Molly Peacock - The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Lifes Work at 72

MOLLY PEACOCK

THE
PAPER
GARDEN

MRS. DELANY

{BEGINS HER LIFES WORK}

AT 72

SCRIBE
Melbourne

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
PO Box 523
Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054
Email: info@scribepub.com.au

Published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe 2010

Copyright Molly Peacock 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers and the author of this book.

Typeset in Bodoni Old Face.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Peacock, Molly, 1947-

The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany begins her lifes work at 72.

9781921753480 (e-book.)

1. Delany, Mrs. (Mary), 17001788. 2. Women artistsBiography.

736.98092

www.scribepublications.com.au

for

Michael Groden
Ruth Hayden
Augusta Hall, ne Waddington (180296)
Ruth McMann Wright (18961976)
Pauline Wright Peacock (191992)

&

all those for whom its never too late

How can people say we grow indifferent as we grow old?
It is just the reverse...

Mary Delany to her sister, Anne Dewes,
Dublin, July 7, 1750

The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness.
I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass my own.

Emily Dickinson to her cousins
Louise and Frances Norcross,
ca. April 1873

CONTENTS

Portrait of Mary Granville Pendarves (later Delany) in gold box, by Christian Friedrich Zincke, ca. 1740

Chapter One.
SEEDCASE

Imagine starting your lifes work at seventy-two. At just that age, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (May 14, 1700April 15, 1788), a fan of George Frideric Handel, a sometime dinner partner of satirist Jonathan Swift, a wearer of green-hooped satin gowns, and a fiercely devoted subject of blond King George III, invented a precursor of what we know as collage. One afternoon in 1772 she noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital imaginative connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade (shed have called it a scalpel) or a pair of filigree-handled scissors the kind that must have had a nose so sharp and delicate that you could almost imagine it picking up a scent. With the instrument alive in her still rather smooth-skinned hand, she began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper.

Then she snipped out another.

And another, and another, with the trance-like efficiency of repetition commencing the most remarkable work of her life.

Her previous seventy-two years in England and Ireland had already spanned the creation of Kew Gardens, the rise of English paper making, Jacobites thrown into the Tower of London, forced marriages, womens floral-embroidered stomachers, and the use of the flintlock musket all of which, except for the musket, she knew very personally.

She was born Mary Granville in 1700 at her fathers country house in the Wiltshire village of Coulston, matching her life with the start of this new century, one that would be shaped by many of her friends and acquaintances. She would see the rise of the coffee house (where she took refuge on the day of the coronation of George II) and of fabulously elaborate court gowns (one of which she designed). She would hear first-hand of the voyage of Captain Cook (financed partly by her friend the Duchess of Portland) and be astounded by that voyages horticultural bonanza (instigated by her acquaintance Sir Joseph Banks). She would attend her hero Handels Messiah. She would share a meal with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and read in a rapture Samuel Richardsons epistolary novel Clarissa. She would flirt with Jonathan Swift. In middle age, at mid-century, she would see the truth of his cudgel of an essay on Irish poverty, and in her old age she would feel the sting of a revolution on the other side of the world that divided North America into Canada and the United States.

By the time she commenced her great work, she had long outlived her uncle, the selfish Lord Lansdowne (a minor poet and playwright and patron of Alexander Pope); she had survived a marriage at age seventeen to Alexander Pendarves, a drunken sixty-one-year-old squire who left her nothing but a widows pension; she had tried to get a court position and found herself in a bust-up of a relationship with the peripatetic Lord Baltimore. But with a life-saving combination of propriety and inner fire, she also designed her own clothes, took drawing lessons with Louis Goupy, cultivated stalwart, lifelong friends (and watched her mentor William Hogarth paint a portrait of one of them), played the harpsichord and attended John Gays The Beggars Opera, owned adorable cats, and wrote six volumes worth of letters most of them to her sister, Anne Granville Dewes (170161), signifying a deep, cherished relationship that anyone with a sister would kill for.

She bore no children, but at forty-three she allowed herself to be kidnapped by love and to flout her family to marry Jonathan Swifts friend Dean Patrick Delany, a Protestant Irish clergyman. They lived at Delville, an eleven-acre estate near Dublin, where Mary attended to a multitude of crafts, from shell decoration to crewelwork, and, with the Dean, renovated his lands into one of the first Picturesque gardens in the British Isles.

But she made the spectacular mental leap between what she saw and what she cut four years after he died, and eleven years after her sister died. She was staying with her insomniac friend Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Duchess Dowager of Portland, at the fabulous Bulstrode, an estate of many acres in Buckinghamshire. The Duchess, who would stay up being read to for most of the night and rarely rose before noon, was one of the richest women in England. Her Dutch-gabled fortress, presiding over its own park, with its own aviary, gardens, and private zoo, housed her collections of shells and minerals, and later the Portland Vase, a Roman antiquity which now occupies a spot in the British Museum. By then the two women had been friends for more than four decades. (They met when Margaret was a little girl and Mary was in her twenties. Margaret would always have been referred to by her title, except by those of us centuries later who seek to know her on a first-name basis. Mary would have called Margaret Duchess, and Margaret would have called Mary Mrs.)

Snip.

Mary Delany took the organic shapes she had cut and recomposed them in the mirror likeness of that geranium, pasting up an exact, life-sized replica of the flower on a piece of black paper.

Then the Duchess popped in.

She couldnt tell the paper flower from the real one.

Mrs. D., which is what they affectionately call her at the British Museum, dubbed her paper and petal paste-up a