Part 5

There is also in the Dining-room an interesting cabinet-sized portrait of Sir George’s younger brother, John Clerk Maxwell of Middleby, that genial, practical, individual Scotsman of whom a most interesting account is given in the life of his distinguished son, Professor James Clerk Maxwell. The picture is the work of his niece, Miss Isabella Clerk, and shows some traces of the amateur, especially in the size and uncouthness of the hands, but a comparison with the engraving from the portrait by Watson Gordon, given in the above-mentioned volume, proves it to be a substantially faithful likeness of the good old man.

IX.

We now come to glance at the portraits at Penicuik House which do not represent members of the Clerk family. Among the earliest of these, hung in the Dining-room, is a three-quarter-length seated portrait of Sir Archibald Primrose, Lord Carrington, that ancestor of the Rosebery family who played an important part in politics during the Restoration period, who fought under Montrose, was captured at Philiphaugh, and barely escaped being executed for treason; who was appointed Lord Clerk Register in 1660, and Lord Justice-General in 1676, presiding, in that office, at the trial in 1678, of Mitchell for the attempted assassination of Archbishop Sharp; and whose later years were spent in steady opposition to the administration of the Duke of Lauderdale. He is styled by Burnet “the subtelist of all Lord Middletoun’s friends, a man of long and great practice in affairs ...; a dextrous man of business, he had always expedients ready at every difficulty.” In the picture he appears in his black, gold-laced robes as Lord Clerk Register, his right hand resting on the arm of his chair, the left raised, and his face seen in three-quarters to the right, with its thin prominent nose drooping at the point, small chin, and lips rising towards the ends and pursed and dimpled a little at the corners. A similar picture, but only bust-sized, stated (Catalogue of Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1863) to be dated 1670, has been long at Dalmeny, and a copy of it was presented by Lord Rosebery to the Faculty of Advocates in 1883, and now hangs in the Parliament House. His Lordship has recently acquired, from the Rothes Collection, another, a three-quarter length, version of the picture; and we are informed that there is also a similar-sized version in the possession of Lord Elphinstone. A portrait of Sir Archibald Primrose appears in Mr. A. H. Millar’s list of the portraits at Kinnaird Castle, but we have not examined this work, and cannot say whether it is a repetition of the present portrait.

Two interesting oil pictures showing Charles, third Duke of Queensberry, and his celebrated Duchess, hang near the portrait of Lord Carrington. The Duke, the correspondent of Swift, painted rather dryly and hardly by Miss Ann Forbes, whose work we have already referred to, is seen to below the waist, clad in peer’s robes, the figure turned towards the right. The face, shown in three-quarters, closely resembles that in the cabinet-sized bust in oils at Ballochmyle, and in the mezzotint engraved in 1773, by Valentine Green after George Willison, with the same high cheek-bones, and prominent high-bridged nose, and the eyes are of a warm brown colour; but the face is older than in either of the other portraits, grave and worn, and covered with wrinkles.

The companion portrait of the Duchess, “Prior’s Kitty, ever young,” the eccentric patroness of Gay, a work by Aikman, recalls in most of its details her portrait by Charles Jervas, in the National Portrait Gallery, London. She is shown in three-quarters length, slim, graceful, and youthful, clad in a coquettish country costume, a dress of greyish brown, of dainty proportions at the waist, low-breasted, and with short sleeves that display the well-turned arms, with a small white apron, and a little close cap set on the head and almost entirely concealing the dark brown hair. The face, with its blue eyes and fresh delicate complexion, is drooping a little, turned in three-quarters to the left; her left hand rests on the edge of a milk-pail, and her right holds what appears to be a broad round-brimmed hat. The background is a landscape, with rocks and trees rising behind the lady to the left, and with a stretch of green meadow to the right—in which, however, no figures appear, as in the National Portrait Gallery picture,—and a space of blue sky faintly tinged with red towards the horizon.

We are informed that these three last-named works were acquired at a sale, about the end of the last century.

