Forgotten Masters: Phoebe Traquair
One of the most intriguing artists associated with the PreRaphaelites... an heir to the movement... was Phoebe Anna Traquair, a multi-talented artist associated with the Celtic Revival/Scottish Renaissance in Arts and Crafts of the early twentieth century. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she attended the School of Design in Dublin before moving to Edinburgh.
Phoebe was greatly influenced by the
Pre-Raphaelites,
William Morris and the
Arts & Crafts Movement,
William Blake, and the Italian painters of the early
Italian Renaissance (the period from which the “PreRaphaelites”… before Raphael… took their name). She was a correspondent of
John Ruskin, a friend of
William Holman Hunt, and pursued a successful career as an artist, designer, and craft worker achieving an international recognition.
Traquair produced a staggering body of work over her long career. The work by Traquair that I first stumbled upon… and which I still consider to be her singular masterpiece… is the four-panel tapestry,
The Progress of the Soul, the imagery of which was based upon the short story by
Walter Pater,
Denys l'Auxerrois. The work is a heady mixture of Christian and Pagan imagery and was begun as as ‘homage’ to the memory of Walter Pater who had died a year before.
Traquair spent the years 1895-1902 working on the four-panel tapestries. There is no suggestion of the use of assistants which makes the achievement even more impressive considering the scale (6 x 10 feet). The work depicts the odyssey of the human soul as it/he travels through four stages of life:
The Entrance,
Stress, Despair and
Victory,
Delving deeper into the iconography, I have found that it is impossible… and probably wrong-headed to attempt to read any definitive, specific, clear, linear narrative to the tapestry. Still… we can come to our own interpretations, can we not? Let us look at the first panel…
The central figure appears to be as a young man, though he’s sufficiently androgynous, feminized in appearance… typical of the influence of the female figures in early Pre-Raphaelite painting… but also common to the ideal beautiful males of Renaissance painting (as in the St. Matthew in DaVinci’s
Last Supper, which Dan Brown argued was Mary Magdalene).
Of course the beautiful, golden-haired, beardless young man with a lyre immediately draws to mind both Apollo… and his brother/compliment: Dionysus, the God of wine, passion, and ecstasy. One might even imagine him as Orpheus, the legendary musician known for his lyre, who was torn to pieces by the Bacchants, adherents of the cult of Dionysus. The link with Dionysus may have been inspired in part by Titian’s masterpiece,
Bacchus and Ariadne, housed in the National Gallery of Art, London. The grape vines and the leopard skin reinforces the connection with Dionysus.
In the second panel a serpent (Python, the earth-dragon of Delphi, and Apollo’s enemy in the underworld) encircles “Apollo’s” feet, while disembodied hands grasp at at pluck the flowers, the birds, the lyre, his animal skin, and the grapevine. The grape vine is broken, flowers plucked, birds killed… and a swan… a bird once sacred to Apollo… savagely bloodies and kills the rabbit from the first panel.
In the third panel we have a tragic view of the aftermath of Apollo/Dionysus/Orpheus/Christ’s travails: his leopard skin cloak is torn; the Python (now doubled in size) encircles his exhausted body; his hair has become as dark as the mood; there are briers and thorns at his feet… and his lyre… the instrument of his artistic creation… is now broken.
In the final panel he is presented victorious… in a moment of apotheosis… his feet placed upon a rainbow above the Python. His head encircled in a crown of grape leaves he is embraced, held aloft, and kissed by an angel.
Is this a victory through death? Is it an expression of the misunderstood artist… the lover of beauty… attacked by those disembodied hands? The outcome of the Victory is not that they went on to live happily ever after. Quite to the contrary: several critics understand the Victory to be a passionate union in death. And then there are the unmistakable homoerotic undercurrents. As a result of Oscar Wilde’s very public trial and sentencing, Walter Pater was placed under a good deal of scrutiny, and was the target of much criticism and hate.
As much as I admire
The Progress of the Soul, I recognize that it is Traquair’s mural work that has most served to assure her place in the history of art. The artist painted murals for various religious and charitable institutions.
Traquair’s best known work and quite likely her masterpiece is in the vast former Catholic Apostolic Church (1893–1901) which has been called “Edinburgh’s Sistine Chapel”, and “a jeweled crown”. It was this work which helped to confirm her international recognition. The de-consecrated church is now the Mansfield Traquair Centre. Traquair spent eight years on these murals, doing hardly any preparatory drawings before sketching the figures directly onto the walls. This is a particularly stunning achievement given the curved surfaces of the chapel ceiling.
Personally, I cannot help but envy the artist who need not deal with gallery directors, the whims of collectors, and the games of the contemporary art world… but instead was given the opportunity to spend an extended period of time employed upon a work worthy of her talents and ambitions… and a work of such a scale and purpose as to inspire the artist to rise to the challenge.
