Part 1

NOTES ON THE ART TREASURES AT PENICUIK HOUSE MIDLOTHIAN BY JOHN M. GRAY F.S.A. SCOT. CURATOR SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.

_REPRINTED, WITH LARGE ADDITIONS, FROM “THE SCOTTISH LEADER.”_

FIFTY COPIES FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION. 1889.

THE ART TREASURES OF SCOTLAND.

III. PENICUIK HOUSE.

I.

There are few Scottish families that, during the last two hundred years, have been more closely connected with the progress of culture in their native country than the Clerks of Penicuik.

Claiming descent from the Drummonds of Hawthornden, through Elizabeth Henderson, grand-daughter of the poet and first wife of the first Baronet of Penicuik, they have produced, both in the main line and in its younger branches, a goodly proportion of men of intellect and mark. At present we need only name Sir John Clerk, the second Baronet, one of the Commissioners for the Union, and a Baron of the Exchequer, a man of varied attainments and the strongest individuality, and known as an enthusiastic antiquary; his son, Sir James, who was the architect of the present mansion of the family; whose brother, Sir George Clerk Maxwell, the fourth Baronet, distinguished himself by his efforts to promote the commercial interests of his country, establishing a linen manufactory at Dumfries, engaging in mining schemes for copper and lead, and writing much upon agricultural and industrial subjects; John Clerk of Eldin, younger brother of the last-named, author of the celebrated “Essay on Naval Tactics,” and known as an artist by his series of etchings which preserve in a manner so interesting to the antiquary the aspect of many of the historical edifices of Scotland; his well-known son John Clerk, “the Coryphæus of the Scottish Bar,” afterwards Lord Eldin; and the Right Hon. Sir George Clerk, sixth Baronet, the friend of Sir Robert Peel, one of the prominent politicians of his time, and especially versed in all matters of statistics. William Aikman, the portrait-painter, too, was descended from the house of Penicuik, his mother having been the eldest sister of Sir John Clerk, the first Baronet; and, in our own time, Professor James Clerk Maxwell, whose father was grandson of the fourth Baronet and brother of the sixth, has by his eminence in science added new lustre to his parental name.

But not only have the Clerks been themselves witty—using the word in its best, its old English, sense—they have been the cause of wit in others; by their loyal friendships with the best Scottish painters and poets of their time, and their open-handed patronage of these men’s work, they have identified themselves with the history of art and literature in Scotland. One can hardly pronounce the name of Allan Ramsay without thinking of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, or the name of Alexander Runciman, without recalling that of Sir James, his son and successor.

The mansion of the family is situated about a mile and a half from the village of Penicuik, on a commanding situation, overlooking the wooded valley of the Esk, a “classic stream” which, at this point, is still uncontaminated by the chemicals of the paper-makers, whose manufactories begin to appear a little lower, at the village itself. Manifestly great care and the finest taste have been expended by the successive owners of the place in laying out the grounds, which are a triumph of landscape-gardening, so filled are they with pleasant combinations of woodland, lawn, and flowers; and we shall hardly forget their gorgeous aspect on that summer day when we first saw them, with their wealth of purple rhododendron blossoms, and, here and there, a touch of particularly vivid crimson of beech-leaves diversifying the “greenery” of June. Especially noticeable is the skill which has arranged that spaces of shadowed and closely enclosed foliage shall lead, with all the force of sharp and grateful contrast, to amplest breadth of outlook and extended view; and so aptly does the peak of the Black Hill top the belt of trees that bounds the Upper Pond, and with such a perfect sense of definitely calculated balance, of satisfying composition, does the blue outline of Mendick complete the view as we look up the stream from near the south front of the house, that, in a fanciful mood, we could well believe the whole to have been the result of something more than a mere happy chance,—could almost imagine that he who designed the place had been gifted with a wizard’s power, greater than that of the Prophet himself, that the mountains had indeed been at his beck and call, that they had come at his bidding, and taken their stations, each in the precise spot best fitted to give to the prospect its last, its crowning perfection.