Near them hangs a three-quarter-length portrait which forms an interesting memorial of one of the second Baronet’s most congenial friendships. It represents that prominent statesman in the days of Queen Anne and George I., Thomas, eighth Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1707, a man of great refinement and varied culture, President of the Royal Society, of which body Baron Clerk was elected a member in 1728, “an honour”—as he states in his “History”—“I value much.” Clerk first made his acquaintance during his student-days at Leyden, when the Earl was acting as First Plenipotentiary at the Treaty of Ryswick. In his account of that Treaty in the “History of my Own Times,” Bishop Burnet remarks that “there was something in his person and manner that created him an universal respect; for we had no man among us whom all sides loved and honoured as they did him.” In 1726 Clerk tells us that he corresponded with Lord Pembroke upon classical and antiquarian subjects; it was then that the Earl “sent me his Picture which is now among the Ornaments of Mavisbank,” one of Sir John’s houses; and after he visited London in the following year, and examined its chief artistic collections, he records with delight his pilgrimage to his friend’s seat of Wilton, and his appreciation of the princely gathering of statues, coins, medals, etc., which he had brought together there, and especially of his great ancestral treasure, the Van Dyck group of Earl Philip and his family. The eighth Earl, it may be noticed, died in January 1732-3, not 1702-3, as given in Noble’s “Granger,” or 1722-3, as stated by Chaloner Smith.

In the portrait he appears in three-quarters length, clad in armour, with a lace cravat, and a long dark curling wig, the jewel of the Garter being suspended by its blue ribbon under his right arm. The figure is turned to the left, but the sallow, shaven face, with its dark eyes appearing from beneath bushy black eyebrows, looks in three-quarters to the right. His right hand is raised holding a baton, behind which is placed a helmet, the left rests on a gold-hilted sword; and there is a rocky background, disclosing a space of sky and sea with a ship and boats.

The picture is evidently a version of the portrait of the Earl painted by William Wissing, mezzotinted by John Smith in a plate to which the date of 1709 has been assigned, though the painting must have been executed much earlier, as Wissing died in 1687. The naval background is stated to be from the brush of “Vandevelde,” having evidently been introduced by that artist, after the death of the original painter of the work, at the time when the Earl was appointed Lord High Admiral of Great Britain and Ireland, a post which he held in 1701, and again in 1708. The younger William Vandevelde must be the artist indicated, as the elder painter of the same name died in 1693.

Among the other portraits in the Dining-room may be mentioned a fine three-quarters length of the Earl of Denbigh, by Lely; a vigorous bust-portrait of the Duke of Norfolk, by Kneller,—the eighth Duke, as is proved by the robe and collar of the Garter which appear in the picture; and a copy from the well-known Janssen portrait of Drummond of Hawthornden, in the possession of the Earl of Home: while the portraits of Prince Charles Edward and of his wife the Princess Stolberg, known as the Countess of Albany, though sufficiently indifferent works of art, possess a certain interest as having been presented to Rosemary Clerk by Miss Law of Princes Street, Edinburgh, after she had heard the tale of the White Cockade, as recorded by Lady Clerk herself, in the postscript to her letter to the Editor of “Blackwood’s Magazine,” which we have already quoted.

X.

In the Corridor hangs an important and striking portrait of Lord Godolphin, probably from the hand of William Aikman, a work doubtless acquired by the Baron as representing an eminent English statesman with whom he had been brought into contact about the time of the Union. The figure is seen to below the waist, turned in three-quarters to the right; and the face is more individual and characteristic, if less dignified and well conditioned, than that which appears in Houbraken’s line-engraving, or in Smith’s mezzotint after Kneller. The nose is small and clear-cut, the mouth has a thin upper lip drawn inwards a little, the eyebrows are straight, slight, and of a dark brown colour, and there are strong lines on the cheeks curving downwards from the nostrils. A long grey curling wig is worn, and a claret-coloured coat, with a plain cravat falling in front; and a ruddy cloak is wrapped round the waist, and passed over the left arm. His right hand rests against his side, and his left is laid gracefully over a parapet.

