PHOEBE ANNA TRAQUAIR
Portrait miniature of Hilda Traquair aged five years (1884) Watercolour on paper 8.5 x 6.8 cm This is an early study of the Traquairs’ only daughter. Like her mother, Hilda became a skilled needlewoman. She married George Napier (1886–1953), emigrating with him to Canada in 1909. They had two children, Margaret and John. Phoebe Anna Traquair made a number of pencil sketches of her children during the 1880s and 1890s with some used for figure studies in her mural schemes. In 1898, Hilda would be represented – along with her father Ramsay – in her mother’s second children’s hospital chapel at Rillbank, in south Edinburgh. The early 1880s, however, predated Traquair’s involvement in the social art of mural decoration. At this point, her art was primarily focused on the design and making of practical domestic embroideries or recording landscapes while on family holidays in the Scottish Borders or on Speyside. The landscape background of this study instead reflects her interest in both formal gardens and especially the beautiful background landscapes often to be found in early Italian Renaissance paintings. It is also a beautiful image of the innocence of childhood. It is possibly influenced by her reading of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (copies of which she gave to family and friends) in the clarity and sweet simplicity of this affectionate little portrait.
Elizabeth Cumming
Phoebe Anna Traquair was a leading figure in the arts and crafts movement. Here, art historian Elizabeth Cumming explores Traquair’s artistic inspirations and shines a light on three early watercolours recently acquired by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation From the 1880s to the 1920s, Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936) was known as one of Scotland’s leading muralists and craft artists. The daughter of a Dublin doctor, she had been born and educated in Ireland and settled in Edinburgh with her zoologist husband Dr Ramsay Heatley Traquair (1840–1912). Illustrating his research papers on fossils for over 30 years demonstrated a precision of draughtsmanship but never the scale of her imagination nor her professional ambition. She painted murals in no fewer than four Edinburgh buildings: the two successive chapels for the Sick Children’s Hospital (1885–86, 1896–98), the Song School of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral (1888–92) and Mansfield Place Church, now the Mansfield Traquair Centre, (1893–1901). As the National Gallery of Scotland’s director James Caw wrote in 1900, she breathed extraordinary ‘visions of life and beauty upon dead walls’. Traquair’s sources for her art were many and varied: she admired Greek sculpture and the romance of Pre-Raphaelite painting, medieval craft and – perhaps surprisingly – modern engineering. Her mentors above all were the great poets and writers of the past and present from Dante to Donne, Blake to Browning,
Ruskin to Rossetti. She struck up friendships with artists including William Holman Hunt and briefly corresponded with John Ruskin in the late 1880s. Ruskin lent her medieval manuscripts to study and copy, and these, together with her reading, inspired a series of glorious illuminations of poetry. Above all she always enjoyed the challenges of mastering traditional crafts from embroidery to leather book cover tooling and, after 1900, art enamelling on copper and silver. She had a professional space within the Dean Studio in Lynedoch Place from 1890 but also worked at home. It is perhaps easy to forget that beyond this intensely creative world lay a mundane middle-class home life. The Traquairs had three children, Ramsay (1874–1952), Harry (1875–1954) and Hilda (1879–1964). With drawing an important part of daily life, she sketched them at leisure in the family home or on holiday in Fife, the Borders or the Highlands, and some of these became figure studies for her murals. The Traquairs’ home was beautified by her crafts lining the walls, staircase, shelves and furniture surfaces. For her, art was an essential element of daily life with even her own leather needlecase carefully tooled with her initials. 1
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1 Portrait miniature of Hilda Traquair aged five years 1884 2 Illuminated Page, 1887 3 Study for The Souls of the Blest c.1889 All images The Fleming Collection
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Illuminated page (c.1887) Ink, watercolour and gold leaf on vellum 17.5 x 13.5 cm Phoebe Anna Traquair responded to the music of poetry in all her art, but nowhere more so than in the craft of manuscript illumination. When she painted her watercolour study of Hilda, she had recently begun to illuminate the Psalms of David on vellum, a highly ambitious programme which would continue for a decade. Such pages found an echo in her first mural decoration for a children’s hospital chapel where medieval ideas were used together with echoes of Byzantinism and PreRaphaelitism. By the later 1880s, her skill in illumination was such that she embarked on illuminating modern poetry which particularly moved her. She started with Tennyson’s In Memoriam(1889–92) which was followed by the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She also briefly illuminated the
poetry of Robert Browning and William Morris and, in a glorious finale, Dante’s La Vita Nuova (1899–1902). She then switched to art enamelling as her preferred ‘little lyrics’, as she called them. Traquair seems to have been entirely self-taught, with the copying of medieval pages a major part of her training. She is known to have been familiar with the medieval collections of Edinburgh’s Advocates’ Library and Museum of Science and Art, and her archive in the National Library of Scotland reveals that she also visited London public collections including both the British Museum and Lambeth Palace Library. The medieval source of this copy – for it surely is such – has yet be unidentified, but we know that French and Italian illumination especially influenced her love of introducing all manner of natural detail (such as the tiny hare found here) and these also wove their way into her other crafts including embroidery. Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 29
