VIII.
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.