In the same Corridor, hung over a door in an exceedingly bad light, is a bust-portrait titled on the back, in an old hand, “Calderwood the Historian by Jamesone.” The costume is a small black cap and a black doublet with a round ruff. The face, seen in three-quarters to the right, against a dark background, is full of intelligence; the features small, the eyes grey, the moustache and beard of a moderate length, yellowish-brown in colour. The flesh-tints are ruddy, inclining, indeed, to an unduly hot tone, but the picture has evidently been much repainted. It is undoubtedly a production of the period indicated in the inscription, and resembles works that have been attributed to Jamesone; but we are not acquainted with any duly authenticated portrait of the historian of the Kirk of Scotland with which it might be compared.

The excellent bust-portrait in the Drawing-room, attributed to Holbein, is certainly incorrectly titled as representing Sir Thomas More. This vigorous, ruddy, bearded countenance is quite unlike the worn, shaven, student’s face which appears in the Chancellor’s authentic portraits by Holbein,—in his two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and in the pen sketch, for the lost oil picture of the Family of Sir Thomas More, which he himself sent to his friend Erasmus, by the hand of the painter, when Holbein returned to the Continent in 1529, a sketch still preserved in the Museum of Basle.

Again, the curious, but much injured, panel picture in the smaller Drawing-room, of a lady wearing a white pipe-frilled cap, with a bowed veil over it, titled “Mary of Guise,” shows no resemblance to such authentic portraits of the Queen as that at Hardwick, in which she appears with her husband King James V.; and the impaled lozenge on the background bears no trace of the arms of either Lorraine or Scotland.

XI.

We have now to examine the mural decorations of Penicuik House, which include the celebrated Ossian ceiling of the room designed for a picture-gallery, and now used as the Drawing-room. But first, two smaller cupolas surmounting the staircases which give access to the upper floor of the mansion are deserving of notice. One is decorated in upright compartments, showing Jupiter in his car drawn by snakes, wielding his thunderbolts, with a moonlit landscape beneath, and on the other side a figure of Apollo, with yellow rays circling his head, driving his team of fiery white steeds over a landscape which is beginning to blush beneath the rosy light of dawn. Between these are ranged a series of allegorical figures of the Months, each marked with a sign of the Zodiac, and surrounded by scrolls, grotesque birds, and beasts, and vases. The whole is relieved against a light green background, and the compartments are divided by broad bands of ochre.

This curious example of the decorative art of the end of the last century is the work of John Bonnar, then a decorative painter in Edinburgh; and when, a hundred years after its execution, his grandson and great-grandson, who were at the time pursuing the same business in the same city, cleaned and restored the work, along with the Runciman ceilings, their ancestor’s signature was disclosed upon a corner of its surface.

The other cupola is decorated by the hand of Alexander Runciman, with scenes from the life of St. Margaret of Scotland, whose history furnished only the other year a subject for the brush of another of the most imaginative of our Scottish painters, Sir Noel Paton. Curiously enough we can find no single reference to this important St. Margaret series in any of the biographies of Runciman, or in the anonymous pamphlet, published in 1773, which so elaborately describes the ceiling of the Ossian Hall. Both series are executed in oil colours upon the plaster. Here the decorations consist of four oval compartments, each occupied with a scene from the life of the Queen.

The first shows “The Landing of St. Margaret.” Its background is a rich blue sky, and a distance of stormy sea. In the centre is King Malcolm, clad in a broad Scottish bonnet with a little white plume, red knee-breeches, white hose and white shoes with ample rosettes, and with a red cloak flapping around him in voluminous folds. With one hand he leads the lady, robed in a yellow mantle and a white dress, her long yellow hair tossed by the wind, and with the other points energetically towards the church before them, where white-robed monks, with clasped hands, are awaiting their arrival.

