Details
MARY DELANY, NÉE GRANVILLE (ENGLISH 1700-1788)
Epilobium Angustiloium: Common French Willow
inscribed, 'Epilobium/Angustifolium/Common French Willow' (on a label attached to the reverse) and numbered 'No 52.' (on the reverse)
pencil and watercolor collage on a prepared black paper
912 x 738 in. (24 x 18.7 cm.)
Provenance
with Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, May 1988, where purchased by the present owner.
Literature
R. Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her life and her flowers, London, 2010 edition, p.181.
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General Sale EnquiresAnne H. Bass: The New York Interiors
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Lot Essay

In 1772, the twice-widowed 72 year old Mrs Delany wrote to her niece, ‘ I have invented a new way of imitating flowers, I’ll send you next time I write one for a sample.’ (Hayden, op.cit., p. 131). Her lifelong skill of drawing with scissors to create paper-cut images, combined with friendships with the great botanists of the 18th Century, had led to the creation of her extraordinary ‘paper mosaicks’.
Over the next ten years she created a collection of around one thousand pictures of plants, all made from cut paper, occasionally with touches of watercolor added, on black backgrounds. She called it her ‘Hortus Siccus’, which is a term more frequently used for collections of dried flowers, and carefully inscribed each sheet with the identification and details of the plant shown. Her pictures bridge the worlds of botanical recording and artistic flower painting. She often used hundreds of tiny pieces of paper to create the tonality of a petal, and her papers were carefully sourced from China, or from paper-stainers who supplied wallpaper. The paper she used for the backgrounds came from 1774 onwards from a newly-established mill in Hampshire, and was washed with Indian ink.
Mrs Delany was well connected, and spent most of her later years at Bulstrode Park, Buckinghamshire, the home of her great friend Margaret, Duchess of Portland. The Duchess of Portland was the richest woman in Britain, and owned the largest natural history collection in the country. Through her, Mrs Delany met Georg Ehret, who the Duchess had commissioned to illustrate her plant specimens, as well as other botanical artists. She was also a great friend of King George III and Queen Charlotte, and later collages are inscribed ‘Kew’ on the verso, denoting that the specimens were sent to her from the Royal botanical gardens under the management of Sir Joseph Banks. When the Duchess of Portland died in 1785, the King presented Mrs Delany with an annuity of £300, and a house in Windsor with a garden adjoining that of the Queen’s Lodge.
After her death the majority of her pictures, housed in ten albums, passed to her great-niece, Augusta, Baroness Llanover. These albums, containing 985 flower pictures, were bequeathed by Baroness Llanover to the British Museum in 1897, where they remain some of the most popularly viewed images in the Prints and Drawings department. Very few of her works were outside of this group, and so these lots are a rate and exciting appearance on the market.

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Condition report

A Christie's specialist may contact you to discuss this lot or to notify you if the condition changes prior to the sale.