The latest posts have mainly focused on tapestry, so let's start moving on with something slightly different - the four panels entitled "The Progress of a Soul" by multi-talented creator, artist, mural decorator and craftworker, Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936), a key figure in the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement.
Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and combining in her work Celtic, Byzantine, Gothic and Baroque elements, Traquair produced a wide body of work that included mural decorations and embroideries, illuminated manuscripts and enamels.
Born in Dublin in 1852, Phoebe Anna Moss studied at the School of Design, moving to Edinburgh in 1874, after her marriage to Scottish paleontologist Ramsay Heatley Traquair.
By 1886, she had turned from small-scale embroidered work to large stitched figurative panels. Among the other places she decorated in the late 1800s-early 1900s there are the new chapel of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, the Catholic Apostolic Church and the choir practice room at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral. From the 1880s she worked in commercial book art and private manuscript illumination, and, after 1900, she focused also on enamel work for jewellery or ornaments.
Her richly-coloured embroideries "The Progress of a Soul" were exhibited at the World's Fair at St Louis in 1904. While they can be filed under the tapestry category, the panels - part of the Scottish Art section at the National Gallery in Edinburgh - are also wonderful examples of textile and fiber art, displaying intricate embroidery techniques.
The four embroidered linen panels composed between 1895 and 1902 in silk and gold thread depicted the journey of the human soul through Stress and Despair to ultimate Victory.
The soul is represented as a delicately feminised young man (critics have identified this character as a sort of Apollo/Dionysus/Orpheus or Christ-like figure) dressed in the skin of a leopard.
In the first panel, entitled "The Entrance" (completed in 1895), he moves in an Eden-like land and is depicted as full of "hope and enthusiasm with innocence and ignorance of the realities of life", in the words of the artist's son.
In the second panel a snake encircles his feet, the panel ("The Stress") intending to show how "the forces of evil make their appearance and begin to destroy all that is cherished and held dear".
In the third panel ("Despair") the young man looks defeated, his exhausted body locked in the snake's deadly embrace, the tapestry showing how "frustration, disillusionment and despair have gained the upper hand".
In the last panel the young man triumphs instead and he is portrayed at the very end of his journey, with his head encircled in a crown of grape leaves, embraced and kissed by an angel. The tapestry shows "ultimate salvation by the grace of Higher powers rather than by the merits of the individual".
The panels - featuring a series of symbolic elements such as birds, flowers and grape vines (some elements such as the grapes and the leopard skin point towards Dionysus) - were loosely based on the story "Denys L'Auxerrois" from Imaginary Portraits by the English critic and writer Walter Pater. The author imagined in it the return of Dionysus among men in an ancient town of medieval France. Denys in the story represents the passion of the senses, injecting in the world a new ecstasy of living and stirring the artists by his visible presence.
Thinking about the main character in this story and looking at Traquair's fourth panel, it's easy to understand why some critics identified the figure in these panels as Dionysus: spirituality and eroticism meet and combine in the last panel, in a passionate yet delicate embrace that anticipates the near-mystic splendour of the amorous experience as portrayed a few years later by Gustav Klimt in "The Kiss".
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