-z CONTENTS Vo1ue One Contents page 2 Acknowledgements Abstract Abbreviations 7 Introduction 9 Chapter One: Beginnings: Education and Taste 14 Chapter Two: 'A little Artistic Society' 37 Chapter Three: 'External Nature or Imaginary Spirits' IL' Chapter Four: Spirits of the enaissance 124 Chapter Five: 'Books Beautiful or Sublime' 154 Chapter Six: 'Little Lyrics' 199 Chapter Seven: Commissions 237 Conclusion 275 Footnotes 260 Bibliography 313 Appendix: Summary Catalogue of Work by Phoebe Traquair Section A: Mural Decorations 322 Section : Painted Furniture; House, Garden and Church Decorations 323 Section C: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Section D: Designs for Mural and Furniture Decorations, Embroideries, Illuminated Manuscripts and Enamelwork 337 Section B: EmbroiderIes 3415 Section F: Enamels and Metalwork Section G: Manuscript Illuminations S-fl Section E: Published Designs for Book Covers and Illustrations L'L. Section J: Bookbindings 333 Volumes Two and Three Plates 3 ACKOWLEDGEXE!TS This thesis could not have been researched or written without the willing help of many people. My supervisors, Professor Glies Robertson, who first suggested that I turn my interest in Phoebe Traquair into a university dissertation, and Dr Duncan Macmillan have both been supportive and encouraging at all stages. Members of the Traquair and Moss families have provided warm hospitality and given generously of their time to provide access to their collections and to answer questions which must have seemed endless: in particular I am deeply indebted to the grandchildren of Phoebe Traquair, Ramsay Traquair, Mrs Margaret Anderson, and Mrs Margaret Bartholomew. Francis S Nobbs and his sister, Mrs Phoebe Hyde, Phcebe Traquair's godddaughter, have furnished me with copies of letters written to their father and helped on numerous matters, Without exception owners and. custodians of Traquair items have willingly allowed access to their collections and offered information which has always helped to paint a clearer portrait of both Phoebe Traquair and the Edinburgh in which she lived: to all, too numerous to name individually here, I express my sincere thanks. For photography I am particularly grateful to Peter Adamson, Ross Ashington, Laurance Black, Keith Harris, Sheila Lithgw, Joe Rock, and am especially indebted to Robin Hill who has travelled to photcgraph a variety of building interiors and objects. His tasks have included scaling the heights of Bellevue Baptist church (the former Catholic Apostolic church) and he has given up so much of his spare time to developing and printing without a word. of complaint. Many others have assisted in uumerou kind ways, notably Malcolm Carr, Dr Anne Cobby, James Deard.en, the late Marcus Dods, Rev Patrick Elkins, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, Ian Gow, Christopher Lorimer, Hew Lorimer, Stuart Matthew, the late Bishop Anthony Otter, Marjorie Robertson, Mrs Janet Sad.er, Helen Smailes, John Vernon Somers Cocks, Mrs Meta Viles, Rosemary Watt and Michael Wilson. Lastly, but as usual far from least, the constant moral and financial support of both my father, Ronald Gumming, and my husband, Murray Simpson, has sustained. me through the various stages of a thesis which otherwise could not have been completed.. ABSTRACT The thesis examines the career of the artist and craft worker Phoebe Traquair (1B52-1936> and her role in both the establishment and development of an Edinburgh arts and, crafts school between the 1880s and the 1920s, The first chapter looks at early influences on Traquair, concentrating on. the nature of art training in her native Dublin and both private and public taste in the visual, Including decorative, arts in the Scottish capital. The second chapter describes the formation and early history of the Edinburgh Social Union, which gave Traquair her first mural scheme commission In 185, and relates the Union to current guild developments in British arts and crafts: her work in. the field of manuscript illumination is discussed in the contexts of relationship to the scheme and of her encouragement by Ruskin. An account in chapter three of public debate in Edinburgh on the interdependence of British applied arts and architecture introduces three further major Edinburgh mural schemes by Traquair which display increased confidence, technical proficiency and a more direct awareness of wider English developments. Chapter four views Traquair's involvement in technical experimentation as one aspect of an Edinburgh craft renaissance of the nineties. Her work in the disciplines of Illustration, illuminatIon and bookbinding, and her established identity not only as a mural decorator but as both an individual craft worker and a member of local and British guils in this decade are discussed in chapter five. The breadth of her London reputation, partly symptomatic of closer personal links between Edinburgh and London in the new century, is described in an essay on her enamelwork which forms chapter six. The