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Phoebe Anna Traquair was the daughter of Dr William Moss, a physician in Dublin, where she was born in 1852. In her late teens she enrolled in classes in drawing and design at the Royal Dublin Institute and was soon given the task of making drawings of fossil fish for J. Ramsay Traquair, a young palaeontologist in the same institution. In 1873 she and Traquair were married and when, the next year, he was appointed Keeper of Natural History at the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art (now the Royal Museum in Chambers St), they moved to this city.

Traquair had three children, two boys and a girl, but by the 1880s she had resumed her artistic career and became involved with the Edinburgh Social Union, which was founded in 1885 by Patrick Geddes. In that year the Union asked her to undertake her first professional engagement, the decoration of a mortuary for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. The hospital decided to turn a small windowless coal house into a mortuary where bodies could be left "reverently and lovingly" until the children were taken by the parents for burial. Traquair covered the walls of this small room with paintings illustrating the redemption of mankind.

Her next major commission was to paint the murals in the Song School which she began in 1888 and finished in 1892.

The Song School was a milestone in her career, she now had her own studio, and almost immediately began on her great work of decorating the Catholic Apostolic Church in Broughton Street, called "a jewelled crown" by a contemporary critic. Is was her largest work. Smaller scale murals throughout Britain followed and bookbinding, enamelling, embroidery, illuminating and book illustrations all continued. In 1900 she had been proposed for membership of the Royal Scottish Academy but had been turned down as not being "an artist by profession", but in 1920 she was elected as the first honorary woman member. She continued to work for the next five years until failing eyesight stopped her. She died in 1936 after an extraordinarily rich, full life.

Further information is contained in the booklet: Phoebe Anna Traquair's Benedicite Omnia Opera, Mural Paintings in The Song School by Margaret G. Campbell, which is available from the Cathedral Office or during visits to the Song School.
 
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