Mary Delany found fame for her flower ‘mosaiks’ in her 70s, but this followed decades of turbulence
Mary Delany didn’t experience her big breakthrough until she was 72. This would be an achievement for any artist, but for one living in the 18th century, when lives and careers generally stopped at 40, it was extraordinary. Delany had spent decades being competent at all the usual “accomplishments” required of a genteel Georgian woman: embroidering napkins, sketching landscapes and, oddest of all, sticking sea shells to mantelpieces to make them look like plaster stucco. But at some point, sitting out in the garden in the golden late summer of 1772, she felt inspired to pick up her scissors and start snipping into coloured paper to see if she could recreate the shape of the plants spread out before her. Thrilled by the results, Delany wrote cock-a-hoop to her niece a few weeks later: “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.”
Delany’s productions remain hard to place and difficult to decipher. But they are gloriously easy to enjoy
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