Society, Creativity, and Science: Mrs. Delany and the Art of Botany

In 2009, we saw the publication of an important, richly illustrated essay collection on Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700-88), one of the most artistically innovative women of her age. Written to accompany the exhibition on Delany's life and work at the Yale Center for British Art and, subsequently, Sir John Soane's Museum in London, this wide-ranging and impressive volume contextualizes Delany and her prolific craft activities, particularly her astonishingly detailed, vibrant, and botanically accurate paper collages, within the political, social, and aesthetic discourses of her time. Building on the pioneering work of Ruth Hayden in the 1980s and, more recently, on Alain Kerhervé's study of Delany's correspondence, this work explores, in great depth, her aristocratic social connections and the artistic and scientific circles in which she moved. While the creative virtuosity she displayed in her "paper mosaicks" and embroidery projects remains central to many of the discussions here, this work also examines the position she held at court, her contribution to late eighteenth-century female accomplishments, and her involvement in popularizing and feminizing the study of natural history. This collection of twelve essays, supplemented by a "theater" of twenty-four illustrations of Delany's collages and a transcript of Delany's unpublished novella Marianna (1759), draws on the expertise of a range of specialists in art history, cultural studies, women's history, botany, textiles, and paper analysis to examine critically what constituted her world and her place in it.

"Delany shines in worth serenely bright / Wisdom's strong ray, and virtue's milder light; / And she who bless'd the friend, and graced the page / Of Swift, still lends her lustre to our age," wrote the poet Hannah More in praise of the aged Mary Delany in 1782. These lines emphasize both the esteem in which Delany was held towards the end of her life and the importance of her connections, which in the literary world included Jonathan Swift, friend of her second husband Dr. Patrick Delany, and the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Boscawen, and Frances Burney. Yet, as Alicia Weisberg-Roberts stresses in the first introductory essay, scholarship has tended to reduce Delany to little more than a spokesperson for her time and has failed to consider her as an individual. Historians have focused more on botanical artists such as Georg Dionysius Ehret to describe the advancement of Linnaean botany in British visual culture, while the contribution women amateurs made to the so-called "minor arts" has been largely undervalued; greater emphasis has hitherto been placed on the contributions professional artists, primarily male, made to the art market and exhibitions of their time. Delany is worth revisiting, Weisberg-Roberts argues, within the context of new developments that seek to redress such imbalances by studying in greater detail the figure of the amateur in artistic production. In the second introductory essay, Mark Laird locates the collection within broader concerns in eighteenth-century scholarship, such as issues of taste and virtuosity, material culture, the iconography of the object, and the specialization of space in this period, notably by reconsidering the garden as a place of pleasure and also of learning.

The first three chapters trace Delany's involvement in court life. Clarissa Campbell Orr investigates Delany's thwarted aspirations to gain a salaried position in the royal household, most likely as woman of the bedchamber, which would not only have given her income and a place at court, but also would have enabled her to extend her social networks. Delany's failure to do so by no means discouraged her from using her connections at court to further her second husband's career, nor indeed did it cause her friendship with the royal family to wane. Dividing her time between Ireland and London, Delany cultivated a peripatetic life similar to that of the royal household, spending approximately half the year near St. James's Square, and was therefore geographically close...