Nay, Nature herself, even in her moments of wildest storm, seems to have been working in harmony with the designer of the place, and making for its beauty. When you have surveyed the last-named prospect, and turned a little towards the left to follow the depressions of the ground which mark the position of the unseen bed of the Esk, you note the greensward that borders the stream; and this leads the eye beyond to the further bank, where an open space of clearing among the trees diversifies the succession of their rounded tops, this break and point of pause being again repeated further up to the left among the trees that crest the hill. The last opening was the work of the tempest, which, by overturning a trunk or two, disclosed a glimpse of the distant Peeblesshire moor behind, giving just that final touch, that hint of the beyond “over the hills and far away,” which perfects the view,—not only to the painter, as completing the lines of its composition, but to the poet as well, by adding that sense of extended outlook, as of a vista piercing into the breadth of the world, which is needful, for finest imaginative effect, in every landscape.

Then, too, there are the Penicuik Gardens to be seen,—the old garden, lying on a sheltered slope to the south, with its glass-houses, the first, or all but the very first, of the kind in Scotland; the extensive modern garden, bounded by brick walls, the soft mellow colouring of which tells so pleasantly through the green of the trees; and especially the “American Garden,” with its wealth of many-coloured azaleas springing from the midmost space of softest turf, “a garden inclosed” like the garden of the Canticles, cloistered and protected, like some princess of romance, by thick-set hedges and a circle of sheltering wood, lest any eager and nipping air of our northern clime should visit its cheek too roughly, and blanch the beauty of its ardent face of flowers.

II.

The house, which fronts us as we approach the termination of the drive, is a modern edifice, built by Sir James, the third Baronet, in 1761, after he had returned from a residence in Italy, saturated with classical ideas. It was erected entirely from the Baronet’s own designs; but, doubtless, these were produced under the influence of Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, whose sister had been married in 1753 to John Clerk, author of the “Naval Tactics,” Sir James’s younger brother. Consequently the present house does not possess the interest of having been the meeting-place of Allan Ramsay, who died in 1758, and his friends and patrons of the Clerk family; an association erroneously assigned to the present structure by Dr. Daniel Wilson in his “Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh,” a work which contains many curious particulars regarding the Clerks, and especially of the Baron, the second Baronet. The house in which the poet and the antiquary spent together many a genial evening of “honest talk and wholesome wine” no longer exists. It occupied a site close behind the present mansion, on whose completion it was removed. Some of the old cellars remain under the earthen mound to the south, and are still in use. We may sigh a little over the memories and associations of old Penicuik House, over the vanished picturesqueness of its “crowstep” gables and its circular corkscrew turrets, of which a shadow still survives in the sketch by John Clerk, reproduced in the Bannatyne Club issue of his etchings; but doubtless the present mansion is vastly more commodious and in better harmony with modern ideas of comfort than was its predecessor, and it takes its place excellently in the landscape; its effect not greatly marred by the more recent wings added by Bryce in 1857-8; its straight perpendicular and horizontal lines contrasting excellently with the flowing curves of ground and trees, in that fashion which Turner recognised and loved, and emphasised so delightfully in his early drawings of four-square English mansions set amid the rounded forms of wood and hill and stream.

As we turn our eye towards the offices of Penicuik House, which are situated a little to our right, two objects of rather singular aspect arrest our attention. Regarding one of them—a tall, very ecclesiastical-looking steeple garnished with the usual large gilded clock-face, which in the oddest fashion surmounts the stables—a curious bit of tradition lingers in the neighbourhood. It seems that Sir James designed not only his own mansion, but also the parish church of Penicuik. When the plan of the latter, however, was submitted to the heritors or kirk-session, it appears that they would have none of the steeple,—for what reason is not recorded, whether it was that their architectural tastes did not chime in with those of the Baronet, or that they considered it as too decorative a feature to be in accordance with severe Presbyterian principles, or whether, finally, the expense was too great for their pockets. Declined, at any rate, the steeple was, so local tradition affirms. But Sir James was by no means willing that the structure which his brain had devised should only be dimly visible upon paper, and never take substantial embodiment in stone and lime; so he reared it, at his own proper cost, in his stable-yard, where it still forms so imposing and unusual a feature.

