Women Artists and the Decorative Arts 1880-1935

The Gender of Ornament

Janice Helland, Bridget Elliott, Janice Helland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138721456
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351761185
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.

1

Patterns of life: the art and design of Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mary Seton Watts

Elizabeth Cumming

In December 1905, during the Royal Scottish Academy display of the memorial exhibition of the painter George Frederick Watts, Phoebe Anna Traquair¹ entertained his widow Mary Seton Watts² to a tour of the three city buildings she had decorated since the mid-1880s.³ This was a rare instance of direct professional contact between two British artist-craftsworkers equally committed to public art and to the improvement of craft design. Central to their work was a desire to respond to the needs of modern society and the individual, and to achieve this through both the democratic art of architectural decoration and the careful fashioning of craft objects. Across a range of media, their art contained both the mysticism of Symbolist art and the tactile richness of the handmade: they celebrated the spiritual life through colour, form and pattern.

In recent years Traquair and Watts have tended to be linked. Both were not only Celtic artists working abroad – the former Irish by birth but working in Scotland, the latter Scottish and married to an English artist – but also conceived and decorated modern memorial chapels in Edinburgh and Surrey during the later 1890s. Historians have tended to assume that Watts asked Traquair for advice when she was devising or working on the painted gesso interior of her chapel at Compton near Guildford.⁴ The survival in the Watts archive of a Traquair letter,⁵ offering advice to an associate of Watts on manuscript illumination, and dating probably from August 1897, does support a degree of professional contact between them: it records a visit by Traquair to the studio of G. F. Watts, where one may presume that she was entertained by his wife.⁶

Yet, despite a paucity of documentation to support active dialogue, their art and their craft have both shared and distinct identities. They certainly embraced the new equality of craft with art as propounded by the theorists and fellow designers of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly since the 1880s and its socio-political dimension which promoted the act of making as an empowering force to engender the good life. With this in mind, the careers of both artists expanded from the domestic arts into the male-dominated territory of public-building decoration. Here they pursued the idea of ‘decoration’ as a specifically feminine activity and, in their bid to work with their public, they published keys to their iconography.

This chapter focuses primarily on the ideas each artist contributed to the concept of ‘decoration’ as an intellectual art in which thought and belief were deeply embedded. Although these decorative schemes were to be accessed across society, both iconography and materials were consciously gendered. While their media and range of visual sources were essentially Victorian, I suggest that Traquair and Watts strategically conflated a number of previously contained areas within art practice. I look specifically at how, in their bid for modernity, they synthesized the crafts within the fine arts, the ‘femininity’ of the domestic studio with the ‘masculinity’ of the public building. In the case of Mary Watts, I also examine the extent to which she abolished a semi-static relationship between the ‘active’ individual artist and her ‘passive’ community audience.

A principal difference between the two artists lies in their daily working relationships with their peers. In this context, Traquair surfaces as a loner, a deeply independent craftworker, happy for the produce of her work to be shared by the community, but also anxious to operate a solo studio and maintain total control of her operations. Although she was obliged to negotiate with the patrons of her mural schemes, she rejected one commission that would have necessitated tighter control by a committee, namely the Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland.⁷ From the 1890s she contributed to exhibitions internationally, keen to contribute her ideas to a public forum, to display, celebrate and, where possible, debate her ideas. When Traquair worked for mass production, it was strictly limited to commercial book illustration and cover design (Cumming, 1987, pp. 162–3; Cumming, 1993, pp. 57, 60–1, 66, 68, 71). In the 1880s she also briefly participated in the teaching of design, but in her entire career only twice had assistance in her work.⁸ She sustained the ideal of the artist who alone can realize her concepts and thus positioned herself at the ‘art’ end of the Arts and Crafts spectrum. By contrast, Watts, working in the Surrey countryside, chose to establish a collective of workers to materialize her public art – the decoration of her mortuary chapel – and went on to set up two pottery guilds and to design for textile production.

The mortuary chapel decorated by Phoebe Traquair has an unusual history covering two sites and two decades. Initially it was intended to be a simply furnished room, a place of comfort and rest in which grieving families could mourn a dead infant. The philanthropic Edinburgh Social Union, responding to a request from the governors of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children to fund a room separate from that already used for post-mortem operations, asked Phoebe Traquair in April 1885 to decorate a small converted coalhouse.⁹ A mother of three young children, she agreed without hesitation.¹⁰

This first mural decoration (completed in 1886) synthesized interpretations of medieval and Byzantine art and focused on the theme of motherhood. The tiny, dark room was painted in gold and the primary colours normally associated with illuminated manuscripts, causing Edinburgh Professor Gerard Baldwin Brown to call it a ‘piece of illumination enlarged’ (Baldwin Brown, 1889, p. 225). Apart from a dominant Theokotos figure, the painted walls represented angel powers as intercessors and comforters. These feminized figures were supporters of both the souls of dead children and their grieving mothers, with one tiny figure of a ‘new-born soul’ receiving the robe of holiness and an angel helping a mortal ‘in the effort to offer up its human heart – an effort beyond it, without the strongest divine help’.¹¹ Feminine qualities of nurture and support were underlined to comfort the mother and care for her own needs. On the opposite wall, three angel powers held globes that symbolized the journey of the soul through life and beyond – a theme to be developed in 1890s mural and embroidered work – and depicted death ‘as the author of life’.¹² Maternal values were further depicted in a small panel showing the figure of death ‘as kindly mother nursing the poor, maimed, and diseased souls into life’. On the adjacent wall, a reworking of Rossetti’s St Cecilia of 1856–7 illustrated the text For So He Giveth His Beloved Sleep in which an embroider falls dead into the arms of an angel. Such images reflect the visitor’s identity as mother and grieving woman, with the artist herself mirrored as artist-embroiderer.

