Museum) 174, 517, 525
India Kano Masonobu 313–14
KC lectures in 280, 281, 382, 389 Kay, Harold Isherwood 192n, 197n
KC’s 1956 visit and views on 428, 429–31, Keene, Charles 370
432–3 Kelmscott Press 299
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 313 Kerr, Philip, Marquess of Lothian 76, 530
Madame Moitessier 181, 182 Kessell, Mary 343–4, 349, 357, 530
International Congress on the History of Art Ketteler, Baroness Mathilda von 269n
(1939) 216–17 Keynes, John Maynard 224–5, 243, 244, 279
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Collection, Kiel, Hannah 433
Boston 464, 482, 528 Kinglake, A. W.: Eothen 319n
Isarlov, George (Iserlow) 362 Kinnaird, Lord 265
Isherwood, Christopher 204 Knox, Father Ronald 340
Islamic art: BB’s interest in 78–9 Koenigs Collection 68, 70
Istanbul see Constantinople Komisayevsky, Fyodor Fyodorovich 28
ITA (Independent Television Authority) Krautheimer, Richard 446, 456, 531
introduction of commercial television 379, Kress, Rush 366, 367
406n Kress, Samuel/Kress Foundation 54, 324n, 341,
KC as chairman 379–82, 388, 389, 408–9, 412, 350, 531, 540
414n, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 donation of pictures to National Gallery of Art,
Italian art exhibition see Exhibition of Italian Art, Washington 424–5
The donation to National Gallery in London 548
Italian artworks and post-war retrieval 251 Kress’s purchases from Contini-Bonacossi 242,
Italian politics 58–9, 490–1 366n, 521
BB’s position in wartime 131, 146, 219, 226–37, support for new editions of BB’s books 283,
239–40, 475, 505–6 407n
Morra’s father’s political and diplomatic roles Kriegbaum, Friedrich 229
491 Kristeller, Paul 68
Morra’s role in and visit to America 371 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden: KC’s work in
see also anti-fascist movement in Italy print room 15–16
Ivins, William M. (Billy) 245, 489
Index 573

Lange, Julius 351 KC’s lectures and book on 164n, 168, 193, 196,
Laocoön works in Fitzwilliam Museum 268 214, 215, 217, 233
Laparelli di Lapo, Colonel Pirro 491 Milan exhibition (1939) 213, 216
Lapsley, Gaillard 79–80, 531 Pollen’s Virgin and Child with Cat drawing 50
Lascelles family 395 Wilton House Leda and the Swan after 216, 218
Laurie, A. P. 151 Windsor drawing and Woolbeding Manor
Lauro, Giacomo: Antiquae Urbis Splendor Romae fountain 395, 396–7
68 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Laocoön 329
Lautrec, Henri de Toulouse- 347 Lévesque, Georges-Henri 461
Lawrence, D. H.: The Virgin and the Gypsy 83 Lewis, Sinclair 322, 376, 532
Lawrence, Sir Thomas 99 libraries as source of drawings 39, 42
Leader, John Temple xiv Libya: BB and Nicky Mariano in 386, 388, 414
Learned Hand, Billings 245, 349, 355, 524, 531 Licinio (?Bernardino Licinio) 73
Leavis, F. R. 434 Liechtenstein Collection 298, 405, 451
Lee, Arthur Hamilton,Viscount Lee of Fareham Life and Letters (magazine) 108, 109, 151
123, 524, 531–2 Lindsay, Norah 304
art collection and attributions 482–3 Lindsay, Tom 393
and Giorgione’s Moses and the Burning Bush 77, Linklater, Eric 385
78, 87, 327–8 Lippmann, Frances 375, 442, 531
Old Quarries and art collection 303n, pl. 33 Lippmann, Walter 61, 214, 245, 301, 319, 340, 375,
Lee, Ruth,Viscountess Lee of Fareham (née 442, 496, 531, 532
Moore) 303n, 328, 531–2 Lisbon
Lee,Vernon see Paget,Violet KC and Piero della Francesca altarpiece 266,
Leger Gallery 265, 409, 412 268, 271
Lehman, Robert and collection 342, 496 KC’s visits 246, 248, 309–10
Lehmann, Rosamund 245, 288, 357, 360, 391, 532, Listener,The (magazine): KC’s articles for 153, 204,
536 205, 206, 207
Lehrs, Max 15–16 Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery 105
Leicester Galleries, London 45 Llewellyn, Sir William 124
Leigh,Vivien 301, 302, 306, 369, 444, 538 Lloyd, Christopher 121n
acting career 304, 359, 412 Lockinge House, Berkshire 38
illness 357, 359, 376–7, 391, 394 Lockov (unidentified person) 181
at Richard III film premiere 420 Lofroth, Naima 252
Leningrad, Russia 176 London homes of KC see Albany; Capo di Monte;
see also Hermitage Museum Old Palace Place; Portland Place; St Ermin’s
Leonardo da Vinci 36, 547 Hotel; Tufton Street; Upper Terrace House
accuracy of BB’s Drawings of the Florentine London University
Painters 498 KC’s lectures on art 93
BB’s article on 147 see also Courtauld Institute of Art
BB’s revision of Florentine drawings 178 Long, Huey Pierce, Jr 463
book collection of 75–6 Longhi, Roberto 335, 345n, 357, 521, 532
drawing in Holford sale 34 Lorenzetti, Pietro 264, 266, 502
drawings in Ashmolean Museum 99 Loria, Arturo 283, 440, 533
Henry (Bogey) Harris’s bequest to Ashmolean Lothair Crystal 364, 365
334 Lothian, Marquess of see Kerr, Philip
inaccurate attributions in nineteenth century Lotto, Lorenzo 315, 393
498 BB’s book on 365, 366, 377, 409, 434–5, 508, 536
