Among The Angels

Nearly all my time in Edinburgh I was absorbed in Mrs Traquair's work and find it far more beautiful that I had foreseen - one can only judge of it when one sees it in a great mass, for only then does one get any idea of her extraordinary abundance of imagination . . . I have come from her work overwhelmed, astonished, as I used to come long ago from Blake, and from him alone.

This is part of a letter full of wonder that W.B. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory in 1906, about the Irish-born artist, Phoebe Anna Traquair. How did she become the first woman to be given the distinction of honorary membership of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920? And how did a photograph of her likeness come to be on the title page of the Biblethick current Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture?

Phoebe Anna Moss was born near Dublin in 1852, and raised in Wicklow. When she was in her late teens, she went to classes in art and design at the RDS. As part of her training, she was given the technically-demanding job of illustrating fish-fossils for a young Scotsman, Ramsay Traquair. Traquair was a palaeontologist who was based at that time in the National History Museum.

It was a splendidly Victorian courtship: Phoebe and Ramsay fell in love as they worked together on the illustrations for his book, Carboniferous Gunoid Fishes. In 1873, they married in Dublin. She was 21 and he was 33.

If Ramsay Traquair had not been appointed Keeper of Natural History at the Museum of Science and Art in Edinburgh that same year, Dublin would almost certainly have been uniquely enriched by the work his wife was to go on to produce in Scotland. Although Phoebe returned occasionally to Wicklow for holidays, she was never to live permanently in Ireland again.

In the first few years of the Traquairs' marriage, their three red-haired children occupied much of her time. She still managed to be a regular visitor to the museum where her husband worked - which is now the Royal Museum of Scotland.

Then as now, the museum was a vast glory hole, not only of scientific artefacts, but also of artistic ones. It contained ceramics, ethnographical objects, furniture and enamels, as well as being the venue for several touring exhibitions, among them Art Needlework (1878), Indian Decorative Work (1879), and German, French and Dutch Engravings (1879). What she saw at the museum on her many visits undoubtedly continued to inspire her artistic sensibility.

Within a decade of her marriage, she was beginning to work again. Like most creative married women of her era, she worked mainly from home during this time, to private commissions. Her work during this period was smallscale and portable. She embroidered, did book illustrations, and then became interested in illuminating manuscripts: tiny precise versions of her later large-scale mural work. She also sketched and painted her children, as well as painting portraits of people who came to the house to sit for her. Perhaps her work would never have reached the broader public if it had not been for the creation of the Edinburgh Social Union (ESU) in the 1880s, of which Phoebe became a member.

The EHS was a quintessentially middle-class philanthropic society, typical of the time. One of its founder members was Patrick Geddes, a biologist, town planner and sociologist. Other members included designers, clerics, architects, and creative artists.

Its philosophy was based on a response to the conditions of the working classes of the day. In Scotland's industrialised society, the ESU members felt that people were no longer using their hands to make things: that creativity had been replaced by the mechanical act of operating machinery.

The union saw it as its duty to try and bring beauty to the poor. It set up studios in the West End of Edinburgh to teach volunteers wood-carving and art, who were then encouraged to teach the working classes. They also employed artists to decorate the walls of various new public buildings in the popular art form of the time, the mural.

It was one of these projects that first brought Phoebe's work to public attention, in which she created the first of her three sets of Edinburgh murals. She painted the walls of the new mortuary chapel of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in 1885. It was a small project, but one which attracted much support and interest, partly due to the emotional investment of the public in the building.

It was as a result of this that she was asked to paint the walls of the Song School at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral. The Song School is a separate building within the cathedral grounds. It is a beautiful barrel-vaulted chapel, and is the only purpose-built choir school in Scotland. It is still used every day.

