The next portrait by Raeburn represents John Clerk of Eldin, the
seventh son of Baron Clerk, second Baronet of Penicuik, and author of
the celebrated “Enquiry into Naval Tactics.” He was educated at the
Grammar School of Dalkeith and the University of Edinburgh, and in
that city he engaged in business as a merchant till about 1772, when
he purchased the property of Eldin, in the parish of Lasswade, and
obtained a post in connection with the Exchequer, the secretaryship to
the Commissioners on the Annexed Estates in Scotland. He was a man of a
vigorous and active mind, and seems to have possessed equal aptitudes
for art and science. Some of his sketches are dated as early as 1758,
but it was in 1770 that he began to etch upon copper, and in the next
twelve years he produced a series of over a hundred plates. These are
founded upon a careful study of the old Dutch masters of the art. In
their topographical aspect they are of great interest as portraying
many ancient buildings which have since been removed or altered; and as
examples of etching, in spite of certain amateurish defects, they form
a curious connecting-link between the period of Rembrandt and the early
days of our own century, when the process was taken up and carried to
such fine artistic issues by two other Scotsmen, Geddes and Wilkie. A
large collection of Mr. Clerk’s etchings and drawings is preserved in
the Library at Penicuik. A series of the former, tinted by Robert Adam,
the celebrated architect, whose sister, Susannah, Mr. Clerk had married
in 1753, was presented to George III. in 1786, at the suggestion of
the Earl of Buchan. Twenty-eight of them were issued to members of the
Bannatyne Club in 1825, and other of the coppers having been recovered,
a series of fifty-five etchings and reproductions of sketches were
issued to the same Club in 1855 with an admirable memoir by David Laing.
In his scientific pursuits Clerk was the intimate associate of Dr.
James Hutton, whose geological papers his pencil was ever ready to
illustrate, and it is believed that the Professor’s “Theory of the
Earth” owed something to his friend’s suggestions. The first part of
Clerk’s celebrated “Enquiry into Naval Tactics” was published in 1782,
and the second, third, and fourth parts were added in 1797. Though a
work of great interest and value, the assertion that it was the means
of Rodney’s adopting that mode of breaking the enemy’s line which led
to the celebrated victory off Dominique on 12th April 1782, seems to be
one incapable of absolute proof. We have a pleasant characterisation
of him, _à propos_ of his death, May 1812, in Lord Cockburn’s
“Memorials”:—
“An interesting and delightful old man; full of the peculiarities that
distinguished the whole family—talent, caprice, obstinacy, worth,
kindliness, and oddity, ... he was looked up to with deference by
all the philosophers of his day, who were in the habit of constantly
receiving hints and views from him, which they deemed of great value.
He was a striking-looking old gentleman, with his grizzly hair,
vigorous features, and Scotch speech. It would be difficult to say
whether jokes or disputation pleased him most.”
“A striking-looking old gentleman” he certainly shows in Raeburn’s
portrait—which, technically, is an excellent example of the ‘square
touch’ and vigorous modelling of that painter—with the strong face,
clear light yellowish eyes, broad forehead, and white hair, rising
from the high-collared old-fashioned coat. The picture has been
lithographed by A. Hahnisch in the 1855 Bannatyne Club issue of the
etchings, and the personality of its subject may be gathered from
two other portraits;—a crayon likeness by Skirving, showing less of
dignity and more of shrewdness, which passed by bequest to the Blair
Adam family, and was admirably mezzotinted by S. W. Reynolds in 1800;
and a three-quarters length portrait in oils by James Saxon, now in
the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where he is represented seated
at a table holding a plan which depicts his naval manœuvre of breaking
the line. The latter belonged to the father of W. H. Carpenter of the
British Museum, who caused the ships in the distance to be painted in
by William Anderson.
The remaining example of Raeburn at Penicuik House is a portrait of
Mr. Clerk’s eldest son, John Clerk, Lord Eldin. Lord Cockburn tells a
pretty story of the relation between the two. “‘I remember,’ the father
used to say, ‘the time when people seeing John limping on the street,
used to ask what lame lad that was; and the answer would be, That’s the
son of Clerk of Eldin. But now, when I myself am passing, I hear them
saying, What auld grey-headed man is that? And the answer is, That’s
the father of John Clerk.’ He was much prouder of the last mark than
the first.”
