Notes on the Art Treasures at Penicuik House Midlothian

by John Miller Gray

XII.

Runciman next turned to the larger undertaking of which the St. Margaret Cupola was but the prologue, and upon which he worked with equal energy, for the ceiling of the Ossian Hall of Penicuik House can hardly have been commenced before the end of 1772, and it was certainly completed during the following year.

It was just ten years previously that “Fingal” (1762) and “Temora” (1763) first appeared, and the controversy regarding their authenticity still raged fiercely. Dr. Johnson and David Hume denied their claim to be regarded as genuine Celtic poems, but they were defended by Lord Kames, Dr. Gregory, and by Dr. Blair, who pointed out their adaptability to the purposes of the painter, as presenting fitting subjects for the exercise of his brush. It was probably upon this suggestion that the Ossian ceiling was commissioned by Sir James Clerk, and commenced by Alexander Runciman.

The centre of the ceiling is occupied by a large elliptical compartment, depicting Ossian old and blind, singing, and accompanying his songs on the harp. In front is seated the white-draped shape of Malvina, and around are grouped a varied crowd of listeners. The distance is a rocky coast, with ruined castles, and a fine expanse of sea, across which white sails are speeding; and above, the clouds take strange, fantastic, half-defined shapes as of spiritual presences, the figures of the vanished heroes of whom the poet sings,—“The awful faces of other times look from the clouds of Crona.” This compartment is surrounded by an ornamental border of gold, which in its turn is enclosed in a wreath of vine-leaves and fruit; and the four corners are occupied by figures symbolical of the four great rivers of Scotland, the Tay, the Spey, the Clyde, and the Tweed,—figures manifestly reminiscent of the work of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel.

Beneath, round the ample cove or volto of the room, is ranged a series of smaller subjects from Ossian—“The Valour of Oscar,” “The Death of Oscar,” “The Death of Agandecca,” “The Hunting of Catholda,” one of the finest of the subjects, very graceful in the figure of the nymph drawing a bow; “The Finding of Corban Cargloss,” an attractive moonlit scene; “Golchossa mourning over Lamderg,” “Oina Morval serenading Ossian,” a vigorous subject of “Cormac attacking the Spirit of the Waters,” “The Death of Cormac,” “Scandinavian Wizards at their Incantations,” in which the grotesque is in excess of the terrible, and “Fingal engaging the Spirit of Lodi.”

If we were to criticise the ceiling purely as an example of decorative art, we might well object that the elaboration and wealth of detail in the work is hardly suitable to its position, that designs so placed should have been simpler and more salient in their component parts, and executed in a lighter and more airy scheme of colouring, so as to carry the eye freely upwards. But as an example of poetic art, in its earnestness of aim and vigour of conception, it is deserving of all praise, as one of the very few instances that Scotland has to show of a serious effort to produce a monumental work, a pictorial epic,—an effort honourable alike to the painter and his patron. The art of Runciman, as here displayed, may be regarded as the precursor of the art of David Scott, another of Scotland’s most imaginative painters, who was also powerfully attracted by the Ossianic legends, choosing “Fingal and the Spirit of Lodi” for the subject of one of his earliest works, and in another depicting Ossian himself, not surrounded by sympathetic listeners as in this central compartment by Runciman, but seated alone by the sea-shore, amid the last dying radiance of a sunset, with his harp lying idle by his side.

It is recorded that about 1720 John Alexander, the grandson of George Jamesone of Aberdeen, executed a “Rape of Proserpina” on a staircase in Gordon Castle. After the completion of his work at Penicuik Runciman decorated a church in the Cowgate of Edinburgh (now St. Patrick’s Catholic Chapel) with sacred subjects, of which a portion still remain; and—presumably in humble imitation of the Ossian Hall—Alexander Carse painted an oval subject on the ceiling of the “Pennecuik Parlor” of New Hall, Mid-Lothian, depicting “The Troops of Tweedale in the Forest of Selkirkshire, convened by Royal authority in May 1685, as described in Dr. Pennecuik’s Poems.” This brief list may be said to include almost all the mural art—excepting such as was simply decorative—executed in Scotland during modern times.

The Ossian ceiling formed the subject of a learned and elaborate descriptive pamphlet, published anonymously, in 1773, by A. Kinnaird and W. Creech, Edinburgh; and the painter would appear to have intended to preserve a record of his work—in the manner afterwards adopted by Barry, in the case of the illustrations of “Human Progress,” with which he decorated the walls of the Hall of the Society of Arts in London, for etchings, executed by Runciman’s own hand in a free and somewhat loose style, of the first two subjects of the St. Margaret Cupola, and of “Cormac attacking a Spirit of the Waters,” and “The Finding of Corban Cargloss,” from the Ossian ceiling, are frequently to be met with.

We have not been able to discover in Penicuik House Alexander Runciman’s easel Picture of “Nausicaa at Play with her Maidens,” executed during his residence at Rome, and shown in London, in the Free Society of Artists’ Exhibition of 1767, a work which Allan Cunningham informs us was “painted for Pennycuik”: and, on account of the delicacy and transparency of its colouring, we should be inclined to attribute to John Runciman, who died at Naples at the early age of twenty-four, that sketch of “David with the Head of Goliath,” which has been commonly assigned to the elder of the two brothers. Certainly by John Runciman is the excellent picture of “Belshazzar’s Feast,” hung in the Billiard-room, a work so delicate in its handling, so mellow in the golden and ruddy tones of its colouring, as to support the opinion held by some discerning critics, that this artist’s brief life afforded definite promise of his becoming a far subtler and more refined painter than the better-known member of his family ever was.