KC sends photographs of Virgin of the Rocks to exhibition in Venice (1953) 393, 436
BB 179, 181 Louvre, Paris
KC’s commission to catalogue Windsor Castle BB and KC’s research in 23
drawings 57–8, 60, 73–4, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, BB visits in 1930s 185
90, 104 BB visits with KC in 1950 332
and information for BB’s list 106–7, 117, 119 Correggio’s virtue and vice allegories 38
publication of catalogue 109, 110, 111, 117, KC on Conseil du Louvre 280, 302, 330, 331,
150, 165, 166, 168, 169, 199 437, 440–1
Index 574

and Sassetta Madonna and Child and other personal and professional relationship with BB
purchases 439 4, 23, 63, 91, 107, 131, 172, 200n
KC and Jane’s post-war visits to Paris 263, 302, BB’s reliance on in later life 386, 387, 434,
397, 419 467, 469, 476
KC supervises exhibition of British pictures concern over KC’s capabilities as BB’s
in 194 assistant 47n
new galleries and Beistegui collection 397 and death of Mary 240
Lubbock, Percy 322, 533, 538, 544 and Harvard institute at I Tatti 204, 496
selection of diary entries for Sunset and
Twilight 480
Macbeth (unidentified person) 36–7 praise for KC’s The Nude 433
MacCarthy, Desmond 32, 108n, 109, 155, 511, 533 travels with BB 102, 135, 165, 213, 295, pls 4, 6
McCarthy, Mary 460 Asia Minor (Turkey) 195
MacColl, D. S. 167n France 24, 286, 331, 332, 333
MacDonald, Ramsay 55, 124 in Italy 5, 284
Machiavelli, Zanobi: BB’s article on 335 Libya 386, 388, 414
Mackay, Clarence 130, 149n, 150, 154, 160, 484 North Africa 58, 61, 101
Maclagan, Eric 64, 155, 167n, 188, 196, 216–17, Rome visits 101, 134, 207, 226, 235–6, 240,
533 249, 265, 273–4, 286, 287, 388, 392, 397
McLaughlin, Martin 316n Syria and Palestine 60
Macmillan, Harold 381 Venice 175, 248, 290, 312, 388, 403–4, 419
Madrid, Spain: KC and Jane in 136–7, 139, 460 Vienna 133, 137
Mahon, Denis 451, 533, 541 wartime difficulties and travel restrictions 226,
Malaguzzi Valeri, Francesco 81, 85, 107 227, 228, 230–1, 250
Malcolm of Poltalloch, John 410 Markevitch, Igor 239, 355n
Mallet, Lady 374, 392 Martin, Emily 514
Mallet,Victor 374, 534 Martin, Robert 514
Malraux, André 437 Martini, Simone 359
Malta: Caravaggio and BB in 414 Masaccio
Manchester: City of Manchester Art Gallery 451 Sagra drawing 338, 339
Mancini, Domenico 321, 357 and Santa Maria Maggiore panels 335, 348, 350,
Manning, Robert 546 351, 357
Manod Caves, Blaenau Ffestiniog 221, 222, pl. 29 Maso di Bianco 251
Mantegna, Andrea 68, 152, 451 Masolino and Santa Maria Maggiore panels 335,
Marcantonio Raimondi: Il Morbetto engraving 348, 350, 357
after Raphael 76, 90 Massey, (Charles) Vincent 455–6
Marchi, Marcello 269n Massigli, René 301, 441, 444, 455
Marchig, Giannino 229, 250n, 534 Massine, Leonid 194
Marées, Hans von 503 Master of Città di Castello 170, 171
Margheri, Clotilde 318, 320, 534 Masterpieces of English Painting exhibition in US
Mariano, Nicky (Elizabeth) 25, 26, 49, 51, 53, 64, (1946–7) 245, 249, 259–60n, pl. 34
70, 110, 138, 269n, 315, 353, 509, 510–11, pls 18, Matisse, Henri 333, 422, 439
20 Matteo di Giovanni 77, 78, 82
and death of BB 467 Maugham, William Somerset 534
and KC’s memorial address at Palazzo Cakes and Ale 83
Vecchio 468 KC and Jane’s friendship and visits 246, 323,
in England 48, 60, 65 324, 370, 372, 388, 419, 420
friendship with KC and Jane Max Planck Society 44n
concern for Jane’s health 310 Mecca and Covent Garden lease 243
first impressions of KC 4 Medici Society 77
as godmother to Colin and Colette 326 Meiss, Millard 350, 535
KC’s first impressions of 10 Melanesian art and culture 307
and visit to I Tatti in 1940s 262n Melani, Emma 387, 467
health 11, 203, 302, 303, 371, 374, 386, 419, 421 Mellon, Andrew 548
on Morra’s friendship 490–1 Mellon, Paul 548
Index 575

Methuen, Paul Methuen, 4th Baron 124 Morra, Maria Teresa (née Bettini) (Lucia) 491
Metman, Louis and Madame 194, 195 Morra, Count Umberto viii–ix, xi, 26, 138n, 147,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 424 292, 489–93, 511, 535, pl. 7
BB and role of director 97 and anti-fascist movement in Italy viii, 59,
KC’s visits 342, 406, 426–7 490–1, 491, 492, 511
Verrocchio’s Measured Drawing of a Horse appearance and Anglo-Saxon character 492–3
38 family and background 491
Meyer, Eduard 92 friendship with Berensons 88, 110, 131, 170,
Meyrick, Sir Samuel Rush 410 171, 203, 258, 260, 305, 324, 371, 431, 467,
Michelangelo 489–93
BB’s article and complexity of attribution 173 first meeting with BB 489–90
Crucifixion of St Peter 161 lasting friendship and stays with BB 492–3
drawings in Ashmolean Museum 99 travels in Italy 134
drawings at Windsor Castle 74, 81–2, 85, 88 travels in Spain 59, 60, 492
The Entombment in National Gallery 210 friendship and correspondence with KC 53, 59,
German scholarship on 373 104, 259, 312, 330, 455