final chapter discusses further commissions received from private patrons and through architects in the post-1900 period, ranging from ecclesiastical and domestic decoration to book illustration. In conclusion, the career of Phoebe Traquair, like that of fellow Edinburgh craftwarkers, is seen to have been bath stylistically and theoretically allied to English and especially London practice. In personal terms Traquair's approach to her work is judged to have been essentially the result of loyality to the values of Ruskin, with an intrinsic dedication to spiritual ideals, and of a broad and alert interest in and. response to historic and contemporary arts, shared with members of various circles of friends in and outside Edinburgh including scholars, clerics, craftworkers, architects, and collectors. I declare that this thesis has been composed by myself and Is entirely my own work. -7 ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations have been used cat. catalogue coil, collection ETJL Edinburgh University Library exhib. exhibited fol. folio GUL Glasgow University Library ill. illustrated manuscript NLS 'ational Library of Scotland p1. plate ref. reference SRO Scottish Record Office vol. volume 8 To the artist, be he the poet, paia• ter or musician, the world is a great treasure house, stored with endless material for him to use, teach yourself to match the beauty of red-tipped buds, sunlight through green leaves, the yellow gorse on the hill, the song of wild birds, so on, step by step, the world opens out. This is life. This is to live, the perfection comes when one's awn life is in harmony with this beauty Phoebe Traquair in a letter of c. l83 to her nephew Villie !'!oss atroduction When Phoebe Traquair died. in Edinburgh on 4 August 1936 at the age of 84, the fullest obituary notice was published not in The Scots.an but in the London Times. Whereas the Edinburgh newspaper labelled her a 'notable personality" the Times notice, from the pen of the retired director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Sir James Lewis Caw, was headed 'Xrs Traquair: Mural Painting and. Art Craftsmanship'.2 Caw chronicled the career of this 'little woman ... sparely built but overflowing with nervous energy' in broad terms, lightly covering the various media in which she worked: embroidery, illumination, tooled leatherwork and. enamelling.3 However he concentrated principally on her mural decorations which had. also preoccupied his article for The Art Journal, published in London, in 1900. There, with considerably more space at his disposal, Caw had written of Traquair that Since the golden age of decoration in Italy mural work more competent in technique has been done time and again, but scarce anything so beautiful and nothing more truly inspired. Her art is the spontaneous efflorescence of her imagination, her religion, and her love of beauty: and these are of no common order. So that despite defects of technique and drawing, her work possesses the elusive yet abiding elements of charm, and the Indefinable yet authentic marks of a noble passion and an exalted inspiration.' Although Traqualr was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy In 1920 the first woman to receive this honour -- in her lifetime, as Caw noted in his obituary, her work and name were declared to be known to only a small circle which excluded 'even the habitvés of /0 Scottish. art exhibitions'. The 'unusual character' of her art work then, as now, was more familiar in London than in Edinburgh, her adopted city. In common with a number of artist-craftsmen, Traquafr's varied career as a member of the British arts and crafts movement from the 1880s to the early 192 Os is only now beginning to be reassessed. Some instances of this may be cited here. In the new display at the Victoria and flbert Museum in London given to British Vesign 1900 to 1960, an important haliotis shell chalice of 1905 (catalogue F.56], designed by her architect son Ramsay with enamels by Phoebe Traquair and set in a silver mount by the Edinburgh silversmith 3 1! Talbot graces an Ashbee cabinet. In the museum's redisplayed Jewellery Gallery, she is almost the sole representative of Scottish fizi-de-siècle jewellers, with seven pieces credited to her: the other is the Glasgow designer Talwin Morris. The acquisition of a number of good pieces by her in the rnid-1970s has allowed the museum to show adequately this single facet of her career, building on her representation In their major 1952 exhibition of Victorian and Edwardlan Decorative Arts. Alan Crawford's recent biography of C R Ashbee has placed Traquair in the same league as the leading enameller of the arts and crafts movement, Alexander Fisher. s Again, a review by Robert Harbison of the Edinburgh volume in the series The Buildings of Scotland, published in the London Sunday TilDes In 1.984 singled out the architect Sir Robert Lcrlmer (1864-1929) and 'the intriguing Phoebe Traquair, an art nouveau Blake' as the two Edinburgh designers worthy of mention.