Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese
William Zachs introduces Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets in all their variety in the BHLM collection and Elizabeth Cumming writes an essay on the recently acquired calligraphic illuminations of Phoebe Anna Traquair.
How do I love thee, let me count the ways? Virtually everyone knows this one line from the group of forty-four sonnets composed in 1845-6 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for her lover and soon to be husband, the poet Robert Browning. The collection’s title derives from Browning’s nickname for Elizabeth, ‘my little Portuguese’.
In 1990 I paid a visit with my parents to the Perthshire home of booksellers Colin Hamilton and Kulgin Duval, who became dear friends and mentors. They showed us a copy of the 1925 edition of the Sonnets, elegantly printed by Dr Hans Mardersteig at his Officina Bodoni Press in Verona in a limited edition. This particular copy was specially bound in what is sometimes called a ‘designer binding’, by Elizabeth Greenhill, the doyenne of British designer bookbinders. Colin and Kulgin showed us another copy of the same book, this one with a completely different and equally compelling binding by Angela James. It was a new world opening up as we gingerly held each of the eight volumes of this same printed text, each one bound by a woman, each a unique response to Browning’s Sonnets and and representing the best of contemporary designer book-binding. ‘How shall I bind thee, let me count the ways.’
My generous parents agreed to buy the group of eight bindings. It surprised me to learn that there were hundreds of editions of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, many of them as elegantly printed as Dr Mardersteig’s. There was also an intriguing story of a forgery by one of the legendary figures in the late-Victorian-early Edwardian book world: Thomas J. Wise, who ‘discovered’ what he claimed to be a rare privately-printed first edition of the Sonnets. In fact it was a modern production of his own deceitful design. Ironically this was by far the most expensive edition, that is if one could find a copy. The majority of editions can be found for modest sums. The stories of these acquisitions have a charm all their own.
All this gentle collecting in shops on my travels and from dealers’ catalogues happened before the Internet changed the ways previously-owned books are bought. I remember putting the first search on Abebooks in about 2001. There were something like 500 hits for Browning’s Sonnets. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, I found this opportunity devastating and stopped collecting the Sonnets, except in one particular way: when I could acquire a copy of the 1925 Officina Bodoni edition I would commission a British woman binder to add to Colin and Kulgin collection. Thus far we have added seven more bindings to the original eight.
It was not until the summer of 2024 that things changed dramatically. A group of 25 parchment leaves with beautiful calligraphy and illumination by Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair appeared at Bonham’s auction in London. In the light of these utterly beautiful works, I had to reconsider the prohibition I had imposed on myself.
The story of Phoebe Anna Traquair’s engagement with the Sonnets from the Portuguese is told below by my friend Elizabeth Cumming, who is a world authority on Traquair specifically and Scottish Arts & Crafts more generally.
As a preamble to Elizabeth’s excellent article, here is the first of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. Please take a moment to read it.
Sonnet 1
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ‘ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove, ..
‘Guess now who holds thee?’ ‘—Death!’ I said. But there,
The silver answer rang .. ‘Not Death, but Love.’
The first edition of the Sonnets, Chapman & Hall, 1850
The Artist
Phoebe Anna Moss HRSA (1852-1936) was educated at the Royal Dublin Society where she was assigned to provide illustrations for the palaeontologist Ramsay Heatley Traquair, the Society’s Professor of Zoology. Married in 1873, the Traquairs settled in Edinburgh in spring 1874 on Dr Traquair’s appointment as curator of natural history at the Museum of Science and Art (today’s National Museums of Scotland). She produced beautiful and imaginative, colour-rich art across a number of fields including embroidery, mural decoration and art enamelling. A constant additional craft from the 1880s until the early 1900s was manuscript illumination.