Between 1888 and 1892, Phoebe worked on the murals that were to cover the entire interior walls. She chose to paint a mural illustrating the canticle (a sung prayer during Lent) Benedictie, Omnia Opera - O all Ye Works of the Lord, bless Ye the Lord. The result was something glorious, reminiscent of the styles of Blake and Burne-Jones. The walls pulse with colour and a sensation of praise.

On the back wall, Phoebe painted the boy choristers who practised in the school each day, likenesses so accurate that their children and grandchildren still come today to look and marvel. She included life-size portraits of those people she either admired or knew, which marks the murals as a unique type of social documentation of the day. Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Carlyle, Blake and Dante are all there. There's also the explorer, Stanley, who received the Freedom of Edinburgh at the time she was working on these murals, and General Gordon, one of the great war heroes of the time.

And of course there are angels beyond number, their gold haloes flashing in the dim light, all of them surrounded by birds and flowers, and gorgeous pastoral landscapes. For me, there was also the delight and surprise of recognising the Sugarloaf mountain in one panel: Phoebe did not forget her Wicklow. The murals have recently been restored at a cost of £300,000, and they glow with all the brightness of newly-uncovered treasure.

To spend a couple of days in Edinburgh searching out Phoebe Anna Traquair's work is to become ever more amazed both by its quality and its astonishing variety. Her enamels in the Royal Museum of Scotland - where her husband once worked - are iridescent squares of perfection. If Harry Clarke had ever made jewellery, you could imagine that it would look something like this: delicate silver-mounted pictures of red-haired angels, worked in foil to create a sense of incandescence and depth.

There are also some strange and exotic objects, pure Victorian: abalone and paua shell cups with long silver stems, decorated with tiny enamels of lovers and butterflies, as well as tiny silver boxes with inlaid lids. The jewellery she made is currently awaiting its display case in the new Museum of Scotland, which opens at the end of this month.

In the National Gallery of Scotland, there is a quartet of exquisitely-embroidered panels, each of them the size of a dining-room table. Entitled Entrance, Stress, Despair and Victory, they depict Walter Pater's story Denys L'Auxerrois: the illustration of a soul's progress. The embroideries are like a Celtic version of Klimt's paintings: a mosaic of tiny stitches in gold thread and coloured silks, powerfully capturing a sense of betrayal, pain, and redemptive love.

Phoebe's third and final Edinburgh murals are in the Catholic Apostolic Church in Mansfield Place: without doubt, the most ambitious and critically-acclaimed project of her lifetime. It was not her church, but her work transcended religious borders.

At that time, Mansfield Place had a wealthy congregation, which was anxious to have its own church celebrated artistically. Phoebe was given a large commission - her first proper fee - and a vast chrysalis of scaffolding was erected. Between 1893 and 1901, she completed the work, murals which cover hundreds of square feet, often without making any preliminary sketches. There are interpretations of the Second Coming of Christ, and angels beyond counting. Rainbows arc across the walls. There are flowers and prophets and apostles. The 10 virgins of the parable who take their lamps and go in search of paradise are walking through a Wicklow landscape.

The sheer scale of the work is staggering. Like Michelangelo in the poem, Long Legged Fly, by her admirer, Yeats, Phoebe must have lain on the scaffolding for years, her mind working in meditative silence. The church - a listed building - is now in commercial hands, and the venue can be rented for events. Both the roof of the church and the murals are in poor repair but are due to be fully restored over the next decade in a £5 million project, aided by funding from the Heritage Lottery and Heritage Scotland.

The most modest of all her works on public display is her self-portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In contrast to the other vast, gilt-framed paintings in the room, Phoebe's self-portrait is a tiny, subtle lozenge of a painting, with a chameleon-like quality to it, almost fading from sight as you look at it.

When her husband died in 1912, Phoebe went off travelling. She visited India in 1913; Egypt twice, in 1914 and 1921; and North Africa in 1925, at the age of 73. She died in 1936, after a life as richly textured as one of her murals. Astonishingly, none of her work is held in any of our State museums or galleries; surely an exhibition of her work here is long overdue?