Public Lecture - Paper Mosaics and Paper Sentiments: Mary Delany’s Loves of the Plants

Public lecture presented by the UQ Node of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800)

Paper Mosaics and Paper Sentiments: Mary Delany’s Loves of the Plants

Professor Deirdre Lynch (Harvard University)

Wednesday 13 December 2017
5.30-6.45pm, with a reception to follow.
Terrace Room, Sir Llew Edwards Building
The University of Queensland, St Lucia

All welcome. RSVP by Monday 11 December to uqche@uq.edu.au.

In her seventh decade, the eighteenth-century bluestocking Mary Granville Delany invented, as she put it in 1772, ‘a new way of imitating flowers’. Breaking with the tradition of watercolour painting that had long defined botanical illustration, Delany began work on a multi-volume paper herbarium she called her ‘paper Mosaic’. Over the next decade, she produced a thousand life-size portraits of plant specimens from far-flung destinations amassed in the botanical inventory of her friend the Duchess of Portland. Delany’s cut-paper botanicals were assembled from bits of paper sheets drawn from a variety of locations; the portraits were then gathered in their turn in ten calf-bound albums, where they were originally interleaved with handwritten poems. Today Delany is viewed either as a precocious inventor of the collage tradition associated with twentieth-century avant garde art-making, or as a contributor to Enlightenment natural history. Indeed in her time learned men like Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Banks praised the accuracy of her ‘curious hortus siccus’ – ‘less liable to fallacy’, wrote Darwin, than drawings were.

In this lecture, I assess Delany’s achievement differently, zeroing in on her book-making and its sources in the broader material culture of eighteenth-century emotion. I will track Delany’s relationship to a mainly female tradition in which home-made manuscript books – dubbed, variously, family books, friendship albums, or scrap-books –mattered, in both senses of the term matter, and in which paper in particular was valued for how, as a mnemonic object, it preserved the traces of the hands that had manipulated it. Tracking that relationship makes visible the overlap between the practice of Enlightenment natural science and the practice of friendship. Yet in some measure Delany’s combination of botanizing and book-making also calls into question the work of typification and classification through which Enlightenment natural history proceeded – a point that this lecture will explore by investigating how these paper mosaics balance delicately between a logic of the specimen and a logic of the souvenir. 

This lecture is a keynote event for the 2017 David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, ‘Natures and Spaces of Enlightenment’, to be held at UQ and Griffith University from 13-15 December 2017. For more information, please visit https://anzsecs.com/.

Image: Mary Delany, Aeschelus Hippocastanum (Heptandria Monogynia), 1776. Collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, on black ink background. © The Trustees of the British Museum.