The second subject is “The Royal Wedding.” The pair are being united by a venerable and aged ecclesiastic with a grey beard, whose bronzed, weather-beaten countenance tells splendidly against his elaborate white vestments. To his right is the King, crowned and robed in red, placing the ring on the hand of the Queen, who stands draped in gold-brocaded white and green. An altar appears to our right, and beside it a mail-clad knight, with head bowed in worship. The figures of women are introduced to our left, and white flowers and a steaming censer lie on the ruddy marble pavement beneath.

The third subject shows the manner of the saint’s queenship. She is known to her people in the breaking of bread; clad in the same robes that she wore at the marriage festival, she is feeding the poor, and her husband, in his red mantle and wearing his royal crown, follows in attendance upon her, bearing a heaped platter.

The fourth subject shows the final development of Queen Margaret’s saintship. Having on earth filled herself with the life of heaven, she is now seen, white-clad, and with a red robe falling from her shoulders like the mortal life that she is done with, ascending inevitably into skies, where the clouds dispart to disclose the benignant figure of the Almighty Father and the white shape of the Holy Dove. Beneath is outspread a familiar landscape which she is leaving for ever—the Fifeshire hills appear on the right on the farther side of the Firth, and beneath is the town of Edinburgh, with the Palace, and the Castle rock crested with her chapel, and to the left the Pentlands which overlook Penicuik, with a kindly ray streaming from above, and irradiating their summit.

In spite of all deductions that may be made on account of occasional crudities and defects, and of the glaring anachronisms of costume that are apt to offend our more archæologically cultured eyes, the series is a remarkable one, with great richness and variety of colouring, and with a dramatic power which goes directly to the heart of the legendary tale, and portrays its incidents in a vivid and impressive manner. Dealing for the most part with definite history, the series is more complete in its realisation than was possible in some of the visionary subjects from Ossian which the painter afterwards essayed in the Hall of Penicuik House.

The three last-named subjects are signed: the second bears the date of “Sept. 7, 1772,” the third “Octr. 14, 1772,” and the fourth “Octr. 6, 1772.” The inscriptions are interesting as showing that the subjects were executed immediately after the painter’s return from Italy, and as illustrating the impetuous speed with which he must have worked.

XII.

Runciman next turned to the larger undertaking of which the St. Margaret Cupola was but the prologue, and upon which he worked with equal energy, for the ceiling of the Ossian Hall of Penicuik House can hardly have been commenced before the end of 1772, and it was certainly completed during the following year.

It was just ten years previously that “Fingal” (1762) and “Temora” (1763) first appeared, and the controversy regarding their authenticity still raged fiercely. Dr. Johnson and David Hume denied their claim to be regarded as genuine Celtic poems, but they were defended by Lord Kames, Dr. Gregory, and by Dr. Blair, who pointed out their adaptability to the purposes of the painter, as presenting fitting subjects for the exercise of his brush. It was probably upon this suggestion that the Ossian ceiling was commissioned by Sir James Clerk, and commenced by Alexander Runciman.

The centre of the ceiling is occupied by a large elliptical compartment, depicting Ossian old and blind, singing, and accompanying his songs on the harp. In front is seated the white-draped shape of Malvina, and around are grouped a varied crowd of listeners. The distance is a rocky coast, with ruined castles, and a fine expanse of sea, across which white sails are speeding; and above, the clouds take strange, fantastic, half-defined shapes as of spiritual presences, the figures of the vanished heroes of whom the poet sings,—“The awful faces of other times look from the clouds of Crona.” This compartment is surrounded by an ornamental border of gold, which in its turn is enclosed in a wreath of vine-leaves and fruit; and the four corners are occupied by figures symbolical of the four great rivers of Scotland, the Tay, the Spey, the Clyde, and the Tweed,—figures manifestly reminiscent of the work of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel.

