Among the portraits of more recent members of the Clerk family are various works representing their eminent politician and statistical authority, the Right Hon. Sir George Clerk, D.C.L., the sixth Baronet, who repeatedly represented the county of Mid-Lothian in Parliament; who was a Lord of the Admiralty under the Liverpool Administration; succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Master of the Mint in 1845, and in the same year was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and a member of the Privy Council. Several miniatures representing him are preserved in the Drawing-room, and there are also two life-sized three-quarter-length portraits in oil. That hung in the smaller Drawing-room is an excellent example by William Dyce, R.A., a distant connection of the family’s, and was painted in 1830. It is executed with great delicacy, quietude, and reticence, and does full justice to the Baronet’s refined and handsome face, then in its prime. This picture has been excellently mezzotinted by Thomas Lupton. That in the Dining-room, painted by the vigorous hand of Sir John Watson Gordon, portrays Sir George in later life, seated in an easy chair, and holding one of the statistical blue-books which his soul loved. Of his wife, Maria, second daughter of Ewan Law of Horsted Place, Sussex, there is also an oil portrait in the Dining-room, showing a refined face, with a delicate complexion, bearing the trace of suffering in the firmly compressed yet pathetic mouth, and the straight dark eyebrows, which are knit a little and contracted over the pale grey wistful eyes. The picture has a rather slight and unfinished appearance, and is somewhat chalky in its whites. Its painter, the late J. R. Swinton, worked comparatively little in oils, and examples of his better-known crayon drawings may be studied in the portraits of the Dowager Lady Clerk and her sister-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Elphinstone, which hang in the smaller Drawing-room. It should also be noticed that many characteristic likenesses of the sixth Baronet are included in an interesting volume of sketches, done in old days by his niece Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and now preserved at Penicuik, a series portraying familiar scenes there, and at Sir George’s London residence in Park Street, Westminster,—card-parties and musical evenings in which Piatti and other eminent performers took part, days spent on the ice, or picnicking among the Pentlands, rides in the Park or over lonely stretches of moorland—drawings highly humorous, plentifully touched with caricature, yet including not a little substantial truth of portraiture.