As the recent exhibition of her work at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has demonstrated, Phoebe Traquair was one of the leading artists of the Celtic Revival and the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland. Born and brought up in Dublin, where she attended classes in art and design offered by the Royal Dublin Society, she moved to Edinburgh in 1874 marrying the young Scots palaeontologist Ramsay Traquair. For the next decade she was preoccupied with her family, two sons being born in 1874 and 1875 and a daughter in 1879, but in 1885 she made her debut as a professional artist with a remarkable series of murals in the Mortuary Chapel of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Lauriston Lane, Edinburgh. From then on she pursued a prolific and astonishingly versatile career, excelling as muralist, easel painter, illuminator, bookbinder, embroideress, furniture decorator and enameller. Those who admired her included Ruskin, who lent her illustrated manuscripts to study, Holman Hunt, Walter Crane, Patrick Geddes and W.B. Yeats. 'I find (her work)', Yeats wrote in 1906, 'far more beautiful than I had foreseen - one can only judge of it when one sees it in a great mass, for only then does one get any idea of her extraordinary abundance of imagination. She has but one story, the drama of the soul .... She herself is delightful, a saint and a little singing bird.'

The present picture is one of her finest, combining great subtlety of drawing and characterisation with the formality of design and iridescent colours which typify her work in general. It takes its subject from Rossett's sonnet Love's Testament, no.3 in The House of Life sequence, the last six lines of which are inscribed by the artist on the frame. From an early date Rossetti, who died in 1882, eight years after she settled in Edinburgh, was one of Traquair's great heroes and an immense influence on her work. He inspired her compositions and on several occasions she actually included him in her paintings, together with other comtemporaries she admired - a 'Company of the Blessed' such as often occurs in the early Italian pictures which also influenced her. He appears in her murals in the Children's Mortuary Chapel and those she painted in the Song School of St. Mary's Cathedral in Palmerston Place (1888-92), as well as the The Awakening, an easel picture of 1887 sold by Christie's in London on 25 October 1991, lot 58 (see Phoebe Anna Traquair, exh. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1993, cat. pp.6, 15 and 20 for reproductions).

Rossetti also provided many of the texts which she illuminated. One of her first illuminated manuscripts, dating from 1890, took as its subject the four 'willowwood' sonnets in The House of Life (1993 exh., no. 29), and during the late 1890s, the period which saw her greatest achievements in this field, she treated both his early poem The Blessed Damozel (1897-8) and the whole of The House of Life (1898-1902; 1993 exh., no. 51). The latter manuscript, now in the National Library of Scotland, was undertaken for her brother, William Richardson Moss - appropriately since he also possessed works by Rossetti himself; and the present picture, dating from 1898, must be closely related to it, possibly repeating the composition of one of its miniatures. The conception may also reflect Traquair's work on The Blessed Damozel, the imagery being strikingly similar to that of the poem. The House of Life sonnets continued to fascinate her, inspiring an enamelled triptych of 1903 (The Scottish National Gallery Exhibition; 1993 exh., no.73), an embroidered panel of c.1904 (see 1993 exh., no. 79), and the decoration of a piano, commissioned from Robert Lorimer by Frank Tennant for the Great Hall at Lympne Castle, Kent, in 1908 (see 1993 exh., no. 124). The appeal which these sonnets held for her is not difficult to understand, treating as they do the subject of redemption, Yeat's 'drama of the soul', which was the constant theme of her work