Beneath, round the ample cove or _volto_ of the room, is ranged a series of smaller subjects from Ossian—“The Valour of Oscar,” “The Death of Oscar,” “The Death of Agandecca,” “The Hunting of Catholda,” one of the finest of the subjects, very graceful in the figure of the nymph drawing a bow; “The Finding of Corban Cargloss,” an attractive moonlit scene; “Golchossa mourning over Lamderg,” “Oina Morval serenading Ossian,” a vigorous subject of “Cormac attacking the Spirit of the Waters,” “The Death of Cormac,” “Scandinavian Wizards at their Incantations,” in which the grotesque is in excess of the terrible, and “Fingal engaging the Spirit of Lodi.”

If we were to criticise the ceiling purely as an example of decorative art, we might well object that the elaboration and wealth of detail in the work is hardly suitable to its position, that designs so placed should have been simpler and more salient in their component parts, and executed in a lighter and more airy scheme of colouring, so as to carry the eye freely upwards. But as an example of poetic art, in its earnestness of aim and vigour of conception, it is deserving of all praise, as one of the very few instances that Scotland has to show of a serious effort to produce a monumental work, a pictorial epic,—an effort honourable alike to the painter and his patron. The art of Runciman, as here displayed, may be regarded as the precursor of the art of David Scott, another of Scotland’s most imaginative painters, who was also powerfully attracted by the Ossianic legends, choosing “Fingal and the Spirit of Lodi” for the subject of one of his earliest works, and in another depicting Ossian himself, not surrounded by sympathetic listeners as in this central compartment by Runciman, but seated alone by the sea-shore, amid the last dying radiance of a sunset, with his harp lying idle by his side.

It is recorded that about 1720 John Alexander, the grandson of George Jamesone of Aberdeen, executed a “Rape of Proserpina” on a staircase in Gordon Castle. After the completion of his work at Penicuik Runciman decorated a church in the Cowgate of Edinburgh (now St. Patrick’s Catholic Chapel) with sacred subjects, of which a portion still remain; and—presumably in humble imitation of the Ossian Hall—Alexander Carse painted an oval subject on the ceiling of the “Pennecuik Parlor” of New Hall, Mid-Lothian, depicting “The Troops of Tweedale in the Forest of Selkirkshire, convened by Royal authority in May 1685, as described in Dr. Pennecuik’s Poems.” This brief list may be said to include almost all the mural art—excepting such as was simply decorative—executed in Scotland during modern times.

The Ossian ceiling formed the subject of a learned and elaborate descriptive pamphlet, published anonymously, in 1773, by A. Kinnaird and W. Creech, Edinburgh; and the painter would appear to have intended to preserve a record of his work—in the manner afterwards adopted by Barry, in the case of the illustrations of “Human Progress,” with which he decorated the walls of the Hall of the Society of Arts in London, for etchings, executed by Runciman’s own hand in a free and somewhat loose style, of the first two subjects of the St. Margaret Cupola, and of “Cormac attacking a Spirit of the Waters,” and “The Finding of Corban Cargloss,” from the Ossian ceiling, are frequently to be met with.

We have not been able to discover in Penicuik House Alexander Runciman’s easel Picture of “Nausicaa at Play with her Maidens,” executed during his residence at Rome, and shown in London, in the Free Society of Artists’ Exhibition of 1767, a work which Allan Cunningham informs us was “painted for Pennycuik”: and, on account of the delicacy and transparency of its colouring, we should be inclined to attribute to John Runciman, who died at Naples at the early age of twenty-four, that sketch of “David with the Head of Goliath,” which has been commonly assigned to the elder of the two brothers. Certainly by John Runciman is the excellent picture of “Belshazzar’s Feast,” hung in the Billiard-room, a work so delicate in its handling, so mellow in the golden and ruddy tones of its colouring, as to support the opinion held by some discerning critics, that this artist’s brief life afforded definite promise of his becoming a far subtler and more refined painter than the better-known member of his family ever was.

XIII.