CSS Drop Down Menu

edin banner

Phoebe Anna Traquair

Phoebe Moss was raised in Ireland and attended classes in Art and Design in Dublin. The course emphasised skilled craftsmanship - the accurate rending of form, tone and colour. There was much copying. The female students would expect this to lead to commissions for illustrations work. Such work was socially acceptable at this time as it could be done at home.

Phoebe Anna Traquair muralPhoebe was assigned the task of doing fossil fish illustrations for the Scots palaeontologist Ramsey Traquair, whom she later married. Later that year Ramsey was appointed keeper of Natural History at the Museum of Science and Art, (now Royal museum) in Edinburgh.

All that survives of her early work is embroidered domestic linen.

In the 1880’s the Art and Craft movement was reuniting morality with Art and Art with design. A programme of mural decoration was initiated in 1885 by the Edinburgh Society Union which wanted an art which would transform the everyday lives of the working classes.

Phoebe Anna Traquair muralOf their early work, the only piece that survives (and that not complete) is Phoebe Traquair’s decoration of the mortuary chapel at the Royal Hospital for sick children. This was executed in 1885-6 in her ‘spare’ time.

The work for which she is best known is her decoration of the interior of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Mansfield place commissioned in 1892 and taking nearly the whole of the next decade to finish. The church is now closed to the public, but the murals are on view occasionally.

Phoebe Anna Traquair muralAnother commission was for the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary which is an Italianate work, originally with four panels. It has recently been restored and can be seen by arrangement. She also had commissions in Glasgow, England and the US.

She also did manuscript illustrations, bookbinding, furniture decoration and enamelling. There was an exhibition of over 150 pieces of the work in Edinburgh in 1993.

After her husband died she travelled extensively and produced work to within 10 years of her death. She was the first woman to be elected as an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920, twenty years after her name was first put forward.

Source - Phoebe Anna Traquair 1852 - 1936 by Elizabeth H Cumming

National Galleries of Scotland. (link)

link to Mansfield Traquair Centre church site and song school site

© 2008 Tiana@WEA Women's Forum