The other curious erection is a rounded dome on the opposite side of the court, raising its height above the stable buildings. This is nothing less than an accurate reproduction of “Arthur’s O’on,” which formerly existed on the north bank of the Carron, a mile and a half from Falkirk, believed by “Sandy Gordon,” the great antiquarian friend of the second Baronet of Penicuik, to be a Roman _Sacellum_, or chapel in which military standards and insignia were deposited, and fully described and discussed in his “Itinerarium Septentrionale,” that precious folio which Oldbuck had captured and was beginning to examine when we make his acquaintance in the opening chapters of “The Antiquary.”

Turning, however, to the house itself, we may remark, as we enter, that the ornaments of the front—the stone vases that break the sky-line, and the graceful “Chippendale” shield of arms, furnished with the decorative, not heraldic, adjunct of wings—were designed by John Clerk of Eldin, author of the “Naval Tactics,” a cadet of the family. Also that the _grisaille_ painting on the lower side of the roof of the raised portico was executed—so James Jackson’s “Account of the Parish of Penicuik” informs us—by Alexander Runciman, when he was an apprentice with John Norie, the well-known decorative painter and landscapist of Edinburgh, and that it was the ability displayed in this work that induced Sir James to assist in sending the youth for four or five years to Rome, whence he returned to execute the mural paintings of the St. Margaret Staircase and the Ossian Hall of Penicuik House. The motto, from Cicero’s _De Officiis_ with which the portal is inscribed, was chosen by the Earl of Perth, grandson of John Drummond, the attainted Earl of Melfort, a close friend of Sir James’s; and a letter regarding it may be transcribed, as a quaint example of the stately epistles of our ancestors.

“SIR,—Upon considering the manner of your House of Pennicueik, where I had the pleasure of beeing some days in November last, and admiring the Architecture of it, after 40 years ponderating (_sic_) in my mind a Precept of Cicero’s,

_Non Domo Dominus, sed Domino Domus honestanda est,_

found for the first time that it was obtemperate, and should wish for leave to inscribe it on Pennicueik House as the real sentiment of

Your most obedient Servant and Cousin PERTH.

“_LUNDIN HOUSE, Ap. 22, 1771._”

III.

In the Entrance Hall various antiquarian and artistic treasures decorate the walls or are preserved in glass cases,—the colours of the local volunteer regiment that was raised at the time of the French Invasion scare, full-sized marble copies of various antique statues, excellent old china, several fine missals, the fan and necklace of Mary Queen of Scots, said to have come into the Clerk family from Mary Gray, wife of the first John Clerk of Penicuik, through her mother, Mary Gillies, to whom it was given before the execution at Fotheringay, and the gold snuff-box presented by the Scottish Widows’ Fund to Lord Eldin, in 1825, in recognition of his services at the time of the foundation of the company.

IV.

Turning to the right from the Hall we enter the Dining-room, where the most important of the portraits are hung. But here the places of honour on the walls, above the fireplaces and fronting the long line of windows which light the apartment, are occupied by no family portraits, by no effigies of distinguished heads of the house. Even the portrait of the second Baronet, the potent Baron of Exchequer himself, even the great Raeburn group of the fifth Baronet and his comely wife, Mary Dacre, have been waived to less important positions; and the pictures which hold the chief places represent a poet and a painter who were loved and honoured by this family of Penicuik.

Over the fireplace to the right is an excellent portrait, by William Aikman, of Allan Ramsay the elder, a man who, though his verses may seem a little artificial and a little dull to the readers of our own day, is worthy of all honour, not only for having aided in turning Scottish poetry into a freer and more natural channel, but also for having established a theatre and the first circulating library in Edinburgh, and so distinctly served the cause of culture in Scotland. He was the sworn friend of the house of Penicuik, the chosen associate of the second Baronet, and of his son, afterwards Sir James, whom he addresses in that homely and vigorous “Epistle,” beginning—

“Blythe may he be who o’er the haugh, All free from care, may sing and laugh,”

which is dated “Pennycuick, May 9, 1755.”

