Mrs. Delany– the Amateur Who Could Shame Professionals
- Mrs. Delany by John Opie
Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788) was a paragon of British female virtue in the 18th century – which was reason enough to forget her.
A petite aristocrat who may have been the finest dilettante of a country that produced scores of them, Delany came closer to exemplifying distaff integrity than any mealy-mouthed damsel Samuel Richardson could create. She was clever; she was artistic; she was precocious; she was industrious; she was cultured. She was the kind of woman contemporaries cheered and feminists reviled. How could they resist? She was so, well, girly.
One of the great benefits of feminism’s second wave is that scholars are now able to look at women like Mary Delaney in new, appreciative ways. The Yale Center for British Art has done so with enthusiasm in its redemptive and revealing, “Mrs. Delany and her Circle.”
Mary Delany, botanical artist, woman of fashion and 18th century epistolary commentator, became famous largely by a voluminous work of 1,000 botanical collages, comprised of cut paper. She was, in other words, noted for an amateurish pursuit, almost exclusively practiced by women. The “Flora Delanica,” a rigorous undertaking that she began at 72 and finished a decade later, was praised by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But, particularly to modern scholars, the work, like her sumptuous embroidery, a “womanly pursuit,” one of the frilly diversions of women with too much time and too little options.
“Mary Delany and her Circle” wisely and firmly roots Delany in her context, thus making her accomplishments not only breathtaking, but, in a stunning way, triumphant. Mary Delany, who compared herself to a lily of the valley — “retired, lives in shade, wraps itself upon its mantle and gentry reclines its head as if ashamed to be looked at,” had to have been the most cunning wallflower the 18th century produced. That she managed to achieve so much of such exquisite skill within the strict boundaries of propriety attests not merely to her preternatural talents — but of incredible cunning.
Born at Coulston, Wiltshire, to an aristocratic family, Mary Granville was married off at 17 to Alexander Pendarves, a member of Parliament 40 years her senior, with whom she was miserable. This was, after all, a woman who, upon hearing Handel play in her home when she was 10, said that if she could not ever play as well as Handel, “I would burn my instrument.”
From the beginning, Delany had pluck, audacity and a prodigious intellect. Her stultifying marriage to Pendarves ended fortuitously with his death four years later. She and her sister than traveled to Ireland, where she met Jonathan Swift and his friend Dr. Patrick Delaney, an Anglican cleric who was inconveniently engaged to another woman. “Dr. Delaney…has all the qualities requisite for friendship,” the widow wrote her new friend, Swift, “friendship, zeal and application.”
Delany had those qualities and then some. By 1734, she was fanatically and methodically collecting shells, a habit she continued until her death. The final room of this splendid exhibit imagines the rooms in which Delany (and her friend, the Duchess of Portland) might have displayed their voluminous collections, which were used to cement their intimate friendship.
Yes, a dress. 
But not any dress. The silk embroidery on black satin petticoat that the museum displays is so breathtaking in execution, brilliant in design and stunning in ornament that it exemplifies the ambiguous station Delany occupied. It skirts, like Delany, the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism, then much nearer than they are today. The petticoat’s sumptuous black background, is ornamented with rich scarlet, cobalt, lilac and pink roses, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, and other native botanicals. What reception it received – a black petticoat in a fashion period that favored lighter colors – remains a mystery. Although Mrs. Delany was a voluminous letter writer and commentator on her society’s mores, she wrote about every other woman’s dress in the room except hers. Worse, no one scholars can identify described Mrs. Delany. Where, one laments, were the Joan and Melissa Rivers of the Georgian Court?
“She was working within the conventions but bushing them to a very extreme,” said co-curator Alicia Weisberg-Roberts. “The decorum is maintained, but she is pushing the envelope.”
She was also, as museum director Amy Meyers notes, heralding the work of God –[Dash]carefully omitting the gold and silver that were de rigeur for other ladies at court. “Can we view the wonderful texture of every leaf and flower, the dazzling and varied plumage of birds, the glowing colours of flies, &c. &c., and their infinite variety without saying, ‘Wonderful and marvelous art thou in all they works?”
Queen Charlotte, by Benjamin West, 1777
Within two years after wearing that dress and against her family’s wishes, the widow Pendarves married the conveniently widowed Dr. Delaney, thus beginning a fertile period in Ireland, where she produced numerous topographical drawings and created the gardens at Delville and Downpatrick, just north of Ireland. Following her husband’s death in 1768, she returned to England, and to her friend, the Duchess of Portland, and ultimately, Queen Charlotte.
A palm-sized silk satchel, embroidered by the Queen, contains the tools of the trade for which Delaney would be celebrated –a knife, small scissors, compass and three bodkins—is displayed in the room that contains a sliver of Delany’s crowning achievement – a series of botanicals fashioned out of cut, colored and paper pasted to a black background. The year after the gift, the Royal Family commissioned Mary Delany’s portrait and the artist completed her endeavor, at 82.
Nobody who knew Delany seemed to be able to forget her. She was roundly praised by her celebrated circle, who seemed to understand that Delany was a woman who deftly navigated the world of social convention just skirting the avenue of professionalism which would have subjected her to scorn. It was a clever trick, and which, until now, has been too unfairly derided. Within four years of Mrs. Delany’s death Mary Wollstonecraft would issue her clarion call for a new system of education for women. Within a generation, Jane Austen would publish books under her own name. Heaven only knows what Mary Delany might have done in such an environment.