and BB’s Drawings of Florentine Painters 20, KC on first meeting 492, 511
151, 152 political role and visit to America 371
Oppenheimer drawing (later in KC’s Morra di Lavriano, Count Roberto 491
collection) 36n, 162, 163 Morshead, Owen 57, 73, 76, 536
Palestrina Pietà 209–10 Mortimer, Raymond 302, 329, 408, 536
Milan Moscow Art Theatre 457
Caravaggio exhibition (1951) 345–6 Moscow, Russia: KC visits 176
KC and Colette visit 400–1 Mostyn-Owen, William (Willy) 283, 408, 432, 434,
Leonardo da Vinci exhibition (1939) 213, 216 436, 437, 451, 471, 496, 536–7
Mildenhall treasure 362 Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson 417
Millet, Jean-François Mountbatten, Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of
BB’s opinion of 422, 423 Burma (Dickie) 462
KC’s lecture on 420, 421, 422, 426 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Cosi fan Tutte in Turin
Milliken, William 376 28
Ministry of Information: KC’s wartime films Munich, Germany: KC visits 17
222–3 Muntz, Eugene 498, 503
Mitford, Mary Russell 207n Murray, George Gilbert Aimé 359, 537
Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery (touring Murray, John (Jock) 444, 447
exhibition in Europe, 1946–7) 261n Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris 330
Modigliani, Ettore 55, 108n Mussolini, Benito 55, 56, 58, 131, 227, 228, 490
Molyneux, Edward 305, 535
Monckton, Walter 438, 535
Monet, Claude 446 Naples: BB visits 14, 213, 317, 318
Monroe, Marilyn 441n Nash, Paul 224
Montesquieu, Robert de 472 National Art Collections Fund (NACF) 120, 121n,
Montreal, Canada: KC and Jane’s visit 461–2 157n, 158n, 222
Moore, Henry 126, 224, 225, 246, 304, 504 Giorgione/Previtali acquisition for National
as close friend of KC and Jane 289–90, 296 Gallery 126
Paris exhibition (1949) 321–2 Givanni di Paolo acquisition for National
visit to I Tatti and BB’s views on 289–90 Gallery 251
Moorhead, Alan 241, 264, 465n, 535 KC’s wartime committee work on 223
Moorish architecture in Britain 69 National Gallery (NG), London
Moravia, Alberto 59, 61, 76, 82, 171, 172, 173, 490, acrimonious relations at 123, 125–6
535 Baker as Keeper of 123, 515
Morelli, Giovanni 62, 63, 472, 497, 498, 499, 508, BB on Davies’s catalogue of early Italian
536 paintings 355, 357
Morgan, J. P. (John Pierpont) 536 composition of trustees 124, 243
Morgan, John Pierpont (Jack) (Birbo Morgo) 97, KC as Director 100, 123–219, 487, 488,
251, 406, 424, 536 pls 29–32
Index 576

acceptance of post and state of affairs on Netherlands

arrival 123–5, 136–7, 138, 140–1, 142, KC and Jane visit 388, 393
143–4 KC lectures in 346
acquisitions 126, 129–30, 149–50, 177, 179, Neumayer, Mr 13
181, 186–7, 189, 191, 198, 253 New Gallery, London:Venetian Art exhibition
attribution problems 126, 163–4, 186–7, 189, (1895) and BB’s review 473, 500, 522
191 New York
Classical Antiquity in Renaissance Painting KC and Jane visit 135, 210, 211–12, 405–6,
(1938) 196 426–7
Duveen’s conflict of interest and removal as World’s Fair (1939–40) 198–9n
trustee 129–30 Niccolò da Bologna 265, 267
improvements to French collections 146 Nicholson, Molly 305
publication of photographic details of collec- Nicholson, Simon 305
tion 128, 196, 217 Nicolson, Benedict 257, 537
re-opening after war and KC’s retirement as assistant to BB at I Tatti 135, 187, 191n
243, 248, 253, 255, 256–7 as Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures 210,
rehanging of collections 128, 150 216
relationship and social affinity with trustees as editor of Burlington Magazine 289, 290, 307,
124, 125, 144, 177 537
strained relations with staff 125–6, 192n, 197, marriage to Luisa Vertova and family life 283,
222 420, 437, 449
trustees and purchase of Giorgione panels Nicolson, Sir Harold 79, 82
126, 189, 484 Nicolson, Luisa Vertova 390, 434, 537
wartime acquisitions 253 as assistant to BB at I Tatti 283, 302, 386, 536
and wartime committee work on Home marriage to Ben Nicolson and family life 283,
Front 222–4, 231, 243–4 420, 437, 449
wartime and evacuation of pictures 195–6, Noailles, Charles de 186, 333, 336, 537
221, 222, 231, 233, 303n, 538, pl. 29 Noailles, Marie Laure de 186, 194, 336, 537
wartime exhibition of contemporary art 222, Norton, Charles Eliot 507, 508
233–4, pl. 30 Norton, Robert 80n, 186, 516, 524, 537
wartime lunchtime concerts and display of Norton, Mrs W. 79–80
single paintings 221–2, 233, 234, 253 Nuremberg Virgin (torture implement) 140
KC sends photographs of works to BB 128, Nuzi, Alegretto 402
148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1, 163, 170, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen 351n
171, 179, 180, 181, 184, 204, 208, 212–13, 263
KC visits in youth 9
KC’s involvement with later purchases 358, 359, Offner, Richard 342, 537
439, 451 Ogilvie, Sir Frederick and Lady Mary 206
and Santa Maria Maggiore triptych panels Oglander, Florence Aspinall 194