The present picture, very similar to that which was excellently mezzotinted by George White, shows the poet nearly to the waist, clad in a brown coat, the shirt open at the throat and without a cravat. No wig is worn, but the head is wound round tightly, cap-fashion, with a low-toned orange handkerchief, beneath which appears the bright, alert, intelligent face, with its bushy eyebrows and very black eyes, its wide-nostrilled, humorous, slightly _retroussé_ nose, and its large-lipped mouth, full and rippling over with good-nature and sensitiveness. We are enabled to fix the exact date of the picture by means of the following interesting inscription on the back, in the autograph of Sir John, the second Baronet:—

“A Roundlet in Mr. Ramsay’s own Way.

Here painted on this canvass clout, By Aikman’s hand is Ramsay’s snout, The picture’s value none might doubt, For ten to one I’ll venture, The greatest criticks could not tell Which of the two does most excell, Or in his way should bear the bell, The Poet or the Painter.

J. C. Pennicuik, 5 May 1723.”

The picture accordingly represents the poet in his thirty-seventh year, and was painted when the artist was about to leave Scotland to settle in London, an occasion on which Ramsay inscribed to him his “Pastoral Farewell,”—not his only poetical tribute to his friend, for previously, in 1721, he had penned another “Epistle,” in which he thanks the portraitist because

“By your assistance unconstrain’d, To courts I can repair, And by your art my way I’ve gained To closets of the fair.”

There are many other portraits which enable us to gather what was the personal appearance of the author of “The Gentle Shepherd.” There is the print in which the poet appears in all the bright bravery of youth, clad in a kind of fanciful Scottish costume,—a coat slashed at the sleeves, a plaid laid over his right shoulder, a broad Highland bonnet, with a St. Andrew badge, set on the head. This is the frontispiece to the first quarto edition of his works, published by Ruddiman in 1721: it is engraved by T. Vereruysse, and bears the initials J. S. P., which, as we learn from the engraving by Vertue, evidently from the same picture, in Ramsay’s “Poems and Songs,” 1728, stands for “John Smibert, Pinxit.” This painter, born in Edinburgh in 1684, was a friend and correspondent of Ramsay’s, and it was to him, while studying art in Italy, that the poet addressed that “Epistle to a Friend in Florence” which is included in his works. He accompanied Bishop Berkeley to Rhode Island in 1727, and afterwards settled in Boston, where he resided till his death in 1751. In Britain his works are scarce, but a portrait of Berkeley by his hand is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and there is at Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, along with minor examples of his art, an important group of Lord Cullen and his family, including twelve life-sized figures, which he painted in 1720. Smibert is believed to have executed a second portrait of Allan Ramsay, that kit-cat likeness with the head turned nearly in profile to the left, which formed the frontispiece to “The Gentle Shepherd, with Illustrations of the Scenery,” Edinburgh 1814, engraved by A. Wilson, from a drawing made by A. Carse from the picture (now at New Hall, Mid-Lothian), which had belonged to the poet himself, and afterwards to Janet Ramsay, a daughter who survived him.

Again there is a singularly heavy-looking and spiritless portrait engraved in the second volume of Ruddiman’s 1728 edition of Ramsay’s works, marked as by Strange’s master, “R. Cooper, ad vivum sculpsit, Edin^r,” showing the figure to the waist, the right hand holding a volume of the Poems; and the smaller print, without name of painter or engraver, which seems to be an improved adaptation of this portrait, the face become refined and delicate, a fitting face for a poet.

