ART SUNDAY, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET??

Art Sunday, Do you want to know a secret??

 

Phoebe Traquair was a truly wonderful Scottish arts and crafts artist, she was multi talented but it is her mural work that I’m looking at today. I may be wrong but I believe her unique murals must be

'one of the best kept secrets of the Scottish Art world,'

not with in Scotland of course but so few people outside of Scotland seem to know who she was or how remarkable her work is.

THE MANSFIELD TRAQUAIR CENTRE; (click on picture to enlarge)

 

 

Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936)

 Phoebe Anna Traquair's place in history is unique. She was the first important professional woman artist of modern Scotland.

To rank as such might be enough to ensure her fame, but Traquair was also a central figure within Scottish Arts and Crafts practice, working prolifically in such diverse fields as embroidery, enamelwork, leather book-cover tooling and, not least, manuscript illumination and mural decoration.

Inspired by a wide range of arts and cultures, she was driven by a quest for ideas and a passion for materials. She considered that the arts should collectively express and celebrate the spiritual depth and wholeness of life. She ignored traditional boundaries of ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art, and was therefore refused even associate membership of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1900. Only in 1920 was she eventually elected an Honorary Academician.

Born Phoebe Anna Moss, near Dublin, she was inspired from childhood by ‘The Book of Kells’. Following marriage in 1873 to Scots palaeontologist Dr Ramsay Heatley Traquair (1840-1912), she moved with him to Edinburgh. She provided detailed illustrations for his research papers until his retirement in 1906 from the Museum of Science and Art (today the Royal Museum). Such detailed drawing of fossils prepared her for the closeness of manuscript work, but the latter gave new scope for the imagination.

Traquair exhibited her crafts internationally from 1893 and painted the interiors of no fewer than four Edinburgh buildings between 1885 and 1901, including the chapels of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (1885-1886 and 1896-1898) and the Song School of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral (1888-1892). The best known is the vast former Catholic Apostolic Church (1893-1901) in East London Street which has been called ‘Edinburgh’s Sistine Chapel’ and was decorated in parallel with her manuscripts of the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ and ‘The House of Life’.

Traquair’s reading of poetry and related work in manuscript illumination was initially inspired by her close friendship with John Miller Gray (1850-94), first curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Gray admired the poetry of Garth Wilkinson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, encouraging Traquair to produce modern manuscripts of their work. In 1887 she wrote to the critic John Ruskin for advice, and received in return the loan of French manuscripts to copy and understand.

From 1890 Traquair leased dedicated studio space in the Dean Studio, a disused church (a gap site since the 1950s) next to Drumsheugh Swimming Baths in Lynedoch Place, where her major manuscripts, including ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ and ‘The House of Life’, were illuminated. Her first major multi-page manuscript was of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (1890-1892) for Sir Henry Hardinge Cunynghame. It was immediately followed by ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’.

While working on her ‘Sonnets’, Traquair also illuminated Robert Browning’s ‘Saul’ (1893-1894), William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guinevere’ and ‘The Song of Solomon’ (both 1897). Her last great manuscripts were of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1897-1898), Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’, Rossetti’s ‘The House of Life’ and Dante’s ‘La Vita Nuova’ (1899-1902). Several of these manuscripts, including ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, were published on completion by William Hay of Edinburgh.

In the 1900s Traquair changed direction. She took up enamelling, to be set as jewellery and formal display pieces such as triptyches and caskets. From this time watercolour paintings for reproduction as commercial book illustrations replaced illumination.

 THE WEST WALL OF THE MANSFIELD TRAQUAIR CENTRE,

 (click on picture to enlarge)

 

As I said, she was remarkable in that she produced work in all areas of the arts and crafts movement. From the 1880s to the 1920s she worked in a wide range of media, including easel painting, embroidery, manuscript illumination, book cover tooling, enamelling, as well as mural decoration. She exhibited in Chicago, London, Turin and St Louis in the 1890s and 1900s. The decoration of the Mansfield Place Church helped to confirm this international recognition.

The third daughter of a Dublin physician, Phoebe Anna Moss attended the art school of the Royal Dublin Society and moved to Edinburgh following marriage to the Scottish palaeontologist Ramsay Heatley Traquair (1840-1912). The eldest of their three children, also Ramsay Traquair, became Professor and Director of the School of Architecture at McGill University, Montreal, in 1913.

 

The Mansfield Traquair Centre

 The Mansfield Traquair Centre is a former Catholic Apostolic Church building at Mansfield Place, beside the roundabout at the foot of Broughton Street.

It is now the national headquarters of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.The church was designed by Sir Robert Rowand Anderson and built between 1873 and 1885.  It has stained glass by  Ballantine but is best known for its large murals painted in the 1890s by Phoebe Anna Traquair.

The Catholic Apostolic Church was established in 1835, set up under apostolic rule, anticipating the imminent Second Coming of Christ.  The church gradually became extinct during the 20th century. Its last priest died in 1971. The Mansfield Traquair Trust was established in 1993 to preserve the  Mansfield Traquair church and its murals. Renovation of the building was completed in 2002 and the restoration of the murals was completed in 2005. The Friends of the Mansfield Traquair Centre provide tours of the building and its murals, once a month on Sunday afternoons, throughout the year, and more frequently during the Edinburgh Festival each August.

 

(click on picture to enlarge)About the Architect

 The Catholic Apostolic Church in Edinburgh was the first of a series of major commissions in the 1870s that were to transform Robert Rowand Anderson's career. The Catholic Apostolic Church was an important step in Anderson's career and it remained the most ambitious of his churches.

Anderson left the office of George Gilbert Scott in 1859 and set up his own practice in Edinburgh in 1860. During the 1860s his main work was small churches in the 'first pointed' style that is characteristic of Scott's former assistants. By 1880 (after the Catholic Apostolic Church) his practice was designing the most prestigious public and private buildings in Scotland: the University of Edinburgh Medical School and the McEwan Hall, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and Mount Stuart for the Marquess of Bute. These buildings demonstrate two notable qualities in Anderson's work: his ability to revive any of a variety of historical styles intelligently and his preference for massive, imposing forms.

THE MURAL IN THE SOUTH CHAPEL

 

And that my friends is my Art Sunday Secret, the secret of Phoebe Traquair's little known murals.