335, 348, 350, 351, 357 Ojetti, Ugo 70, 71n, 538
Kress donation 548 Old Master Drawings (journal) 89n, 91, 539
loss of Rubens’s Portrait of Thomas Howard 464 Old Palace Place, Richmond, Surrey 57, 61, 65, 71,
and Mahon 533 72, 73, 74, 80–1, 382, pl. 25
Ruhemann’s restoration methods and results Edith Wharton visits 101, 102
542–3 Mary Berenson visits 101, 109–10
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 343, 422 on move to Oxford 110
donations of pictures and collections 424–5 Old Quarries, Avening, Gloucestershire 303n,
Walker’s career at 341, 375, 420, 423, 424, 425, pl. 33
548 Olivier, Laurence (Larry) 301, 302, 306, 377, 394,
National Gallery of Canada 455–6 538
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh: Poussin’s acting career 304, 359n, 412
Seven Sacraments 417–18 Colin Clark works for film production
National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh company 441, 443, 444
398–9 Richard III film premiere 419–20
Neri, Dario 325n opera
Index 577

KC on board of Covent Garden Opera Trust Parnell,Val 382

243–4, 266 Parry, Mr (BB’s chauffeur) 9, 22, 227, 240, 387,
KC and Jane’s support for Royal Opera House pl. 3
244, 279, 296 Pasmore,Victor 126
KC sees Cosi fan Tutte in Turin 28 Pater, Walter 99, 321, 472, 486, 495, 498, 502, 529,
Wagner and KC’s German studies 15 539
Oppenheimer, Henry J. 107, 115n, 162, 538 Sebastian van Storck story 32n
Origo, Count Antonio 533, 538, 540 Pattison, Mark 104
Origo, Iris (née Cutting) xiii, 264, 269n, 480, 538, Paul, Prince of Yugoslavia 120–1, 140, 156–7, 158,
540 214, 217, 226, 231n, 232n, 336, 551
Ormsby-Gore, William George Arthur (later Lord Paulsen, Friedrich 311
Harlech) 124 Peake, Sir Charles 362n, 539–40
Ortolano, L’: Three Saints 204 Pearsall Smith, Alys Whitall see Russell, Alys
Ottawa, Canada: KC and Jane visit 462 Pearsall Smith, Hannah (née Whitall Smith, BB’s
Our Lady of Vladimir Russian icon 176 mother-in-law) 476, 509, 510
Oxford Pearsall Smith, Logan (BB’s brother-in-law) 32,
KC and Jane’s home in Headington 111 113, 114, 155, 252, 315, 476, 509, 510, 511, pl. 2
Edith Wharton visits 102 as friend of KC and Jane in London 10, 29,
Oxford University 154, 161
awards Honorary Degree to KC 428n literary career and writing
BB spends term at 99–100 critiques of BB’s writing 282, 505
Clark children at 280 as editor of The Golden Urn magazine
debate on fighting for King and Country 118 384
KC as Slade Professor of Fine Art 244–5, 249, friends and followers 521, 546, 547
258, 271, 289, 293, 295, 325, 513 The Golden Grove 109n
post-war focus on writing 277–8, 325 letters on English prose 12
resignation from post 321, 323 reads KC’s The Gothic Revival 37
KC’s Romanes lecture 399, 401, 404n, 405 Reperusals & Re-collections 197–8
see also Ashmolean Museum; Clark, Kenneth: Pearsall Smith, Mary see Berenson, Mary
as student at Trinity College, Oxford Pearsall Smith, Robert (BB’s father-in-law)
509–10
Percival, Elizabeth 227
Paget,Violet (pseud. Vernon Lee) 354, 454, Perkins, John Bryan Ward see Ward-Perkins
539 Perry, Rachel (née Berenson, BB’s sister) 509
Palmer, Samuel 273, 274 Perugia: Fontana Maggiore 334
Pancrazi, Pietro 490, 492 Phaidon Press 277, 283, 349, 407n, 427, 434–5
Panofsky, Erwin 85, 485, 528, 535, 539, 550 Philadelphia Museum of Art
BB’s antipathy towards 127–8, 162 Johnson Collection 341
Papi, Robert 460 KC lectures at 286, 336n, 338, 342
Paris Philip of Macedon (Philip drunk/Philip sober)
BB and KC in 286, 328, 330, 331, 332, 333 307, 308n
BB visits in 1930s 185 Phillips, Duncan 375, 420, 425, 540
exhibition of Byzantine art 93–4 Phillips, Marjorie 375, 425, 540
KC and Jane visit Edith Wharton 102 Phillips Gallery, Washington DC 341–2, 420, 421,
KC and Jane’s post-war visits 263, 286, 287, 422, 540
295, 302, 321, 328, 350, 388, 389, 397, 398, photographs and BB’s research
419 as basis of scholarship and research 501
KC on social life in 194, 419 KC brushes up photography skills for
KC’s visits and Conseil du Louvre 285, 286, assistantship at I Tatti 10, 13
302, 330, 331, 332, 336, 437, 439, 440–1 KC sends photographs to BB 297, 336, 362, 364,
see also Louvre, Paris 390, 398–9, 449
Paris Peace Conference (1919) 58–9, 509 BB reprimands for uninformative photo-
Parker, Karl Theodore (Charles) 17, 41, 89, 142, graphs 87–8, 89
163, 321, 539 from his own collection 265–6, 271, 272, 293,
Parma, Italy 28 294, 321, 402, 403
Index 578

from National Gallery collection 128, 148, Pollen, John Hungerford 50n
149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1, 163, 170, 171, Pomfret, Countess of 98
179, 180, 181, 184, 204, 208, 212–13, 263 Pooley, Ernest 279
from Royal Collection 154, 158 Pope, Arthur Upham 175, 541
lack of photographs of French works 315 Pope-Hennessy, James 343, 541