From his earliest years the future judge possessed all that love for
art which has been constant in the family of Clerk; his own drawings
possess considerable vigour and character. He was an enthusiastic
collector, and the crowd that was gathered in his house in Picardy
Place, Edinburgh, at the sale of his collection after his death in 1832
was so excessive that the floor gave way, causing the death of one
person, and the serious injury of several others. Vigorous and lifelike
sketches of his vehemence and wit and curiously eccentric and powerful
personality will be found in the pages of Lord Cockburn and in “Peter’s
Letters to his Kinsfolk.” From their student days Raeburn and he were
chosen friends, and it must have been about the date of the present
portrait that the whimsical episode occurred which Allan Cunningham
records in his account of the painter, an account that has left little
to be gleaned by later biographers. “Raeburn received an invitation to
dine with Clerk, and hastening to his lodgings, he found the landlady
spreading a cloth on the table, and setting down two dishes, one
containing three herrings and the other three potatoes. ‘And is this
all?’ said John. ‘All,’ said the landlady. ‘All! Did I not tell ye,
woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that a gentleman was to dine with me, and that
ye were to get six herrings and six potatoes?’ The tables of both were
better furnished before the lapse of many years; and they loved, it is
said, when the wine was flowing, to recall those early days, when hope
was high and the spirit unrebuked by intercourse with the world.”
The present portrait shows Clerk in the character of a budding
barrister. The figure is life-sized, seated, seen in three-quarters to
the left, the wigged head turned nearly in pure profile to the left.
The figure, clad in black coat, black satin vest, and knee-breeches
of the same, and with ruffs at breast and wrists, lies back easily in
the chair, the right hand extending over its arm, and holding a law
paper, the left placed, with outspread fingers, on the table in front,
which is covered with a richly tinted cloth, on which lie “Stair’s
Institutes,” the “Regiam Magista,” and other volumes in “law-calf,”
while on the other side, as though to hint at the advocate’s artistic
tastes, appears a cast of a classical head, just as in the later
Raeburn portrait a little bronze version of the Crouching Venus nestles
among the bundles of briefs. The face, wearing an expression of great
earnestness and intentness, is as yet beardless, unformed, and rather
heavy-looking; different indeed from the emphatic furrowed countenance
that appears in the later portraits which show him when age had
developed his full individuality. The eyes are pale bluish grey, and
the eyebrows very light in colour.
There are no other early portraits of Lord Eldin, by which we can
judge of his appearance at the time that this one was executed. The
admirable three-quarter seated portrait by Raeburn, where he appears
holding his spectacles in his right hand, and with the other supporting
a folio which rests on a table, shows him in later life. It passed by
bequest to the house of Riccarton, and has been powerfully mezzotinted
by Charles Turner, the plate appearing, after it had been reduced in
size, in the Bannatyne volume of Mr. Clerk’s Etchings, 1855. A somewhat
similarly arranged portrait, of cabinet size, painted by Andrew Geddes,
another of Lord Eldin’s artistic friends, was in the possession of
the late Mr. James Gibson Craig; and there is the lithograph by B. W.
Crombie, a bust-portrait, in ordinary dress, executed in June 1837,
showing in the shrewd profile face much of that “thoroughbred shaggy
terrier” aspect upon which Lord Cockburn remarks in his “Life of
Jeffrey”; and also the bust by Joseph, engraved in line by Robert Bell,
of which a cast is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
In addition to these there are several caricatures which doubtless
preserve much that was characteristic of the man. There is the etching
by Kay, in the plate of “Twelve Advocates who Plead with Wigs on,”
showing an eager countenance, with opened mouth and protruding under
lip; and the four very vivid and lifelike sketches by Robert Scott
Moncrieff, reproduced in “The Scottish Bar Fifty Years Ago.” The first
of these latter shows him in suppressed—but most belligerent—mood
seated as an advocate listening to the pleadings of the council on the
opposite side, with mouth compressed, and lips drawn down at the ends,
his left hand grasping his spectacle-case, the other cast over the arm
of his chair and grasping his papers. Another shows him pacing the
floor of the Parliament House, briefs in hand, his gown trailing behind
him, his wig perched knowingly in front, his spectacles pushed far up
his forehead,—much as Carlyle, in his “Reminiscences,” records that he
saw him, when he visited the Parliament House in 1809, on his arrival
in Edinburgh to begin his student-life. “The only figure I distinctly
recollect, and got printed on my brain that night, was John Clerk,
then veritably hitching about, whose grim, strong countenance, with
its black far-projecting brows and look of great sagacity, fixed him
in my memory.” The third of Mr. Moncrieff’s drawings shows him in the
full fury of his vehement eloquence as a pleader, his gown flying about
him in mighty folds, his right fist clenched and raised in excited
action. A fourth sketch, a rather terrible one, depicts him in latest
age, seated on the bench, his hands laid in front and muffled in his
judge’s gown, his great mouth with its prominent under lip firmly set,
and his small eyes keenly observant through his spectacles. One other
caricature remains to be noticed, the little etching marked “X. Y. Z.,”
which is often to be found bound up along with copies of his sale
catalogue, showing him in full-length ascending a flight of stairs,
snuffbox in hand.
