Phoebe Traquair, Self Portrait, ca. 1910

This self-portrait of Phoebe Traquair (1852-1936) was painted in oil on a mahogany panel between 1909-11. Traquair was a key figure in the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and is perhaps its most well-known woman. Her work included jewellery enamelling, book illuminating and binding, embroidery, and mural painting. The portrait shows Traquair at the peak of her career having completed several large commissions and at a time when she was developing her small-scale decorative work. She began enamelling in 1901 using a technique that involved painting enamels onto copper plate, and in total produced over 300 enamelled works including the gold and enamel ‘Love Cup’ pendant designed as a special commission for the architect Robert Lorimer.

Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Kilternan, near Dublin, Ireland, in 1852, Traquair attended art classes at the Royal Dublin Society before moving to Scotland with her husband Dr Ramsay Traquair in 1873. She started her career preparing scientific drawings for her husband who became Keeper of Natural History at Museum of Science and Art in Edinburgh.  Her early work was produced within the context of her family but after 1885 she began to take on larger works and public commissions. In 1888 she was commissioned by the Edinburgh Social Union (ESU) to produce a large-scale mural scheme for the Song School at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral.  This was followed in 1893 by an even more ambitious mural commission for the interiors of the Catholic Apostolic Church Edinburgh.

Traquair’s style and imagery were influenced by Renaissance art and her love of illuminated manuscripts.  She combined realistic representations of the human figure with symbolic imagery, the latter influenced by her Catholic faith but also by her travels to Italy at the end of the 1880s. The University of Edinburgh’s rare books collection includes a series of illuminations on velum that are typical of her skills and preoccupations in using jewelled colours, gold leaf and fine detail.  The illuminations, which depict the medallions for the Song School commission, were bound in green calf leather at Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Bindery in London.

Traquair’s diverse practice made her contribution substantial and far-reaching. Her enamel heraldic plaques can still be seen in Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel at St Giles Cathedral, and her three-panel embroidery, The Salvation of Mankind, which took eight years to complete between 1885 and 1893 and was exhibited in St Louis in 1904, is now housed in the National Galleries Scotland. In 1920 Traquair became the first woman to be awarded Honorary Membership of Royal Society of Arts in Scotland.