Mary Delany (1700 - 1788), an English artist known for her "paper-mosaics" and her lively correspondence, created 950 works of botanical decoupage.
"With the plant specimen set before her she cut minute particles of coloured paper to represent the petals, stamens, calyx, leaves, veins, stalk and other parts of the plant, and, using lighter and darker paper to form the shading, she stuck them on a black background. By placing one piece of paper upon another she sometimes built up several layers and in a complete picture there might be hundreds of pieces to form one plant. It is thought she first dissected each plant so that she might examine it carefully for accurate portrayal..."
- from Mrs. Delany: her Life and her Flowers, by Ruth Hayden, 1980/2000. (The author was a descendant of Delany's sister Anne.)
Born the daughter of Colonel Bernard Granville, she was a niece of George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne. She was coerced into an unhappy marriage with the sixty-year-old Tory MP Alexander Pendarves when she was still only seventeen; her husband died in his sleep seven years later, making her a widow at the age of twenty-four. With little means and no home of her own, she spent time living with various relatives and friends. But having the social freedom allowed by her widowhood, she was able to indulge her artistic and scientific interests.
At the age of forty-three, she married again, to Dr. Patrick Delany, an Irish clergyman. A year later they moved to Dublin, where Dr. Delany had a home. Both husband and wife were very interested in botany and gardening. After twenty-five years of marriage, most of it spent in Ireland, her husband died, leaving her a widow again at the sixty-eight. She had always been an artist, but during her second marriage she had had the time to hone her skills, not only as a gardener, but with her needlework, drawing, and painting.
It was only in her second widowhood, though, when she was in her early seventies, that she began to assemble detailed and botanically accurate depictions of plants in decoupage, using tissue paper and hand coloration. She created nine-hundred and eighty-five of these works, calling them her "Paper Mosaics." She continued making them until her sight began to fail in the last year of her life. She died a month before her eighty-eighth birthday. The ten volumes of her Flora Delanica were eventually bequeathed to the British Museum.
(From the blog of artist and writer Stephen O’Donnell. He is married to writer and graphic designer Gigi Little, with whom he sometimes performs. Their book, The Untold Gaze – a collection of Stephen’s paintings paired with short fiction by 33 authors – was published in October of 2018.)
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