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“... our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to Rembrandt lead ...”

“... coincided with the advent of photography. It has given critics a useful point of comparison. Kenneth Clark described View of Delft as ‘the nearest … painting has ever come to a coloured photograph’. But, as photorealist painters such as Gerhard Richter have sought to demonstrate (in Richter’s case, with compositions artfully reminiscent of ...”

“... the war. Nicholas writes that the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, rushed to Paris with Kenneth Clark in 1944, expecting to find impoverished French collectors and dealers eager to sell pictures at bargain prices. Instead they found (in Clark’s words) ‘a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made ...”

“... do so normally reach that state through ups and downs. Constable had ‘the slowest start,’ as Kenneth Clark put it, ‘of any painter before the time of Grandma Moses.’ He moved fairly steadily towards a peak reached around 1824 and then stayed at about that level until not long before he died, at 61, in 1837. And he was pushing things further ...”

“... in later centuries. Tragically, a painting often has to shed its frame to retain its lovers. Kenneth Clark, seeking to persuade the Trustees of the National Gallery to purchase Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier, had it removed from the florid gilt composition frame which the artist had probably selected (and possibly even designed) for ...”

“... A generation grew up believing that Seurat and Cézanne had made Piero’s rediscovery possible. Kenneth Clark, who, as director of the National Gallery, should have inquired how Piero’s paintings came to be in his care, even made the absurd claim that the Victorians could never have understood Piero. For all the influence of this book, Longhi has ...”

“... aloof and misanthropic: ‘An unpleasant man,’ P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the 1970s. Kenneth Clark, with whom Hastings says Maugham enjoyed a ‘firm friendship’, described him as ‘an extremely mysterious character’; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: ‘God only knows what is inside.’ (Maugham said much the same ...”

“... identified with the century itself. Her circumstances were of course relatively comfortable. Kenneth Clark made sure that the royal air-raid shelter was tastefully decorated with Dutch old masters. Nevertheless the aftermath of war left her tired and the next few years of austerity and reconstruction were ‘hard & grinding’. Despite her ultimate ...”

“... By 1939 the stormlit, nervy rhapsodies over ruins for which he is now best known had won over Kenneth Clark, who as director of the National Gallery had been a powerful foe to abstraction and who would henceforward prove an equally powerful patron. Harris makes this switcharound in Piper’s career a model for changes across the board in English ...”

“... recently saved a further colleague, Victor Pasmore, from court martial for desertion by leaning on Kenneth Clark to vouch for him as ‘one of the six best painters in England’, but artistically the two were by now on very different tacks. More urgently, there was now no woman, or prospect of a woman, left to give focus to Coldstream’s life. Four ...”

“... it was not as though the inner circle of his admirers was composed of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were on offer. With the ...”

“... trees, every detail plain.4 March. I am rereading (or reading properly) James Stourton’s book on Kenneth Clark. I hadn’t realised how apposite for these days is Yeats’s quite hackneyed ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ … The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate ...”

“... The Shell-Mex advertising campaign, lavishly praised by art critics such as Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark, appeared at a time when motoring was still more or less a luxury pursuit. Yet these initiatives made possible the ‘common culture’ of Britain in the Thirties. A ‘common culture’ is a slippery concept: to what extent does it genuinely ...”

“... its egalitarianism fully. This IG position defied not only the lofty civilisation tended by Kenneth Clark, but also the high Modernism advanced by Herbert Read at the ICA; it also rejected the sentimental view of (British) folk culture in opposition to (American) popular culture held by such critics as Richard Hoggart. ‘American films and ...”

“... the unpardonable lapse of taste of examining the period in between, when Berenson, as Lord Clark pointed out some years ago, did nothing but authenticate. Not only does she presume to scrutinise his dealings with the unsavoury Joseph Duveen – a partnership which began in 1907 and continued for thirty years – but she also attempts (a little ...”