Over the fireplace is inlet in the wainscoting an attractive subject representative of “Music,” executed in grisaille on canvas, in clever simulation of a marble bas-relief. It is signed by its painter, Jacob de Wit, a native of Amsterdam, born 1695, died 1754, who “attained a marvellous excellence in the imitation of sculpture of all kinds of materials, bronze, wood, plaster, and particularly white marble, in which he produced such complete illusion that even the practised eye is deceived.” His most notable work of this kind was the decoration, in 1736, of a hall in the Hôtel de Ville of Amsterdam; and it is further stated by Kugler that “a favourite subject with the master was the representation of pretty children in the taste of Fiammingo.” The present picture, in the satisfying arrangement of its composition and in the grace of its flowing lines, possesses a more legitimate artistic value than could come from any merely imitative dexterity in rendering the effect of sculpture by means of painting. The musicians are a party of naked, chubby children. The figure of their leader is an especially charming one, standing holding up a music-book in one hand, beating time with a roll of papers held as a baton in the other, and singing with open mouth; his raised face, with the soft hair clustering about the rounded cheeks, wearing an entranced expression which embodies the very spirit of melody. Beside him one of his infant musicians touches the wires of a lyre, another bends over a great mandoline, of which a third is tightening the strings, and a fourth breathes softly on the flute.
At the entrance to the Library door are placed two large glass cases, one filled with natural history specimens, the other containing the valuable collection of Roman remains, in metal, pottery, coins, etc., accumulated by Baron Clerk, which it would require the skill of an archæologist rightly to estimate. Among them is a curious and most interesting ivory carving, inscribed, on a parchment label, in the Baron’s handwriting, “An Antient piece of Sculpture on the Tooth of a Whale,—it was found by John Adair, Geographer, in the North of Scotland, Anno 1682, all the figures are remarkable.” In this year Adair, the Geographer for Scotland, was appointed by the Privy Council of Scotland to make a survey of the kingdom and maps of the shires, of which only a portion was published. The carving represents a crowned queen, seated holding a lapdog on her knees; with a knight, wearing a surcoat over chain-armour, and bearing a sword and a shield blazoned with a chevron chequé, standing on her left; and on her right a musician playing on a crowde, an old instrument resembling a violin; while between these, round the rest of the ivory, is a row of female figures, wearing long flowing robes, standing with clasped hands, that beside the musician holding a palm-branch. The carving is described and figured in Dr. Daniel Wilson’s “Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.” Dr. Wilson considers it to be a queen piece of a chess set, and assigns it to the fourteenth century.
XIV.
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.