COLLECTION Identifier: BER-16

Kenneth Clark correspondence

Overview

Incoming letters to Kenneth Clark and his wife Jane, with occasional carbon copies of Clark's responses and partial diary from 1934.

Dates

Creation: 1923 - 1983
Creation: Majority of material found within 1923 - 1950

Conditions on Access

Unrestricted.

Conditions on Use

Copying: Papers may be copied in accordance with the Biblioteca Berenson's usual procedures. Copyright: The President and Fellows of Harvard College are the copyright holder for the Berenson's papers held in this collection. Copyright in other papers in the collection may be held by their authors, or the authors’ heirs or assigns. Researchers must obtain the written permission of the holder(s) of copyright, before publishing quotations from any material of the collection.

Extent

2 boxes

Additional Description

Biography

Kenneth Clark was an art historian and a patron of the arts. He was born in London, and educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, where he gained a second class in modern history. In the autumn of 1925, art historian Bernard Berenson asked him to assist him in the revision of his corpus of Florentine drawings. In 1929 he was offered the task of cataloguing Leonardo da Vinci's drawings held at Windsor Castle. In 1931 he was appointed keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1933 he was appointed director of the National Gallery in London (1934-1945). In 1946 he resigned from the National Gallery to devote himself to his own writing. Between 1946 and 1950 he was Professor of fine art at Oxford. Between 1953 and 1960 he was chairman of the Arts Council. His program series Civilisation broadcast on BBC in 1969. He was Chancellor of York University from 1969 to 1979 and a trustee of the British Museum.