The House - Architecture
Mavisbank was designed over the winter of 1722/3 by William Adam, father of the Adam brothers and the leading architect of early eighteenth-century Scotland, and his patron, Sir John Clerk, one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, second Baronet of Penicuik and Baron of the Court of Exchequer – hence ‘Baron Clerk’ – who had succeeded to the Penicuik estates a few months earlier, jointly. The first Clerk laird of Penicuik, who had been a merchant in Paris in the mid 17th century, acquired the estate of Penicuik in the 1660’s, and the farm of Mossiehill near Loanhead was added and renamed Mavisbank some years later.
In the late 1690’s the second Laird and the first baronet, Baron Clerk’s father, produced several designs for a new house at Mavisbank, but nothing was built at that time. While his father was alive Baron Clerk had lived at Cammo, where he had spent a dozen years planting and laying out the grounds. He considered rebuilding the old house of Penicuik, but decided not to, and built instead at Mavisbank, where he had coal interests and which was only about four miles, rather than seven or eight, from the centre of the town. Mavisbank was not to be a family home or the centre of the estate, which would continue to be at Penicuik, but rather a villa, firmly in the country but close enough to the town for easy commuting on horseback, for entertaining, away from the cares of family and estate business, and for the enjoyment and display of culture and learning through architecture, music, his picture collection, library and antiquarian interests.
The foundations were laid in 1723, the main body of the house was completed in 1727, and the pavilions added in 1728 and 1729. Internal finishing, fitting out and furnishing continued into the 1730s. The laying out of the grounds went on in parallel with the building of the house and with the transformation of the landscape at Penicuik, and probably continued more or less until Clerk’s death in 1755.
In accordance with Clerk’s purpose, Mavisbank is a small house, fifty feet by forty feet with two pavilions each twenty feet by thirty feet. The centre block had two main floors with basement and attic, the pavilions one main floor, joined to the entrance floor of the centre of the block by roofed passages behind the linking screen walls, and a basement; taking advantage of the fall in the ground, the south pavilion had a second basement and an adjacent service yard.
It was, however, planned like a country house of the period in miniature. The principal floor was the upper main floor and was approached from the entrance hall by a mahogany staircase. It consisted of a traditional ‘state apartment’, that is a dining room, drawing room, bedroom, dressing room and closet, opening one from the other in a clockwise progression, though all but the drawing room were individually accessible from the separate service stair. The rooms were fully panelled, with marble chimney pieces and there is much detailed information in the Clerk papers about their finishing and decoration, furnishing and picture hanging. The entrance floor, besides the hall and stair, contained less formal and more simply panelled family rooms: a family dining room or parlour, Lady Clerk’s and another smaller bedroom, each with a dressing room or closet and, probably a business room adjacent to the front door. The north pavilion was filled by a ‘great room’ or saloon, with, presumably, a coved ceiling rising into the roof, the flat of which was filled with a large cartoon of ‘God the Father’ by a minor Italian Master, Giacenti Brandi. Beneath were a coach house and stables. The south pavilion was occupied by children’s rooms over a large kitchen. The basement of the centre block contained service rooms, including a common hall, pantry, larder, and there were further bedrooms in the attic. Much is known, therefore, about the interior of Mavisbank in Baron Clerk’s time, and some of the furniture and pictures survive at Penicuik and elsewhere.
As far as the exterior of the house is concerned, Mavisbank is a pedimented and balustraded five bay, three storey box, on a double pile plan, with the flue bearing spine wall expressed as a single chimney stack rising through the lead platform which capped the slated square domed roof. The pavilions are smaller boxes which had bell-cast piend roofs and open-pedimented chimney gables to front and rear. The linking screen walls are plain with round-headed window openings. The entrance floor level is strongly expressed by a horizontal string course running right round the building, which establishes the top of what may be seen as a plinth on which the architecture proper is set. Most of the building was well built but simply built of rubble stone, which was designed to be lime plastered, and probably lined out and limewashed in a colour to blend with the new stone. Only the main facades of the centre block and the pavilions have any architectural detail and carved enrichment, and only that of the centre block itself is of polished ashlar. The masonry by John Baxter and the carving by Isaac Silverstyne are of the highest possible quality.
The principal front was designed to be seen on the approach to the house, through the designed landscape. It was and is a confident and, indeed, powerful composition, which, carries all the hallmarks of William Adam’s work, but which transcends, presumably through the influence and stimulus provided by Clerk, almost everything else which Adam produced. It manages to combine richness with modesty, drama with repose, and originality with an orthodox and recognisable vocabulary. It manages to be in the mainstream of European classicism, with qualities which are identifiably French and Dutch, profoundly British and yet, in the final analysis, inescapably Scots. It is a thoroughly intellectual, yet stunningly beautiful house, with an Augustan dignity which could not be more perfectly matched to the character and distinction of Baron Clerk. Like Clerk himself, and Adam too, Mavisbank was part of the essential underbuilding from which the Scottish Enlightenment was beginning to rise.
The design of the house and its landscape setting, its interior and contents, must be considered as an ensemble, as an integrated concept: each part of great value in its own right, but the value of the whole even greater than the sum of the parts. Clearly the dispersal of the contents and the loss of the original fabric of the interiors, the dereliction of the house itself and the degraded state of the landscape represent a serious loss of overall value. If Mavisbank were intact to the extent that Arniston and Newhailes, two more or less contemporary houses, are intact, its value would be greater, much greater, than it is. Nevertheless, Mavisbank is important in ways and for reasons that no other house of the period is important and it is as valuable and important, even in its present state, as any other Scottish house of the first half of the eighteenth century. It is important not just for its intrinsic quality as Architecture and for the beauty and potential beauty of the house and setting combined, but for its vital place in the history of Architecture, as the joint creation of the two most important figures by far on the Scottish Architectural scene in the first half of the eighteenth century, William Adam and Baron Clerk.