The side walls of Traquair’s chapel were painted with two pairs of white-robed angel figures based on Blake’s image of the vision of Job’s comforters: ‘When all the morning Stars sang together, & all the Sons of God shouted for joy’.¹³ When the first chapel was demolished in 1894 and a new hospital opened in Rillbank, these were among several sections that did not survive the transfer by horse and cart across the cobbled streets of south Edinburgh.¹⁴ Other parts, somewhat miraculously, did, but required various levels of repainting. In a new red sandstone chapel by George Washington Browne, the children’s hospital architect, two new walls were painted in a much more simplified style. Six cherubim replaced the four from Lauriston Lane and stood in front of a series of six horizontal bands, within a gold border, each representing a stage of creation (Fig. 1.1) A Christian believer, Traquair used such stratification to counter Darwinism. Belief was partnered by her commitment to the family audience: the walls were meant for both children and their parents, and thus intended to convey a joy in the world of nature as much as to celebrate their states of being and way of thinking.

The new scheme was united through colour, a silky burnished wax coating applied to protect the paint surface, and defining borders above and below. In the ‘feminine’ softness of its surface finish, this scheme followed Traquair’s decoration of the Song School, St Mary’s Cathedral (1888–92) but not that of the Mansfield Place Church (1893–1901) where stacked gilded gesso was applied to the wall to achieve the richness demanded by the celebratory, sensuous liturgy, music and vestments of the Catholic Apostolic Church. There, the side chapels of the church illustrated the Parable of the Ten Virgins, using gilded gesso in abundance (1895–7). To give additional texture to haloes and lamps and the gilded borders of small lunettes depicting the life of the Virgin, she added coarse string to give an increased depth. In the hospital chapel, a place of sadness and quiet comfort, the dimensionality was deliberately controlled: the design was completed not by surface richness but through the use of borders. The heavily gilded upper border contained a black lettered text of Psalm 23, while the lower contained a ribbon of souls ‘circling in and out through the Serpent of Eternity’ to return into the hands of God double-powered, having passed through the Trees of Knowledge and of Life. The paintings of this chapel were detailed in a text supplied by the artist and published as a guide by the hospital on their completion in May 1898 (History and Description of the Decorations by Mrs Traquair, 1898).

By this date Traquair was an artist celebrated at home and abroad for her professionalism and use of colour and materials across a range of craft media. As indicators of her growing reputation, the Song School had been featured in The Magazine of Art in 1892 and the Mansfield Place Church was written up in The Studio in 1897, only halfway through its completion. In addition, she was known for her textile work, modern manuscripts and leather bookbindings shown in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London.¹⁵ By 1898 she was also a participating member of the Edinburgh group of women bookbinders affiliated to Frank Karslake’s Guild of Women Binders in London.¹⁶ The Edinburgh binding style was uncoloured, allowing the morocco or pigskin to be press-moulded as a bas-relief. In textile art Traquair sought an integration of ideas through working materials. In bookcover design, while the binding partnered the text, the relationship between concept and fabrication was more lax; but in modern manuscript illumination there was as tight a synthesis of ideas as in embroidery, as colours were chosen and images formed in response to individual thoughts and words.

A decorated interior essentially magnified this concept of the illuminated book to accommodate the user of the building. In the medieval tradition, Traquair’s chapel was specifically intended to be a Book of Life. She recognized parallels between these types of highly personal art, distinguishing them as having ‘lyric’ or ‘epic’ values according to their scale and relationship to the user, and writing of her desire ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Patterns of life: the art and design of Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mary Seton Watts
• 2 May Morris: ubiquitous, invisible Arts and Crafts-woman
• 3 The decorated object: gender, modernism and the design of industrial ceramics in Britain in the 1930s
• 4 Owning femininity: Thea Proctor and the Australian Avant-garde
• 5 The performative art of court dress
• 6 ‘She would not cook the spaghetti …’: domestic and decorative femininity and the film designs of Natacha Rambova
• 7 Laura Nagy: Magyar muse
• 8 Engendering the spaces of modernity: The Women’s Exhibition, Amsterdam 1913
• 9 Housing the work: women artists, modernism and the maison d’artiste: Eileen Gray, Romaine Brooks and Gluck
• 10 Crystal flowers, pink candy hearts and tinsel creation: the subversive femininity of Florine Stettheimer
• Index