Traquair, Phoebe Anna [née Moss] (1852-1936)

Title

Phoebe Anna Traquair [née Moss]

Full Name

Traquair, Phoebe Anna [née Moss] (1852-1936)

Lifespan

1852-1936

Place of origin

Kilternan, County Dublin

Dublin

Edinburgh

Country of origin

Ireland

Language

English

Occupation

Painter

Engraver

Arts and Crafts movement

Manuscript illuminator
Bookbinder

Book Illustrator

Short biography

Phoebe Anna Moss was born into a Dublin medical family and studied art with the Royal Dublin Society. She moved to Edinburgh in 1874 with her husband Dr Ramsay Traquair and they had three children.
Initially her art consisted of watercolours and embroidery. Later she illuminated manuscripts, tooled bookcovers and, after 1900, took up enamelling.

Public art gave her imagination and ambition an even greater scope. Her first commission came from the Edinburgh Social Union in 1885 for the decoration of a tiny chapel at the first Hospital for Sick Children. This was painted in an eclectic mix of medieval, Byzantine and Pre-Raphaelitism and reflected her interest in the poet-artist William Blake. A second commission, for St Mary’s Cathedral Song School, soon followed and made her name.

Critics wrote of her modern colour and extraordinary imagination. In 1904 Phoebe Traquair’s finest embroideries The Progress of a Soul (now in the National Gallery of Scotland) were shown at the World’s Fair in St Louis. Although highly respected, she was turned down for professional membership of the Royal Scottish Academy but finally elected an honorary member in 1920. She died in Edinburgh at the age of eighty-four."

She was a significant and important figure in British art. She contributed widely to the Arts and Crafts movement, and was one of the first women artists in Scotland to achieve professional recognition.
Like many artists of the Arts and Crafts era she worked across diverse branches of the arts, producing embroideries, manuscript illumination, bookbinding, enamelwork, furniture decoration, easel painting and mural decoration, which led to international recognition.

Phoebe Anna Traquair - National Galleries

Selected List of Publications

Dante Illustrations and Notes

J. Black (1890). Dante Illustration and notes. T & A Constable. Edinburgh

La Vita nuova ... Illustrated by Phoebe Anna Traquair

(1902). La Vita nuova ... Illustrated by Phoebe Anna Traquair. Edinburgh

Relation

Anglophone women writers

Tag

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/phoebe-anna-traquair