‘It is not an allegory but the Te Deum’: Phoebe Anna Traquair, art, and the Divine.’

Dr Clare Broome Saunders, Senior Tutor, Blackfriars Hall

Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936) was one of the leading contributors to the British Arts and Crafts movement, and one of the first three women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy. Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Dublin, she was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed at Trinity College, particularly to see the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art.

The influence of these medieval documents – the use of colour, the interaction of text and image to create new meanings – reverberated throughout her long and varied professional life.  After marrying the Scottish palaeontologist Dr Ramsay Heatley Traquair, she moved with him to Edinburgh, where she illustrated his papers for the next thirty years, with a Ruskinian attention to what she called in a letter ‘all the unapproachable beauty in nature’s details’. At the same time, she embarked on a career that focused on the illustration of literary texts, mural painting, enamels, and embroideries. Traquair wanted to show a society in which she saw loneliness, struggle, and isolation a vision of joy and hope, where a focus on the world around and local environment could elevate the everyday to the divine.

In this talk, Dr Clare Broome Saunders will explore how Traquair used her public art commissions to reconnect society with the environment and with each other, as well as leading them ultimately to a communion with God. She will also consider the ways in which inspiration from medieval texts and art, and William Blake’s medievalism, offered Traquair the imaginative means to express this artistic vision.

Tickets: Free
Venue: Blackfriars Hall - St Giles Oxford, OX1 3LY United Kingdom Array ( [lat] => 51.756248 [lng] => -1.259881 )