Manuscript illumination
As a child Traquair had been familiar with the Book of Kells in the library of Trinity College. In adulthood she was self-taught in illumination and would learn much from studying and copying medieval manuscripts in many British libraries. In 1887 she enjoyed a brief correspondence with the Victorian writer and collector John Ruskin who lent her medieval manuscripts to study and copy. Her first self-assigned major project was an illumination of the entire Psalms of David (National Galleries of Scotland), a major task halted in the 1890s a decade when her focus in illumination switched to working with modern English poetry, starting with Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1889-1892, Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, Duke University).
For her brother William Richardson Moss, a Lancashire textile mill owner, she illuminated Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese from 1892 to 1897 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life between 1898 and 1902. Both are now with the National Library of Scotland. Her last major manuscript was Dante’s La Vita Nuova (1899-1902, private collection) for Sir Thomas and Lady Gibson Carmichael with whom she shared a love of both Italian culture and the poetry of William Blake.
The History of the Sonnets
These fine twenty-five leaves were made in 1894 and 1895 and acquired for the Blackie House collection in 2024, thus returning to the city in which they were made. Although their full history is not yet known, the artist noted that they were commissioned by a Scot, Lord Elcho. We also know that they passed swiftly to his sister, Lady de Vesci (née Charteris, 1851-1939), probably as a special gift, for in a letter of January 1897 to her nephew Traquair wrote that a second ‘set’ belonged to Lady de Vesci. For many years thereafter these beautiful leaves were part of the De Vesci library at Abbey Leix, County Laois. At some stage they were acquired by Morris Kadjatan, a rare book and print seller.
The 1897 mention of a ‘set’ might imply that Traquair illuminated all forty-four Sonnets. However, they stop abruptly with Sonnet 27. There are also gaps: there is here no Sonnet 19 nor 26 (the latter a particularly attractive one in her brother’s set, with exquisite tiny portraits of the Brownings and the artist George Frederic Watts). It is possible that Sonnet 26 illuminated for Lord Elcho may have been kept aside at some point for framing, or, given the fact that these Sonnets were never bound, sold by a later owner.
The poems were not worked through in strict order and in neither set are all pages dated. Sonnet 38 in the Moss set was one of the first illuminated for her brother in 1892, remaining in Edinburgh with all other leaves until sent to the Doves Press for binding in 1897. Traquair worked on both sets in the mid-1890s, with a few in this collection predating their corresponding pages in the Moss set. For example, Sonnet 23 here is dated 1894 but 1895 in the Moss version. Blackie House Sonnets 1-4, 9 and 23 (plus others) were made in 1894, but Sonnets 16-22, 24-27 and 38 not till the following year.
Duplicate leaves were also made. A pencil note in Traquair’s hand on the reverse of Sonnet 2 tells us that she had copied it several times, with one made for the artist William Holman Hunt, and we know one of these was made for herself in 1894 (National Galleries of Scotland).
Method
Traquair used a mix of traditional and more modern materials such as Chinese white. Her working method was first to rule her parchment and write out the poem in graphite before applying the ink calligraphy and images. As with her mural painting, she constantly reconsidered her responses to texts as she worked. Not only might she alter the precise positioning of letters but imagery too could change in a major or minor way on a re-reading. The key image of Sonnet 17, for instance, here differs from that in the Moss version. Her calligraphy in the earlier (pre-1894) pages of the Moss Sonnets is uneven and at times slightly clumsily positioned. These pages, made over approximately eighteen months, have a more cohesive style.
The Sonnets show Traquair to be both a modern and a traditional artist, ever alert to the nuances of language. Her imagery, as well as her chosen colours, is vivid, with each page a personal emotional response to her reading. Each leaf is highly detailed, often reflecting a deep knowledge and understanding of medieval French or Italian book art. Traquair was proud to be part of a European tradition. The critic Margaret Armour explored her art in an article ‘Beautiful Modern Manuscripts’ (The Studio Special Winter Number, 1897), recording Traquair’s admiration of manuscripts of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries when ‘line and colour [were] used with greater delight in the inherent beauty of each (line as a line, colour as colour)’.
Dr Elizabeth Cumming