I was delighted to be asked to choose my favourite interior for Homes & Interiors Scotland magazine. For the ‘I LOVE THIS’ feature in the current issue I chose the Mansfield Traquair Centre in Edinburgh.
I Love This
Following in the footsteps of previous contributors, including the artist Jim Lambie and the film-maker Richard Jobson, I wracked my brains for an interior which has made a great impression on me and which inspires me to visit it time after time.
‘To walk through the red doors…’
It didn’t take long to decide upon the outstanding mural cycle by Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) commissioned by the Catholic Apostolic Church, which she began in 1893. Traquair was born in Dublin and trained at the Royal Dublin Society School of Art. Following her marriage in 1873, she moved to Edinburgh where she became Scotland’s foremost Arts and Crafts artist. As I write in the magazine: ‘to walk through the red doors of the Mansfield Traquair Centre in Edinburgh is to walk into a masterpiece’.
The Evangelist and the Apostle
The Mansfield Traquair Trust, who care for the Centre, kindly supplied images of the Chancel Arch and a detail of The Evangelist and the Apostle from the murals upon it, as you can see above. My text concludes ‘Traquair’s celebratory imagery never fails to lift my spirits’ and you can experience it too: the Centre holds Open Days throughout the year and tours and talks for private groups can be arranged. The next Open Day is on Sunday 5 December 2021, information about which can be found here. You can also become a Friend of the Mansfield Traquair Centre and thus enjoy a range of events whilst supporting its education and on-going preservation programmes. See if you love the murals by Phoebe Anna Traquair too!
For more about Phoebe Anna Traquair, you might like this article. For another of my favourite Edinburgh interiors, that of Fountainbridge Library, follow this link. If you are interested in murals by women artists, then I suggest you read this feature about Jann Haworth’s Utah Women’s Mural.
