Phoebe Anna Traquair 1852-1936

Mansfield Church Nave © Tiana Sidey

Free spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement

Phoebe Moss was raised in Ireland and attended classes in Art and Design in Dublin. The course emphasised skilled craftsmanship - the accurate rending of form, tone and colour. She married the Scots palaeontologist Ramsey Traquair, who was appointed keeper of Natural History at the Museum of Science and Art (now Royal Scottish Museum) in Edinburgh. She provided illustrations for his research papers throughout his life.

Her early work was predominately domestic embroidery, illustration and watercolour paintings. In 1885 she was commissioned by the Edinburgh Society Union to decorate the mortuary chapel at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. This was executed in 1885-6 in her ‘spare’ time. Her next commission was for the Song School of the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary, an Italianate work with four panels executed in 1888-1892.

The work for which she is best known is her decoration of the interior of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Mansfield Place, Edinburgh, commissioned in 1892 and taking her nearly the whole of the next decade to finish.

After this she included bookbinding and enamelling in her repertoire, exhibiting countrywide.

After her husband died (1912) she travelled extensively and produced work well into the 1920s, including the railings at 25 Bridge St. in Colinton now recently restored.

She was the first woman to be elected as an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920, twenty years after her name was first put forward.