Artist. Born in Ireland, the daughter of William Moss, a doctor, she was raised in Dublin and Wicklow, before studying art with the Royal Dublin Society. She was asked to draw fossil fish for Ramsay Traquair (1840 - 1912), who was then keeper of the museum at the Society. The couple married and moved to Edinburgh in 1874, where they settled in Colinton. Traquair went on to become an important part of the arts-and-crafts movement. Her social circle included John Miller Gray (1850-94), the first curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and social reformer Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1932), who commissioned her to paint murals in the mortuary chapel of the original Royal Hospital for Sick Children (1886), which were transported to the new Sciennes building nine years later. The success of these murals brought further commissions including those in the Song School of St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, in Mansfield Place Church (now the Mansfield Traquair Centre) and at Kellie Castle.
She was able to copy illuminated European Mediaeval manuscripts, which had been lent to her by the author John Ruskin (1819 - 1900), and also produced embroidery, enamel-work, jewellery and illustrated books, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life (1904).
Her illuminated manuscript of Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is held by the National Library of Scotland, while embroideries based on the story of the Redcrosse Knight from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, are on display at National Museum of Scotland, alongside examples of her enamel-work and a piano with a case designed by Sir Robert Lorimer (1864 - 1929) which Traquair had decorated. Her work is also held by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is also noted for having decorated various memorials constructed after the First World War. She was invited to exhibit at the World's Fair in Chicago (1893) and St. Louis (1904). Traquair also continued to provide detailed illustrations for her husband's research papers. After his death in 1912, she travelled widely, visiting India (1913), Egypt (1914, 1921) and North Africa (1925).
In 1920, she was elected the first female honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy.
Traquair died in Edinburgh and lies buried next to her husband in the churchyard of Colinton Parish Church, with the grave marked by a stone of her own design. Her son, Ramsay Traquair (1874 - 1952), was a noted architectural historian.
