Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) was one of the leading contributors to the British arts and crafts movement, and she was one of the first three women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy. Born in Dublin, she was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed at Trinity College, particularly the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art. After marrying the Scottish paleontologist Ramsay Heatley Traquair, she moved to Edinburgh where she illustrated his papers for the next 30 years, with a Ruskinian attention to what she called in a letter “all the unapproachable beauty in nature's details.” She embarked on a career that focused on the illustration of literary texts, mural painting, enamels, and embroideries. In this talk, Clare Broome Saunders explored Traquair's celebration of the natural world—focusing on her use of public art commissions to reconnect society with the beauties of the environment—and the ways in which inspiration from medieval texts and art (including Dante’s Divine Comedy), and William Blake's medievalism, offered her the imaginative means to express this artistic vision.
Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple, a Future of the Humanities Project senior fellow, moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master's Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Stephencdickson.