photographs ordered from British Museum Pope-Hennessy, John 254, 343, 452, 465, 483, 533,
36–7 541
photography and KC’s work Popham, A. E. 36n, 67n, 162n, 268n
KC’s lecture on ‘Art and Photography’ 329, Popham, Margaret 380
402, 403 Popp, A. E. 107, 145, 163
publication of details of National Gallery works Port Lympne see Bellevue, Port Lympne, Kent
128, 196, 217 Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke
Piacenza, Italy 28 of 435
Picasso 296 Portland Place, London: KC and Jane’s home in
BB’s view of 270, 282, 392 125, 154, 214, 216, 225
KC’s Listener article on 202, 206, 207 Portugal
Piccini, Giulia and Emilio pl. 37 Alan’s student holiday in 291
Pichetto, Stephen 341, 375, 540 KC and family visit 246, 248, 249, 265, 285
Piero della Francesca see also Lisbon
BB’s evaluation of 502 Pouncey, Philip 36n
BB’s Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art Poussin, Nicolas: Seven Sacraments 417–18
281–2, 328, 329, 330–1 Powell, Dilys 380
in Gualino Collection 27–8 Poynter, Sir Edward 464, 516
KC and St Augustine altarpiece in Lisbon 266, Preston, Stuart 404, 541
268, 271 Previtali, Andrea 126
KC views Rimini fresco in Bologna 324–5 Price, Mrs (KC’s landlady in Italy) 27
KC’s article on Nativity 153, 154 Pudelko (unidentified contributor to Burlington
KC’s plans for paper on 254, 255 Magazine) 183
KC’s post-war book on 277, 323, 325, 329–30 Purcell, Henry: Fairy Queen 90
National Gallery photographic details 163
Saint Michael 9
Piero di Cosimo: KC and The Forest Fire for Quebec, Canada: KC and Jane visit 461, 463
Ashmolean 120–1, 137
Pinsent, Cecil Ross 13, 251, 269n, 270, 283, 285,
288, 540 race relations in US 426
Piper, John 126, 226, 334 Randalls (Rosentahls) and collection 462
Pisani, Nicola and Giovanni: Perugia Fontana Raphael 38, 45, 74, 76, 89–90, 99, 173
Maggiore 334 KC sends photographs of Ansidei altarpiece to
‘Pisgah sights’ 115–16n BB 179
Pitt-Rivers, Colonel A.H.L.F. 98 KC sends photographs of Mond Crucifixion
Placci, Carlo 161, 490, 505, 540 altarpiece to BB 213
BB’s article on 258 Rasponi, Angelica 368
Planiscig, Leo 64, 184, 540–1 Rasponi, Anna 368n, 437, 443
Poggio al Spino, Consuma, Italy: BB’s house at 22, Rathbone, Perry 464n
24, 63, 155, 170, 211n Ravaisson-Mollien, Jean Gaspard Félix 213
politics in Italy see Italian politics Ravenna, Italy 429
Pollaiuolo, Antonio del (Pollayuolo) 74, 89, 148, Read, Herbert 45, 46, 308, 541–2
156, 158, 159, 396 BB’s writing in English Prose Style 114, 115
KC’s discovery of Edinburgh drawing in style Reale Commissione Vinciana and Leonardo
of 390, 392 drawings 107
KC’s gift of medal to BB 259 Reinhardt, Oskar and collection 297
National Gallery Martyrdom of St Sebastian 146, Reith, Sir John 223
149, 152 Rembrandt 454
Pollen, Arthur Hungerford: Leonardo drawing KC’s discovery in Kupferstich-Kabinett in
50–1 Dresden 16
Index 579

KC’s lectures on 245, 293, 295, 337–8, 346, Ronald, Sir Nigel 291
347–8, 349–50 Rondinelli, Niccolò 105
KC’s purchase of Saskia van Ulenborch at NG Rosenberg, Alfred 212
198 Ross, Janet (Aunt Janet) 8, 269n, 542, 548, 549
KC’s Sunday Times article on 447 disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 26, 27
National Gallery wartime acquisition and ill health 12
display of Portrait of Margaretha de Geer 222, KC stays with in Italy 14
253n and first meeting with BB 1, 5, 7
Renan, Joseph Ernest 213 Rosselli, Cosimo 41
Reni, Guido 451 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 421
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste: in KC’s collection Rothschild, Mrs Lionel de 208
139–40, pl. 28 Rothschild, Max 33
restorers and restoration practices 534, 540 Rothschild family
BB’s low opinion of restorers 484, 500 cameo in collection in Paris 93
Duveen’s restoration of Chalandon panels 130, van Eyck in Frick Collection 406
149 Rouveyre, Edouard 85, 106, 117
KC on value of work of 500 Rouvier, Jean 318
National Gallery works during wartime Royal Academy, London
evacuation 222 International Exhibition of Chinese Art (1935–6)
Ruhemann’s methods and results 542–3 170, 175
Rhinelander, William 97 International Exhibition of Persian Art (1931) 85
Ribbentrop, Joachim von 195 Landscape in French Art (1949–50) 325
Rice, Nolwen see Clark, Nolwen Works by Holbein and Other Masters (1951) 338
Richard III (film) 419–20 see also Exhibition of Italian Art
Richardson, Jonathan 486 Royal Collection 125
Richmond, Surrey see Old Palace Place acquisition of Leonardo drawings 57
Richter, Jean-Paul 508 KC as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures 125, 154,
Ricketts, Charles 114, 529, 542 210, 216, 243
Ridley, Sir Jasper 124 BB’s congratulations and enquiries for
Riegl, Alois 93, 542 research 153
Rienaecker,Victor 109 wartime evacuation of paintings 221
Rilke, Rainer Maria 423 see also Windsor Castle and Royal Collection
Roberti, Ercole 298, 392 Royal Fine Art Commission 243, 266
