The Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, Connecticut;/br>
Through January 3, 2010
As the autumn and winter months descend upon us, perhaps a visit to New Haven to view a curtain of flowers and an assemblage of artistic natural beauty might warm the spirit and provide one last look at summers past.
This is the only U.S. venue for
“Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,” which
was co-organized with London’s
Sir John Soane’s Museum. The
ambitious exhibition looks at the
intersection of Mrs. Mary Delany’s
social circuits and reveals the
complexity of her engagement
with natural science and design.
At the age of 72, Delany, nee Mary
Granville (1700-1788), embarked
on a series of 1,000 botanical
collages, or “paper mosaics,”
which marked the crowning
achievement of a life defined by
creative accomplishment. The Yale
Center for British Art displays
30 of these mosaics as well as
landscape drawings, textiles and
manuscript materials culled to
reflect the scope of manners,
taste and style of the Georgian
period.
Delany was a botanical artist,
woman of fashion and a
commentator on life and society
in 18th Century England and
Ireland. Her hand cut floral
designs, created using a method
of Delany’s own invention, rival
the finest botanical works of her
time or ours. Marked by perfection
and strict attention to detail, the
stunning thing about Delany’s
mosaics is that they are created
using tiny cuts and slices of
colored paper, and assembled on
black ink backgrounds. Horace
Walpole called them “precision
and truth unparalleled,” and Sir
Joshua Reynolds admired their
“perfection and outline, delicacy
of cutting, accuracy of shading
and perspective, and harmony and
brilliance of color” (Ruth Hayden,
Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her
Flowers, London: British Museum
Press 2000). Indeed, these pieces
are amazingly put together,
and the accuracy and shading
perceived upon first glance lead
one to believe that these were
hand painted.
It is rare that traditional art
history makes note of such
accomplishments as Delany’s,
for art history often undervalues
and obscures the work of women,
outsiders and the so called “minor
arts.” This exhibition and its
voluminous catalog show not
only the breadth and depth of
Delany’s work, but also how her art reflected her relationships and
allowed the artist to navigate the
social complexities of artistic,
aristocratic and court circles in
18th Century England and Ireland.
Those who knew Delany respected
her greatly. Her orbit consisted
of
.jpg)