In the Business-room there hangs a small portrait of Lord Eldin’s
younger brother, William Clerk, advocate—“only less witty and odd than
his great Swiftian brother,” as Dr. John Brown has truly remarked—who
figures so prominently in the biography and correspondence of Sir
Walter Scott. At college they were contemporaries and bosom friends,
they passed their Civil Law and their Scots Law examinations on the
same day, and together assumed the advocate’s gown. It was in his
company that the young Scott, after a fishing expedition to Howgate,
visited Penicuik House, when he “was overwhelmed with kindness by the
late Sir John Clerk and his lady”—the pair who figure in the great
Raeburn group, and when “the pleasure of looking at fine pictures,
the beauty of the place, and the flattering hospitality of the owners
drowned the recollection of home for a day or two.” The friendship
thus begun was continued through life; and in his latest years Scott
dwells, in his Diary, with especial gusto upon the snug little dinners
in Rose Court, Edinburgh, when a few chosen spirits gathered round
Clerk’s bachelor board.
The present picture, a cabinet-sized bust, is somewhat amateurish in
its execution, but still full of character and individuality; the
features of the shrewd, wrinkled face, its definitely curved nose,
sharply-cut mouth, thin compressed lips, and dark, brilliantly blue
eyes beneath the bushy white eyebrows, combine into what is doubtless
a faithful rendering of that friend of whom Scott wrote in his Diary,
in 1825, “I have known him intimately since our college days; and
to my thinking I never met a man of greater powers or more complete
information on all desirable subjects.” It is the work of Mrs. Hugh
Blackburn, a lady so well known for her excellent renderings of birds
and animals; but another oil-portrait of William Clerk, a cabinet-sized
bust, turned to the right and dated 1843, the work of Miss Isabella
Clerk, sister of the seventh Baronet, is also preserved at Penicuik.
Among the portraits of more recent members of the Clerk family are
various works representing their eminent politician and statistical
authority, the Right Hon. Sir George Clerk, D.C.L., the sixth Baronet,
who repeatedly represented the county of Mid-Lothian in Parliament;
who was a Lord of the Admiralty under the Liverpool Administration;
succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Master of the Mint in 1845, and in the
same year was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and
a member of the Privy Council. Several miniatures representing him
are preserved in the Drawing-room, and there are also two life-sized
three-quarter-length portraits in oil. That hung in the smaller
Drawing-room is an excellent example by William Dyce, R.A., a distant
connection of the family’s, and was painted in 1830. It is executed
with great delicacy, quietude, and reticence, and does full justice
to the Baronet’s refined and handsome face, then in its prime. This
picture has been excellently mezzotinted by Thomas Lupton. That in the
Dining-room, painted by the vigorous hand of Sir John Watson Gordon,
portrays Sir George in later life, seated in an easy chair, and holding
one of the statistical blue-books which his soul loved. Of his wife,
Maria, second daughter of Ewan Law of Horsted Place, Sussex, there is
also an oil portrait in the Dining-room, showing a refined face, with
a delicate complexion, bearing the trace of suffering in the firmly
compressed yet pathetic mouth, and the straight dark eyebrows, which
are knit a little and contracted over the pale grey wistful eyes. The
picture has a rather slight and unfinished appearance, and is somewhat
chalky in its whites. Its painter, the late J. R. Swinton, worked
comparatively little in oils, and examples of his better-known crayon
drawings may be studied in the portraits of the Dowager Lady Clerk and
her sister-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Elphinstone, which hang in the smaller
Drawing-room.
It should also be noticed that many characteristic likenesses of the
sixth Baronet are included in an interesting volume of sketches,
done in old days by his niece Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and now preserved
at Penicuik, a series portraying familiar scenes there, and at Sir
George’s London residence in Park Street, Westminster,—card-parties
and musical evenings in which Piatti and other eminent performers took
part, days spent on the ice, or picnicking among the Pentlands, rides
in the Park or over lonely stretches of moorland—drawings highly
humorous, plentifully touched with caricature, yet including not a
little substantial truth of portraiture.
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.