Roberts, Laurence 404, 542 Royal Mint Advisory Committee 223
Robertson, Ian 109n, 121n Royal Opera House, London 244, 279, 296, 357
Rockefeller, John D. and collection 342 Rubens, Peter Paul 177, 182
Rodin, Auguste: KC’s lecture on 421–2, 423, 426 Portrait of Thomas Howard 464
Rogers, Bruce 51 Ruffino family 138n, 490
Romanes, George John 399n Ruhemann, Helmut 163–4, 542–3
Rome Runyan, Damon 204
BB and KC’s plans for and visits together Rusk, Ralph 544
266–7, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397, 398 Ruskin, John 35, 86n, 99, 502
BB and Nicky Mariano in 101, 134, 207, 226, as connoisseur 486, 495
240, 249, 265, 286, 287, 388 KC’s gift to BB of Kelmscott The Nature of
artistic and social life in Rome 235–6, 273–4 Gothic 299
Hotel de la Ville apartment 207, 267 and KC’s Gothic Revival writings 11, 244
and Picasso exhibition (1953) 392 KC’s inaugural Slade lecture on 271, 272, 321
plans for and visits with KC and Jane 266–7, KC’s introduction to new edition of Praeterita
397 292, 295, 296–7, 298, 299
BB’s book on Arch of Constantine 282, 373, KC’s Ruskin Today 278, 514
474 reading and research for 446–7, 450, 456
KC and Jane in 60, 266–7, 275, 286, 388, 397 photographs of Italy 317
KC’s research for Florentine drawings 42–4 as Slade Professor 244
BB’s instructions on 42–3 Ruspoli, Marthe (née Marthe-Marie de Pineton
in nineteenth-century photographs 317 de Chambrun) 186, 543
Index 580

Russell, Alys (née Pearsall Smith, BB’s sister-in- Schiavone, La (Andrea Meldolla) 338
law) 34, 111, 112, 476, 509, 510, 511, 547, pl. 2 Schuman, Henry 106n
Russell, Archibald George Bloomfield 34, 37, 38, Schwarzenberg, Prince Johannes 392, 412, 455
67n Schwerin, Countess Sigrid Ebba Mariana von 252
Russell, Bertrand 511 Scott, Geoffrey 538, 540, pl. 10
Russell, John 511 Scott, Sir Walter: Red Gauntlet 9n
Russia Scottish Museum of Antiquities 398–9
BB considers visit 174–5, 176, 178 Sebastiano del Piombo 89, 91, 213
KC and Jane visit 176–7 Alnwick Castle fresco 152
see also Hermitage Museum, Leningrad Bowood Portrait of a Humanist 161
Rustici, Giovanni Francesco: Woolbeding Manor Raising of Lazarus in National Gallery 148, 149,
fountain 395, 396–7 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1
Second World War 121–37
cessation of postal services between Britain and
Sabachnikoff, Theodore 106n Italy 221, 245, 250, 253, 478
Sachs, Paul Joseph 59, 89, 102, 204, 543 lead up in Britain 195–6, 197, 201–2
St Ermin’s Hotel, Westminster, London: Clark evacuation of National Gallery paintings 196,
family flat in 13, 21, 25, 31, 57 221, 222, 231, 303n, 538, pl. 29
Saliba, Antonio de 399 lead up in Italy and BB’s situation 131, 146, 219,
Salles, Georges 186, 280, 318, 333, 393, 397, 408, 226–37, 475, 505–6
409, 444, 543 post-war return to normal life 239–44, 248
retirement from the Louvre 440–1, 442 Segni, Antonio 395
Saltwood Castle, nr Hythe, Kent 411, 429, 513, Serluppi, Marchese 228–9
514, pl. 39 Seznec, Jean 344
and Jane 384, 407, 453, 461 Shakespeare, William: KC’s speech on 412, 414
KC and Jane’s purchase and move to 382–4, Shannon, Charles 542
388, 400, 401, 402, 404 Shapley, Fern 375, 544
as KC’s weekend retreat 450 Shellal (Shallal) mosaic 309
Reynolds Stone’s woodcut of 466 Sicily: BB’s Viaggio in Sicilia 417
running costs and KC’s television income 457, Signorelli, Luca 101
464 The Circumcision in National Gallery 213
Salvemini, Gaetano 324, 329, 490 School of Pan 16n
Samson, Major 239 Simony, Count Reynald de 252
Samuels, Ernest 131 Simpson, Colin 483
Sanchi, India 430 Singer, Hans Wolfgang 16
Sandberg-Vavala, Evelyn 88 Sitwell, Edith 84, 262, 263
Sani, Alberto: BB’s monograph on 282, 325, 331, Sivas, Turkey 195
348 Slade, Felix 244
Santayana, George 12 Slade Professorship see Oxford University
Sassetta 75, 77, 78, 82 Slade School of Art, London 244
altarpiece panels in Berenson collection 129, Smith, (Arnold) John Hugh 80, 187, 544
149n Smith, Pearsall see Pearsall Smith
BB’s book on 258, 281 Snow, C. P. 434
KC and purchase of panels for National Gallery Solario, Andrea 271, 272
129–30, 149–50, 151, 154, 157–8, 160, 165, 484 Sospel, France: Golf-Hotel 11n, 25, 27, 86, 92, pl. 3
Burlington Magazine article on 149n, 158, 159, Spain
164 Berensons travels in 59, 60, 66, 69, 70
Louvre Madonna and Child 439 KC and Jane in Madrid 136–7, 139, 460
Sassoon, Aline 543–4 Prado exhibition in Geneva (1939) 215
Sassoon, Sir Philip 124, 125, 135, 192, 214, 225, Spender, Stephen 204
543–4 Sprigge, Cecil 385, 544
Sassoon, Sybil, Marchioness of Chomondeley Sprigge, Sylvia: biography of BB 385, 403, 452–3,
543, 544 454, 544–5
Savile Gallery, London 34n, 45 Staedel Museum, Frankfurt 68
Saxl, Fritz 196, 288, 289 Stamp Advisory Committee 223
Index 581

Stark, Freya 264, 274, 310, 324, 374, 398, 467, 545 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 34, 346, 347