There is, further, that interesting and characteristic chalk drawing, by the poet’s artist son, preserved at Woodhouselee, and inscribed “His first attempt of that kind from the life ... 1729,” done when the youth—who in the words of his father in a letter to the above-mentioned Smibert, had “been pursuing his science since he was a dozen years auld”—was just sixteen, seven years before he started for Italy, to study art in Rome; and there is a print in which the same portrait is treated as a bust on a pedestal, drawn by the younger Ramsay and engraved by Cooper. There is also the well-known portrait, done by the same filial hand, that was engraved by David Allan in the 1788 quarto edition of “The Gentle Shepherd,” a bust likeness, with the strong-featured, firmly modelled face turned in profile to the right, appearing from behind a parapet on which lie the various symbols of the pastoral muse, a mask, a staff, a crook, and a rustic pipe. In interest, however, and in all life-like qualities, the picture at Penicuik is fully equal to the best of those we have named as portraying the shrewd and cheerful countenance of the homely poet.

The portrait which hangs to the left, over the other fireplace of the Penicuik Dining-room is also by Aikman, and its subject is the painter himself. Here again an additional interest is given to the picture, in this case a most pathetic interest, by its inscription. On its back is a note, also in the hand of the second Baronet of Penicuik, the painter’s cousin:—“Mr. Aikman, painted by himself when dying, and left as a legacy to me, J. C., anno 1733.”

This artist was born in 1682, the son of William Aikman of Cairnie, Forfarshire, by his second wife, Margaret, sister of the first Sir John Clerk. In his youth he was possessed, as Douglas of the Baronage says, with even more than his customary solemnity, of a “mighty genius for portrait-painting.” His father, like so many of the Scottish gentry, was a member of the Scottish Bar, and desired that his son should enter upon the studies that would qualify him for the same profession—studies which would reasonably occupy his time, put him in the way of intellectual effort, and give him enough law to enable him to manage his estates profitably, and to sit with dignity and propriety upon the bench of county magistrates. But the parental wishes were in vain; the “mighty genius for portrait-painting” was not to be controlled. Aikman studied art for three years in Edinburgh, under Sir John de Medina, of whose portraiture there is a representative series in Penicuik House; and, when he came into possession of his ancestral acres, which were valuable then, and have become doubly valuable since, he promptly parted with them, sold all that he had for the sake of art; and having rid himself of the burden of ponderable and engrossing material things, started a free man to study painting in Rome. During the five years that he spent abroad he even visited Constantinople and Smyrna, a “far cry” indeed for a Scottish laird of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Returning to his native country in 1712, he was in time patronised by John, Duke of Argyll, and in 1723 he established himself in London, where he moved in the best and most cultured circles, numbering among his friends Sir Robert Walpole, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay, several of whom still live upon his canvases. At the age of forty-nine he was prosperous and happy, in excellent practice as a portrait-painter, busied upon a great group of the Royal Family, commissioned by the Earl of Burlington, and now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. But this work was destined never to be completed. His only son, one of those “bonnie bairns” to whom Allan Ramsay refers in his “Pastoral Farewell to Mr. Aikman,” a youth of great artistic promise—several etched studies after Van Dyck by his hand still exist to prove his talent[1]—sickened and died at the age of eighteen, and the father never recovered the blow. He pined away, died six months afterwards, 1731, and was buried in the same grave in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, Edinburgh. Mallet wrote his epitaph; Ramsay, Thomson, and Somerville have recorded his virtues and the charm of his presence.

[1] A three-quarters length portrait of the younger Aikman, with a grave earnest face, clad in a long-skirted grey coat, and holding a sketch in his hand, is in the possession of the representative of the family at The Ross, Hamilton. It is an excellent example of the elder Aikman’s portraiture.

At Penicuik we are enabled to trace the development of Aikman’s art from first to final phase. His portrait of “Dame Christina Kilpatrick,” second wife of the first Baronet, is marked on the back by the painter’s cousin, “painted 1706 by Mr. Aikman when he was learning to paint, but very like.” The portrait of the second Baronet himself, similarly inscribed, “painted by Mr. Aikman, about the year 1706, when he was beginning to paint,” is identical in style with the work of his master Medina. In the Red Bedroom are hung his school copies after classical subjects by Maratti, done at Rome; and we have seen that the portrait of himself was one of the very last canvases that his brush touched.