14 minute read
A Life in Catterline
PHOEBE ANNA TRAQUAIR
Elizabeth Cumming
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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.
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.
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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
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.
The concentration and patience required to illuminate even a single page was considerable, yet in a sense such slow, close work came naturally to her. After all, she illustrated her husband’s fossil research papers throughout his professional career, and it had been this which had first brought them together in Dublin in the early 1870s. In the spring of 1887, she wrote to John Ruskin for advice on what to copy. Their surviving correspondence over a period of three or so months reveals loans of medieval manuscripts to Traquair and her own modern pages to him. Her delight in old manuscripts was recorded in letters to family and friends, and in an 1897 interview published in The Studio, she commented that ‘purple and gold are delightful things to play with’ and ‘the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have always appealed to me most in illuminated work’.
Study for The Souls of the Blest (c.1889)
Ink and watercolour on paper 35.5 x 25.5 cm
Most of Traquair’s surviving embroidery designs are for domestic items such as table covers. This one is for a panel of a draughtscreen – then a common piece of drawing room furniture in many middleclass homes. They were both practical and aesthetic although few were as fully artistic as those of Traquair. The ideas of the journey of the soul beyond death had filled her children’s hospital chapel and, perhaps surprisingly, were now to be embedded in a screen for her own home. She called this first embroidered screen 'The Salvation of Mankind' (1886–1893, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, City Art Centre). Its success would immediately encourage her to work on her most celebrated screen, 'The Progress of a Soul' (1893–1902, National Galleries of Scotland), and that would be followed in turn by 'The Red Cross Knight' (1904–14, National Museums of Scotland) which was partly worked by Hilda Napier. Each panel of these screens took at least eighteen months to work. This rare item from 'The Salvation of Mankind' project is the only known working study for the second (left) of its three panels, 'The Souls of the Blest' (embroidered c.1889–91). It would have been used as a clear reference when inking her linen with the design prior to stitching the piece. Traquair depicts six angels receiving the souls of the just from the Angel of Redemption, the focus of the central panel (stitched c.1886–87). Seven angels are shown in the finished embroidery, and they are surrounded by banks of cumulus clouds (representing air) and water, the latter to be translated into choppy waves and wonderfully still pools in the embroidery. The other two elements were to be found across the central and right screens: the Angel of Redemption holds a flaming skull, while earth dominates the composition of the right (third) panel, 'Souls waiting on Earth' (1891–93). The testing of souls by the ordeal of fire was an idea long used in culture. Here, as in much of her art, Traquair fused many traditions with her imagination. 'The Salvation of Mankind' screen is witness to her changing figurative style from Pre-Raphaelite to the largely Renaissance-inspired naturalism of her Song School mural. Nonetheless, she would adapt this design in her illuminations of Stanza III of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Willowwood (1890,National Museums of Scotland), and as part of The House of Life, (1898–1902, National Library of Scotland).
Elizabeth Cumming is a historian, curator and Honorary Professor in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a trustee of the Mansfield Traquair Trust, the Scottish Stained Glass Trust and the Lorimer Society.
The first part of this article was originally published by Bonhams for their Scottish Sale in October 2020
AGNES MILLER PARKER
Emily Walsh
Agnes Miller Parker's The Uncivilised Cat – a recent acquisition by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation – represents an artist who pushed against the prevailing tide in her lifetime. Emily Walsh, managing director of The Fine Art Society, unveils the meanings and metaphors within this groundbreaking feminist painting
Agnes Miller Parker’s (1895-1980) seemingly innocent still life brings to the fore concerns and debates around women’s rights of the time. Whether it points to the artist’s relationship with her husband, fellow Vorticist William McCance (1894–1970), is conjecture. What we can be certain of however, is that Miller Parker was unequivocally a female anomaly of her time, as an independent thinker who was unafraid to reject societal norms and conventions of womanhood. ‘The Uncivilised Cat’ was painted in 1930, either when Miller Parker and McCance left their life in London, or upon their move to Gregynog, in the Welsh town of Powys. The still life captures the animal’s restlessness and alarm. It has landed upon the open pages of Marie Stopes’ Love’s Creation, its title partially visible to the viewer. Published in 1928, the year women obtained the right to vote, Stopes works through several debates which affected both her personal and public life as a woman: sexual relations, the link between the arts and sciences, and the quest for female sexual fulfilment. The pound note on which the cat’s claw is protectively placed acknowledges the female struggle for financial freedom. A toppled vase of Calla lilies and a broken Venus statuette draw attention to the story of Venus, Roman goddess of love, seeing lilies for the first time. Jealous of their beauty, she cursed them by placing a large yellow pistil in the middle. The Calla lily, in this context, represents the lust and sexuality that Miller Parker suggests a woman can never have. The spine of the green book indistinctly reads Good-Bye to All That, a 1929 autobiography by Robert Graves. ‘It was my bitter leave-taking of England,’ he wrote, ‘where I had recently broken a good many conventions.’ Good-Bye to All That describes the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the WWI; the subsequent disillusionment of the glories of patriotism, combined with the gradual increased interest in atheism, feminism and socialism in a post-war British society, all signify monumental fissures in British collective thought. These rifts undoubtedly impacted both Miller Parker’s personal and artistic outlook; ‘The Uncivilised Cat’ exudes this uncertainty, particularly in its rejection of the Victorian tropes of womanhood as ‘The Angel of The Home’. Miller Parker’s early paintings, often executed in tempera such as ours, reflect the artistic ethos of the short-lived group, the Vorticists, who were active in London in the 1920s. Miller Parker and her husband, Glasgow School of Art contemporary William McCance, moved there in 1920. They were among the few Scottish artists to engage with modernism, and were described by poet and polemicist, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) as ‘that clever couple from Scotland who believe in cubist methods’. Miller Parker’s decision to marry McCance in 1918 is a significant one. They were in the early stages of their relationship during the WWI, when McCance was court martialled for failing to turn up to duty after being conscripted. Despite the huge social stigma that was attached to conscientious objectors during this
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Agnes Miller Parker, The Uncivilised Cat, 1930. The Fleming Collection. ©The Estate of the Artist
period, McCance’s internment at Wormwood Scrubs Prison and in a Home Office work camp did not deter her; they were married a year prior to his release from the work camp. These would have been significant disrupting factors in their lives; the social opprobrium she must have been subject to suggests that she was both in agreement with his position as a ‘conchie’, but also had the steel to withstand it and continue her life with him by her side. The artist William Roberts lodged briefly at their Earl’s Court home; his influence upon Miller Parker’s painting was significant throughout the 1920s, and it’s easy to see Robert’s influence in her sculpturally volumetric figures. ‘The Horse Fair’ (1928) is one of Parker’s most ambitious paintings. Human and animal participants are simplified and wryly observed in a work which used to belong to her friend, the writer Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999). Painted in the same year, ‘The School Room’ shows an art class at Maltman’s Green School in the suburb of Gerrards Cross, where Miller Parker taught from 1920–1923. During this period, McCance mainly painted and experimented in his work; the imbalance in their working lives was to be a recurring theme. Miller Parker made do with painting by night, McCance by day. By 1925, the couple became part of the Chiswick Group, which included the Mitchisons, Blair Hughes Stanton (1902–1981) and his wife, Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983). While Miller Parker had taught herself the rudiments of wood-engraving, it was HughesStanton and Hermes who encouraged and refined her talent. In 1928, both couples had a major joint exhibition of their painting and sculpture at St George’s Gallery, London. Their modernism unsettled one uncomprehending critic, who observed that ‘eccentricity ran riot with rather lamentable results!’ In spite of this, both couples continued to intertwine the personal with the professional, moving to the Gregynog Press, in Powys, Wales, in 1930. The press was dedicated to producing fine books in limited editions. McCance was to be the controller and the others artist-illustrators. The Fables of Esope (1932) and XXI Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales (1933), illustrated by Miller Parker’s engravings, are among the finest of the period. Paradoxically, Miller Parker felt many of the books hardly needed ‘decoration’: ‘so many of the jobs that I get to do I feel ought not to have been illustrated. [Thomas] Hardy describes so well that illustrations seem to be superfluous.’ After the successes of the 1930s, finances were precarious. Thanks to the triumphs of her engravings, Miller Parker’s work was more widely recognised than that of her husband. This undoubtedly gave rise to further tensions in her relationship with McCance. Personal correspondence with friends suggest that he became increasingly lazy and selfish in the years prior to the breakdown of their marriage. This increasing unhappiness culminated in 1955, when Miller Parker made the decision to leave her husband. Divorce at this time was highly stigmatised, heightened by the reality that she took the decision to break away from the institution of marriage, and the traditional role of womanhood as a wife. Finalised in 1963, the divorce drew Miller Parker back to Scotland, where she settled in Arran. She never remarried; in this retrospective light, we could interpret ‘The Uncivilised Cat’ as a visual reinforcement of Miller Parker’s desire for independence, both professionally as a woman artist, and personally as a liberal believer in women’s rights and female sexuality.
This feature was originally published in Issue 1 of The Journal, published by The Fine Art Society
VICTORIA & ALBERT: OUR LIVES IN WATERCOLOUR
Carly Collier
With a new exhibition at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Gallery exploring Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s love of watercolour painting, curator Carly Collier takes a closer look at the queen’s passion for the art form
