It was her piano that first caught my eye. On a recent visit to Edinburgh to witness the work of the outstanding Irish-born artist and designer Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936), who is largely overlooked in her country of birth but is a celebrated figure in Scotland, the painted Steinway is a spectacular piece of furniture. It forms one of the centrepieces of her work in the National Museum of Scotland, alongside three huge embroidered panels, enamel jewellery, caskets and other items. The collection was brought together for the first time in the Design for Living Hall, a permanent gallery set up there three years ago.
Considered the star of the Scottish Arts & Crafts movement and its first important professional woman artist, Traquair from Kilternan, Co Wicklow, was astoundingly prolific, her vast artistic design output embracing oil and watercolour painting, embroidery, bookbinding, manuscript illumination, ironwork, furniture, jewellery, enamelwork and, most outstandingly, mural decoration. She also brought up a family of three.
The red-headed, headstrong daughter of the Dublin physician Dr William Moss and Teresa Richardson Moss, her early interest in art led her to train at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she won a student award. It was there that she met the Scottish zoologist Dr Ramsay Traquair whom she married in June 1873 at the age of 21 (he was 33) moving with him to Scotland a year later when he took up the position of Keeper of Natural History in what is now the Royal Museum.
For the next 30 years, she would illustrate all his manuscripts, developing a wider, versatile career underpinned by the design movements of Pre-Raphaelism, Arts & Crafts and Aestheticism. At a time when art and design were still dominated by men, Traquair played a significant and inspired role in the promotion of decorative art in public buildings. In 1920 she became the first woman member of the Royal Scottish Academy, a position that reflected her status and growing international recognition.
Fundamental to her art were ideas exploring the relationships between art, spirituality and science, often lustrously expressed visually and always with technically bravura.
The landmark Steinway grand she decorated features a keyboard panel called Willowwood after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet, detailed watercolour studies for scenes from The Song of Solomon running around the case, with the inside piano lid depicting Pan playing his pipes with Psyche and Eros surrounded by assorted birds, flora and fauna.
Traquair considered it her best painting, though part of it was later overlaid with vine and putti because Psyche’s nude torso offended the Tennants of Lympne Castle in Kent who had commissioned it.
The other outstanding piece, The Red Cross Knight and his Lady Riding, three huge embroidered panels in silk and gold thread on linen from the early 1900s were made after her famous embroidered triptych The Progress of a Soul, based on the character of Denys L’Auxerrois by the English critic and writer Walter Pater, was sent for exhibition in St Louis (it is now in the National Gallery of Scotland).
Likened to a Celtic version of Klimt’s paintings, the powerful imagery in these magnificent textiles capture a sense of betrayal, pain and redemptive love. Such creative use of traditional stitches modernised embroidery, according to Scottish art historian Elizabeth Cumming.
Arguably Traquair’s greatest achievements were her murals, from the first in the mortuary chapel of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, to the Song School of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral (with panoramic vistas of Scotland and Ireland), which brought her wide acclaim and the commissioning of murals for Edinburgh’s Catholic Apostolic Church. Passing by it one day and hearing the organ, she went inside to listen and when the prayers were over waylaid a priest and demanded to paint the walls. “If I am to paint them no one can prevent me and if I am not going to paint them, no one can make me,” she said.
The commission of this vast scheme, some call Edinburgh’s Sistine Chapel, with 20m-high walls took her nine years to complete. “Cold, grey Edinburgh’s answer to Florence” was one response.
Sparely built but brimful of energy, clad in her working linen smock and velvet cap, she lived into her 80s, designed her own gravestone and, though Yeats described her as a “a little singing bird”, remained largely ignored at home. Her work is rarely, if ever, exhibited in an Irish context, despite her extraordinary skills, according to Virginia Teahan, who organised the first comprehensive exhibition in the US of the Arts & Craft movement. “She felt disappointed in her native Ireland”, according to Cumming.
Far more famous at home was her niece, the talented, flame-haired artist Beatrice Elvery Campbell, Lady Glenavy, mother of the broadcaster Patrick Campbell, but that’s a whole other story.