Sir Kenneth Clark(1903–1983)

Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born on 13 July 1903 at 32 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, the only child of Kenneth McKenzie Clark senior, a Paisley cotton-thread heir of substantial inherited wealth (the Clark family business was J & P Coats, the Paisley thread manufacturer that was, in the late nineteenth century, one of the three largest commercial companies in the United Kingdom by revenue and the principal employer of west-of-Scotland industrial labour), and Margaret Alice McArthur. The father had retired from active management of the family business at the age of thirty on a fortune sufficient to support the household at the level of the Edwardian leisure class for the rest of his life. The boy was schooled at Wixenford preparatory school and then at Winchester College from thirteen, went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1922 to read modern history, and graduated with a first-class degree in 1925. He had decided by his second undergraduate year that the subject of his adult life would be art history, on the basis of his Italian holidays in his school years and the connection with the Berenson household at I Tatti outside Florence that his uncle had introduced him to at seventeen.

The Berenson apprenticeship was the foundational training of his art-historical career. He spent two academic years between 1925 and 1927 at I Tatti as an assistant to the seventy-year-old American expatriate connoisseur Bernard Berenson, the senior figure of the early-twentieth-century Italian-Renaissance attribution tradition. The work was the cataloguing of the I Tatti collection of Italian Renaissance drawings (about a thousand sheets, mostly Florentine and Sienese fifteenth century), the preparation of Berenson's catalogue raisonné of Florentine drawings (which appeared, with Clark's research apparatus, in 1938), and the connoisseurship-and-attribution training that the Anglo-American art-historical establishment of the period treated as the apprenticeship of the discipline. He came home to England in 1927 at twenty-four, took the post of Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1931, and was offered the Directorship of the National Gallery in London in November 1933 at the age of thirty.

The National Gallery directorship ran for the next eleven years to December 1944. The achievements of the Clark tenure were the reorganisation of the gallery's display and cataloguing (he had the pictures rehung on the chronological-and-national-school principle that has been the gallery-display orthodoxy since), the acquisition policy that brought into the collection the fifteenth-century early Renaissance Florentine and Flemish pictures the gallery had previously been weak in, and the wartime evacuation programme. From September 1939 he had the pictures of the gallery moved to the slate quarry at Manod above the village of Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales, where they spent the six wartime years in controlled-humidity underground storage; the gallery itself in Trafalgar Square was empty for the duration of the war, was used for the Myra Hess lunchtime concerts, and was the empty-frame public space of wartime central London.

He was simultaneously the Surveyor of the King's Pictures from 1934 to 1944, the official with curatorial responsibility for the royal collection of about seven thousand paintings across the royal residences. He published the *Catalogue of Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at Windsor Castle* (1935), the reference catalogue of the most important single Leonardo collection outside the Louvre. He served as Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1953 to 1960, as Chairman of the Independent Television Authority from 1954 to 1957 (the regulatory body for the new ITV commercial-television network), and as a trustee of every museum and gallery board of the post-war London establishment.

*Civilisation*, the thirteen-part BBC Two colour-television documentary series on the visual-cultural history of Western Europe from the fall of Rome to the present day, was first broadcast on the Sunday-evening slot of the BBC's new colour-television service from 23 February to 18 May 1969. He had written and presented the thirteen fifty-minute episodes himself across three years of production, with the BBC producer Michael Gill and a unit of about forty researchers, camera crew and editing staff. The series was the popular art-history television success of the post-war era: about 2.5 million UK viewers per episode on first broadcast, the BAFTA series of the year, and a book that sold 1.4 million copies in its first six years of publication. He was knighted in 1938 (one of the youngest English-establishment knighthoods of the century at thirty-five), made a Companion of Honour in 1959, given the Order of Merit in 1976, and raised to the peerage as Baron Clark of Saltwood in 1969. He died at Saltwood Castle in Kent on 21 May 1983, seventy-nine years old. The Clark name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the medieval occupational *cleric*, the literate-clerical functionary of the medieval Highland church and burgh administration; he carried the Paisley-thread-heir variant of it into the foundation of post-war British popular-television art history.