Steegman, John 462 Times,The
Steegmuller, Francis 294 70th birthday letter for BB 167
Steinmann, Ernst 43, 44, 173–4 on Exhibition of Italian Paintings 67n
Steinmeyer, Fritz 68n KC’s view of 118, 196
Stephen, Adrian 511 obituaries of BB and KC xii, 468
Stephen, Karin (née Costelloe, BB’s step-daughter) Tintoretto 89, 189, 409
165, 510, 511–12 Titian 272, 338
Stoclet, Adolphe 68, 545 and Allendale Adoration controversy 129
Stoop, Mr and Mrs Frank 28–9, 230n BB visits Venice exhibition (1935) 175
Stourton, James 109n Europa in Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection
Strachey, Barbara see Halpern, Barbara 464
Strachey, Giles Lytton 114, 510, 545 KC on Titians in Louvre 419
Strachey, Rachel (Ray) (née Costelloe, BB’s step- KC visits Berlin galleries 16
daughter) 510 St Margaret and the Dragon 139
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: KC and Jane Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player in
on official visit 412–13, 414n Fitzwilliam Museum 86
Strong, Arthur 47, 67n Toesca, Elena Berti 338
Strong, Eugenie 67n, 167n Toesca, Ilaria 339–40
Stryzgowski, Josef 46n, 308n Toesca, Pietro 43, 44, 62, 63, 93, 106, 236, 546
Stubbs, George 442, 443, 444 Toft, The, Bournemouth: Clark family home 7n
Sudbourne, Hall, nr Orford, Suffolk 361n Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio 376
Suez Crisis (1956) 442n Tolnay, Charles de 145, 546
Suida, Bertina (later Manning) 546 Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Far Eastern
Suida, William 341, 545–6 collection 464
Summerson, John 334 Torrigiano, Pietro 390, 399
Sunday Times,The Toscanini, Arturo 17
KC’s articles on paintings in 382, 445, 447, 453, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 347
460 Toye, John Francis 338
KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article on death of BB Tradescant Collection and Ashmolean Museum
468, 472–7 97–8
request for KC to write obituary of BB 468 Trevelyan, George 310
Sutherland, Graham 126, 224, 225, 246, 432 Trevelyan, Julian 310, 546
Sutherland, Kathleen 225, 246 Trevelyan, Robert (Trevy) 26, 88, 110, 172, 264,
Sweden 310, 505, 511, 546
KC’s wartime lectures 223, 248 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 247, 324, 511, 526, 546–7
see also Gustaf Adolf, Crown Prince of Sweden Trewin, Ion 140n, 325n
Switzerland Tucci, Giuseppe 235
Alan Clark’s home in Zermatt 453 Tufton Street, Westminster, London: KC’s house
see also Geneva; Zurich 21, 24, 35, 57, 65
Tura, Cosimo 217
Turin, Italy 27–8
Tate Britain, London: archive of KC’s papers Turkey
xiv–xv BB visits Asia Minor with Nicky Mariano 195
Tate Gallery, London 146 see also Constantinople
Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery Turnell, Martin (Turrell) 340
touring exhibition (1946–7) 261n Tyler, Royall 93, 187, 188, 517, 547
Tatti see I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy Tynan, Kenneth 359n
Taylor, Francis 496
Taylor, Jeremy 109n
Tel-el-armena see Amarna, Egypt Uccello, Paolo
Television Act (1954) 379, 381 BB’s evaluation in Lists 502
Teniers, David, the younger 186, 187 KC’s study of and lectures on 296, 342
Thomas, (Martha) Carey 140, 512 The Hunt in the Forest 120–1
Thompson, F. W. 67n Umberto I, king of Italy 491
Index 582

Updike, John 479, 483–4 Mary Berenson’s stay in sanatorium 167,

Upper Terrace House, Hampstead, London 246–7, 169–70, 172
280, 287, 382, 388, pl. 38 Villa Gamberaia, Settignano 269
Upton House, nr Tetbury, Gloucestershire 225, 234 Villa La Fontanelle, Careggi: BB and Nicky
Utrecht Psalter 364, 365 Mariano’s wartime refuge 228, 229, 239–40, 248
Villa Maser (Villa Barbaro),Veneto, Italy 448–9
Villa Medici antiques 418–19
Valeri, Francesco Malaguzzi 81, 85, 107 Villino, Il, Corbignano, Italy pl. 14
Valéry, Paul 206 KC and Colette stay at 399
Vallombrosa see Casa al Dono, nr Vallombrosa KC and Jane’s residence at 39, 40
van Gogh see Gogh,Vincent van KC stays at in early 1950s 351, 352, 353, 354,
Vanni, Lippo 263, 265 pl. 37
Vasari, Giorgio 41, 259n, 335, 486 Vivarini, Bartolomeo 298
Vatican State 58 Voigt, Georg 74
Vavala see Sandberg-Vavala, Evelyn
Velasquez 215
Las Meninas 445, 454 Wagner, Richard: and KC’s German studies 15
Venetian art Waley, Arthur David 300, 301, 547
BB visits Titian exhibition (1935) 175 Walker, John 8n, 134, 200n, 250, 254, 260, 337, 340,
KC visits Berlin galleries 16 543, 547–8, pl. 19
New Gallery exhibition (1895) and BB’s review on BB’s approach to advisory work in art
473, 500, 522 market 483
Veneziano, Domenico 390n, 392 career at National Gallery of Art in Washington
Veneziano, Jacometto see Jacometto Veneziano 341, 375, 420, 423, 424, 425, 548
Venice 17 on friendship between BB and KC 479
BB visits with Nicky Mariano 175, 248, 290, on Giorgione panels in National Gallery 189n
