Clerk, James
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- Clerk, James
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(1709 - 82), landowner, patron and amateur architect; e. s. by his 2nd wife of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik; suc. fa. 1755 as 3rd Bt.
1732 - 4 Florence, Pisa (Nov. 1732), Rome
Clerk's father, the second baronet of Penicuik, had made a grand tour at the end of the seventeenth century (he had been in Rome in 1697 - 8) and was a collector and antiquarian of considerable repute. With his father's experiences to emulate, James Clerk set off for Italy ostensibly to continue his law studies which he had begun in Edinburgh and had continued in Holland. But, unlike his father, James had little aptitude and less inclination for the law.
From Pisa Clerk confessed to his father that there was 'no employment so entirely disagreeable to [him] as that of Advocate', and revealed much in the comment that he had really come to Italy to see 'some of the best things in the way of Virtu'. He had found no law worth studying in Florence, and Pisa was 'one of the poorest places in the world'. He therefore pressed on to Rome, where his activities led his father - tolerant of his son's preference for culture rather than practical skills, perhaps because he saw in them a reflection of his own inclinations thirty-five years before - to come to terms with James's vocation in life. Sir John told the antiquary Roger Gale in 1733 that when James returned to London he hoped Gale would find him 'a greater virtuoso than his father'.
Clerk had already had some art training in Edinburgh and in London, where the antiquary Alexander Gordon had described him as 'intirely wrapt up in virtuosoship'. Sir John admitted that the young man had 'no ordinary skill both in painting and drawing'. Now, in Rome, Clerk attached himself to the circle and studio of Imperiali. There is, however, no firm evidence that Clerk took formal training from Imperiali. He certainly kept company with William Mosman, a Scottish pupil of the master, whom Sir John Clerk had earlier assisted. Sir John had bought his first Imperiali in 1723. Even before he left for Italy James Clerk had begun to buy pictures for his father, and in Rome he was largely entrusted with the development of the Clerk collection along the lines set by Sir John. An account of June 1734 shows that Clerk had spent £;186 on art and music in Rome, but that he had chosen to live much more cheaply than most English or Scottish visitors, and so had been able to avoid their company. This last intelligence would have gone some way to comfort Sir John, who always feared the expense to the family and loss of time to his son that a tendency to wander on the Continent might bring. But James Clerk was in fact to remain abroad for some further years, and was to travel in Holland and Germany several times in the 1740s. There his picture-buying continued.
In Rome Clerk developed those interests which accounted for his greatest celebrity as Scotland's leading amateur architect of the 1760s and 1770s. Their principal monument is the new Penicuik House, built to his own design, with its chimneypieces and statuary shipped from Italy and with its interior decorative schemes painted by Alexander Runciman, the most distinguished of Clerk's artistic prot?g?s. A remarkable Pantheon library, evocative of what Rome had meant to two generations of the Clerk family, was never built.2
1. See the Clerk of Penicuik MSS; I.G. Brown, The Clerks of Penicuik: Portraits of Taste and Talent [1987], and private information. 2. See I.G. Brown in A.J. Rowan and I.R. Gow eds., Scottish Country Houses, 134 - 49. A.J. Rowan, CL, 15, 22 Aug. 1968.
I.G. B.