Kenneth Clark: life, art and civilisation
JAMES STOURTON

“May I bring my motor car and chauffeur?” the young Kenneth Clark asked. He had been invited by Bernard Berenson to become his assistant. It was 1925; Clark was still an Oxford undergraduate and Berenson was the foremost art connoisseur of the day. “It may seem preposterous that I even have a chauffeur, but he understands the innards of the car and I don’t, and he doubles as my valet,” added Clark, perhaps a little disingenuously. Berenson was delighted. There was nothing he liked more than to play guru to wealthy young public school patricians.

Kenneth Clark belonged to the Brideshead Revisited generation of 1920s Oxford undergraduates which included Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron and Anthony Powell, as well as Evelyn Waugh himself. In some ways Clark became the most celebrated and successful of that golden cohort – director of the Ashmolean, then the National Gallery, Keeper of the King’s Pictures, wartime senior civil servant, post-war pioneer of television, and finally author and presenter in 1969 of Civilisation, the BBC’s groundbreaking TV series of art and cultural history, which made him an international star and household name. A knighthood was followed by a peerage: he became one of the good and the great – a trusted committee man, a royal courtier – and he amassed one of the great private collections of art.