312, 388, 403–4, 419 introduces Rush Kress to BB 366, 367
and Biennale exhibition and Chinese on KC’s relations with staff at National Gallery
exhibition 403 126
Bellini exhibition (1949) 312, 314, 346 proposed as director of Harvard institute at
KC and Jane visit and view Tintoretto I Tatti 59, 424, 496
exhibition 189 visits BB at I Tatti 61, 172, 200n, 204, 350, 394,
KC and Jane’s post-war visits 286, 312, 314, 362, 467
388, 389, 393, 419 visits KC and Jane in England 393, 455
Lotto exhibition (1953) 393, 436 Walker, Margaret 455
Veronese exhibition (1939) 213, 232 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 105
see also Venetian art Wall Street Crash (1929) 58
Venturi, Adolfo 81, 166, 547 Wallace Collection, London 528
Venturi, Lionello 547 Walpole Society, The 90
Veronese, Paolo 86, 146, 148, 149, 213, 232, 409 Walton, Susana, Lady 419–20, 437, 443, 444
Verrocchio, Andrea del 395, 396 Walton, Sir William 193n, 225, 226, 244, 419–20,
BB’s Italian article on 136, 137–8, 147 437, 443, 444, 548
drawing in V&A 41, 147 War Artists Advisory Committee 223–4, 233,
Measured Drawing of a Horse 38 488
Versailles, Paris 440–1 Warburg, Abraham (Aby) 24, 60, 128, 278, 427,
Vertova, Luisa see Nicolson, Luisa Vertova 485–6, 548, 550
Vicentino, Andrea 105n Mnemosyne Atlas 44n
Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy 56 Warburg Institute, London 288, 289, 364, 365, 427,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London 495
Hilliard exhibition 271, 272 Ward-Perkins, John Bryan 274
KC’s research for Florentine drawings 41 Warren, Earl, Chief Justice of the United States
Verrocchio drawing 41, 147 426
Vienna Warren, Edward (Ned) Perry 99, 507, 508
BB’s cure and dental treatment in 190 Washington DC
KC and Jane visit 64, 183 cherry blossom festival 375
Index 583

KC’s visits and lectures 341–2, 343, 420, 421–2, Wilde, Johannes 36n, 162n, 183, 184, 294, 550
423–7 Wilde, Oscar 99, 472, 486
The Nude lecture series 278, 280–1, 287, 348, Wildenstein, Georges: BB advisory role with
373, 375–6, 377, 388 241–2, 248, 482
see also National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Wilder, Thornton 330, 417
Waterfield, Caroline (Lina) 8, 9, 542, 548–9 Williams, William Emrys 279
Waterfield, Gordon 21, 49, 549 Wilson, Sir Horace 201–2
Waterhouse, Ellis 77, 78, 82, 123, 257, 549 Wilson, Woodrow 58
Watteau, Jean-Antoine 460 Wilton House, Wiltshire: Leda and the Swan after
Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited 2 Leonardo 216, 218
Weiss, Bianca 230–1 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 354, 495
‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ and KC’s father’s business Wind, Edgar 464, 550
8, 478 Windsor Castle and Royal Collection 395
West, Eddy Sackville 225 BB and KC’s Florentine drawings research 22,
Westbury, Lord xiv 23, 24, 38, 41, 52, 73, 81, 84, 85
Westminster, Loelia, Duchess of 313 KC’s commission to catalogue Leonardo
Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire 31n drawings 57–8, 60, 73–4, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, 90,
Wharton, Edith 269n, 509, 517, 524, 533, 537, 544, 104, 106–7, 109, 111, 117, 119, 150
547, 549–50 Witt, Sir Robert Clermont 55, 67n, 167n, 359, 550
BB’s friendship and visits in South of France as National Gallery trustee 124, 126, 144
22, 24, 60, 61, 69, 78, 79, 101, 102, 112, 113, Wittkower, Rudolf 288n, 289, 316, 531, 551
116, 133, 134, 165, 180, 185, 186 Wolff, Addie see Kahn, Addie
Hyères as haven for reading for BB 83–4 Wolff, Gerhard 229
initial froideur and successful second meet- Wölfflin, Heinrich 15, 82, 495, 551
ing 56–7 Woolbeding Manor, West Sussex: Rustici fountain
Wharton reads from autobiography 117 395, 396–7
death 131, 188 Woolf,Virginia 230n, 435
distressing events with household staff 121 World War II see Second World War
illness 169, 170, 187 Worth, Irene (Harriet Abrams) 391, 392, 417, 551
KC and Jane’s friendship with 57, 61, 79, 83, acting career 373–4, 417, 465
113, 135, 142, 169, 188 friendship with KC and Jane 408, 409, 419
as godmother to Colin and Colette 116, 193n and visits to BB 406, 407, 470, 471
library bequeatheed to Colin Clark 193 Wrightsman, Jayne 425
visits at Hyère 86, 92, 133, 180
visits in Paris and Sainte-Brice house 94, 102,
133, 134, 187 Yale University: KC delivers Ryerson Lectures
Wharton visits in London 157 164n, 193
Wharton visits in Oxford 102 Yashiro,Yukio 10
Wharton visits in Richmond 101, 102 Yeats, W. B. 94, 141, 142, 145, 156, 263, 501
visit to Italy and I Tatti 60–1, 134, 161–2 Yugoslavia see Paul, Prince of Yugoslavia
Whitall Smith, Hannah see Pearsall Smith, Hannah
Whiteley, John 121n
Whitman, Walt 511 Zahle, Eric 261
Whittemore, Thomas 175, 550 Zurich: exhibition of Lombardy art (1948–9) 298
Wickhoff, Franz 308n
Widener Collection: BB and published catalogue
281
584