Notes on the Art Treasures at Penicuik House Midlothian

by John Miller Gray

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.