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.
This portrait of Aikman showing the figure nearly to the waist within
a painted oval, is practically identical with that in the National
Gallery of Scotland, formerly in the possession of Mrs. Forbes, the
artist’s eldest daughter, and engraved in “The Bee,” vol. xviii. 1793.
The only difference is that here the draperies consist of a coat and
vest of a cool yellowish-brown velvet, passing into definite yellow in
the high lights, while in the National Gallery version a golden-brown
gown and a flowered vest of the same colour is substituted. The
well-balanced, handsome, oval face, with its ripe mouth, rippling in
its lines and dimpled at the corners, fine dark-blue eyes, and rounded,
slightly cleft chin, is turned in three-quarters towards the right, and
surmounted by a voluminous powdered wig. Another portrait of Aikman
by himself is preserved at Florence in the Painters’ Gallery of the
Uffizi. Here the pose of the figure is similar to that in the two other
pictures; but the coat is of crimson, the lower part of the body is
wrapped in a dark mantle, and no wig is worn, its place being taken by
a white handkerchief which is wound round the head. Among the portraits
of Aikman at The Ross is another from his own hand, showing him as he
appeared on his travels, bearded, and wearing a turban and a ruddy
Eastern gown.
We may now turn to the family portraits with which the walls of the
Dining-room are covered. The earliest of them is a portrait of John
Clerk, father of the first Baronet, and the founder of the family,
known for centuries in the familiar traditions of the Penicuik nursery
under the playful title of “Musso,” from his prolonged residence in
France. He was born in 1610, the son of a merchant-burgess of Montrose,
and baptized at Fettercairn by the Bishop of Caithness, on the 22d
December of that year. Bred a merchant, he settled in Paris in 1634,
where he acquired “a fortune of at least £10,000,” as his grandson
informs us. In 1647 he returned to Scotland, married, acquired the
lands of Penicuik and of Wrightshouses, near Edinburgh, and died in
1674, at the age of sixty-three.
His portrait, which hangs in the Dining-room, is not a contemporary
work, but a copy executed by Aikman—to range with the other family
pictures—from a miniature, done in Paris by an unknown painter, and
still preserved in the Charter-room. This original, inscribed on its
gold case “John Clerk of Pennicuik, 1644,” is a bust portrait painted
in oils on a small oval slab of bloodstone, the polished green surface
of which, with its red markings, serves for background. The face shows
a delicate, prominently aquiline nose, a forehead broad rather than
high, sharply pencilled black eyebrows above the dark blue eyes, a
full, brightly red lower lip, a small moustache of darkest brown,
turned up at the ends, and a tiny tuft on the chin. The bust is clad in
that pseudo-Roman costume so much affected in the portraiture of the
period, similar to that in which Charles II. appears in the equestrian
statue in the Parliament Square, Edinburgh, and very closely resembling
the dress worn by George Lauder, author of “The Scottish Souldier,” in
the scarce portrait engraved by J. Hermanni after J. Reyners. The tunic
is of a bright blue colour, cut square at the neck, and edged with
gold lace, decorated on the breast and shoulders with gold ornaments
worked into the shape of satyr and lion heads, and a bright red mantle
falls in graceful folds on either side. The little picture is of
excellent workmanship and is delicately finished, much of its precision
of detail having been lost in Aikman’s not very refined life-sized copy.
Above the fireplace in the Drawing-room is another portrait of this
same John Clerk, a large, dark, gallery full-length, stated to have
been executed, like the miniature, in Paris. Here the founder of the
family is depicted standing, in a black dress, his right hand resting
on the stone ball which surmounts and decorates the parapet of garden
walk, his left hand sustaining his sword. The countenance is manifestly
the same as that in the miniature. This picture is stated by family
tradition to have been painted by “De Wit,” a portrait-painter we have
not as yet been able to identify. It bears no resemblance in style to
the portraits executed by James de Witt at Holyrood in 1684-5, and at
Glamis Castle in 1686-8; and it could hardly have been the same artist
who was working at Paris before the year 1647. Nor, of course, is it by
Jacob de Wit, the painter of a subject in the Library to be afterwards
described, who was not born till 1695.
The portrait of the wife of John Clerk, Mary, daughter of Sir William
Gray of Pittendrum, is also a copy, and of this a delicate and spirited
contemporary miniature is preserved at Penicuik. It was executed about
the end of the last century by Miss Ann Forbes, a grand-daughter
of William Aikman’s, and consequently a connection of the Clerks,
whose work, chiefly in crayons, though this is an oil picture, is
to be found in many Scottish houses, as, for instance, at The Ross,
Hamilton, the seat of the present head of Aikman’s family. A few other
examples of her brush are preserved in the present collection; and
her own portrait, painted by David Allan, a carefully handled cabinet
picture, very clear and silvery in tone, showing her standing in
three-quarters length, holding a portcrayon and a portfolio, is in the
Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The portrait of Mrs. Mary Clerk,
like that of her husband, shows the figure to the waist; the face is in
three-quarters to the right. She has light hazel eyes, neutral brown
eyebrows and hair, the latter elaborately curled, fastened with bows
of black ribbon, and decorated in front with a small plume of white
ostrich feathers, and she wears pearl ear-rings and a double string of
large pearls round the neck. The costume is a black flowered dress,
worn low at the breast, with a tall white lace collar standing up
behind the neck.