In the Charter-room are preserved, in addition to documents, many
curious miscellaneous relics of an artistic and personal sort. The
MSS. include the account-books of the family, extending well into the
seventeenth century, kept with the minutest accuracy, and containing
many entries of great interest to the student of the social manners
of the past. There are also voluminous devotional compositions,
commonplace-books, etc., by the first Baronet; and the MS. “History
of my Life,” and the two volumes of the “Journal of my Travells for 5
years Through Holland, Germaine, Italy, France, and Flanders,” by the
second Baronet, Baron Clerk, along with the MSS. of several of his
published and unpublished historical and antiquarian pamphlets.
A somewhat grim development of portraiture is seen in a couple of
waxen death-masks—one of them shows the face of Lady Margaret Stuart,
the Baron’s much-loved first wife—each casketed in its little wooden
case or shrine. The habit of preserving such masks seems to have been
common in Scotland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—we
remember that the Abertarff sale included several representing various
members of the Lovat family: a survival, one may call it, of the
old Roman custom of preserving the waxen images of ancestors, which
prevailed, too, in France, in the days when Clouet was summoned to
Rambouillet, to cast the waxen effigy of the dead Francis I.
In the Charter-room are various interesting old miniatures and
drawings, among the latter one of a cupid and a griffin, attributed to
Raphael; one by Guido; a couple of designs by Inigo Jones—one marked
“given me by the Earl of Burlington in 1727” (the year of the Baron’s
visit to London), “I very much value this and the other drawing by
Inigo. John Clerk, 1744;” and the original sketch for the picture of
St. Cecilia, still preserved at Penicuik, by Francesco Imperiali, an
artist of repute in his day, who died at Rome in 1741, under whom the
Baron studied art when in Italy, and who was afterwards one of the
instructors of Allan Ramsay, the portrait-painter.
Another relic of the Baron’s days in Italy is the small marble bust of
Cicero—preserved in the Charter-room—which, as he tells us in his
“History,” was bequeathed to him by “Montignia Chapigni, a learned
antiquarian and philosopher.” Yet another is a little wooden casket,
fragrant still with a sweet old-world perfume, as we open the drawers
filled with neatly stoppered bottles. This is the “Box of Chymical
Medicines, still at Penicuik,” which was presented to the Baron on his
leaving Florence, along with “all the variety of wines and sweet meats
which his country produced,” by the Grand Duke Cosimo III., who had
previously honoured the young Scotsman by bestowing on him “a patent
under the privy seal signed by himself and his Secretary of State, the
Marquise de Ricardi, appointing me a Gentleman of his Bedchamber, which
patent lies now in the Charter-room.”
On one of the shelves is placed another curious family relic, a basket
filled with artist’s materials, marked “Oil colours brought from Rome
by Uncle Sandy,” a son of the first Baronet, that Alexander Clerk who
figures in the Baronage as “bred a painter,” and whose name appears,
in 1729, on the original indenture of the Edinburgh School of St.
Luke, as a member of that first academy founded in Scotland for the
study of art, in which, six years later, Strange the engraver received
instruction. In this old document, so significant in the history of
painting in our country, and now fittingly in the possession of the
Royal Scottish Academy, Richard Cooper, Strange’s master, appears
as Secretary. Among the other signatures are those of James Clerk,
Alexander’s elder brother, afterwards third Baronet of Penicuik; his
nephew Hugh Clerk, Junr., who “served with the allied army in Germany,
and died soon after the battle of Minden”; the two Ramsays; “Ja. Norie”
and “Jas. Norie, Junior”; John Patoun, whose portrait of Thomson the
poet is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London; John Alexander,
the portrait-painter, who engraved the family group of his grandfather,
George Jamesone of Aberdeen; and William Denune, known by his portraits
of Thomas and Mrs. Ruddiman, of Professor Robert Simson of Glasgow
(1746), and of the Rev. William Harper, Episcopal clergyman in Leith
(1745).
There is one other of the contents of the Charter-room to which we must
refer, a volume containing a complete set of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum”
prints, evidently an original subscriber’s copy; most of the plates are
in excellent impressions, and some are proofs.
For permission to examine these, and all the other Art Treasures at
Penicuik House—to many of which we have been unable even to refer—we
have to express our grateful thanks to Sir George Clerk, the owner of
the mansion, and to the Dowager Lady Clerk, its present occupant.