Notes on the Art Treasures at Penicuik House Midlothian

by John Miller Gray

XI.

We have now to examine the mural decorations of Penicuik House, which include the celebrated Ossian ceiling of the room designed for a picture-gallery, and now used as the Drawing-room. But first, two smaller cupolas surmounting the staircases which give access to the upper floor of the mansion are deserving of notice. One is decorated in upright compartments, showing Jupiter in his car drawn by snakes, wielding his thunderbolts, with a moonlit landscape beneath, and on the other side a figure of Apollo, with yellow rays circling his head, driving his team of fiery white steeds over a landscape which is beginning to blush beneath the rosy light of dawn. Between these are ranged a series of allegorical figures of the Months, each marked with a sign of the Zodiac, and surrounded by scrolls, grotesque birds, and beasts, and vases. The whole is relieved against a light green background, and the compartments are divided by broad bands of ochre.

This curious example of the decorative art of the end of the last century is the work of John Bonnar, then a decorative painter in Edinburgh; and when, a hundred years after its execution, his grandson and great-grandson, who were at the time pursuing the same business in the same city, cleaned and restored the work, along with the Runciman ceilings, their ancestor’s signature was disclosed upon a corner of its surface.

The other cupola is decorated by the hand of Alexander Runciman, with scenes from the life of St. Margaret of Scotland, whose history furnished only the other year a subject for the brush of another of the most imaginative of our Scottish painters, Sir Noel Paton. Curiously enough we can find no single reference to this important St. Margaret series in any of the biographies of Runciman, or in the anonymous pamphlet, published in 1773, which so elaborately describes the ceiling of the Ossian Hall. Both series are executed in oil colours upon the plaster. Here the decorations consist of four oval compartments, each occupied with a scene from the life of the Queen.

The first shows “The Landing of St. Margaret.” Its background is a rich blue sky, and a distance of stormy sea. In the centre is King Malcolm, clad in a broad Scottish bonnet with a little white plume, red knee-breeches, white hose and white shoes with ample rosettes, and with a red cloak flapping around him in voluminous folds. With one hand he leads the lady, robed in a yellow mantle and a white dress, her long yellow hair tossed by the wind, and with the other points energetically towards the church before them, where white-robed monks, with clasped hands, are awaiting their arrival.

The second subject is “The Royal Wedding.” The pair are being united by a venerable and aged ecclesiastic with a grey beard, whose bronzed, weather-beaten countenance tells splendidly against his elaborate white vestments. To his right is the King, crowned and robed in red, placing the ring on the hand of the Queen, who stands draped in gold-brocaded white and green. An altar appears to our right, and beside it a mail-clad knight, with head bowed in worship. The figures of women are introduced to our left, and white flowers and a steaming censer lie on the ruddy marble pavement beneath.

The third subject shows the manner of the saint’s queenship. She is known to her people in the breaking of bread; clad in the same robes that she wore at the marriage festival, she is feeding the poor, and her husband, in his red mantle and wearing his royal crown, follows in attendance upon her, bearing a heaped platter.

The fourth subject shows the final development of Queen Margaret’s saintship. Having on earth filled herself with the life of heaven, she is now seen, white-clad, and with a red robe falling from her shoulders like the mortal life that she is done with, ascending inevitably into skies, where the clouds dispart to disclose the benignant figure of the Almighty Father and the white shape of the Holy Dove. Beneath is outspread a familiar landscape which she is leaving for ever—the Fifeshire hills appear on the right on the farther side of the Firth, and beneath is the town of Edinburgh, with the Palace, and the Castle rock crested with her chapel, and to the left the Pentlands which overlook Penicuik, with a kindly ray streaming from above, and irradiating their summit.

In spite of all deductions that may be made on account of occasional crudities and defects, and of the glaring anachronisms of costume that are apt to offend our more archæologically cultured eyes, the series is a remarkable one, with great richness and variety of colouring, and with a dramatic power which goes directly to the heart of the legendary tale, and portrays its incidents in a vivid and impressive manner. Dealing for the most part with definite history, the series is more complete in its realisation than was possible in some of the visionary subjects from Ossian which the painter afterwards essayed in the Hall of Penicuik House.

The three last-named subjects are signed: the second bears the date of “Sept. 7, 1772,” the third “Octr. 14, 1772,” and the fourth “Octr. 6, 1772.” The inscriptions are interesting as showing that the subjects were executed immediately after the painter’s return from Italy, and as illustrating the impetuous speed with which he must have worked.