Investigating the Collaging Techniques of Mary Delany

Mary Delany (1700-1788) was an English collage artist known for constructing exquisite ‘paper mosaicks’ in the style of detailed botanical illustrations. Over the course of her married life, Delany acquired a number of artistic skills, cutting silhouettes, creating shell compositions and murals, and painting with watercolours. She began her collaging later in life as a widow, while staying at the house of a friend, and was even given a set of collaging tools by Queen Charlotte, wife to George III. Yet due in part to her obscurity as a non-professional female artist, as well as to the originality of her practice and the lack of information surrounding it, our understanding of how Delany constructed her collages remains limited. We know she received gifts of plant specimens from friends such as Joseph Banks, a leading botanist and the King’s advisor for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Yet how she translated these into ‘paper mosaicks’ has largely remained a mystery - one on which the National Trust wishes to shine a light, in a forthcoming exhibition at Beningbrough Hall this September.

I had never heard of Mary Delany when I first joined this Micro-Internship project. The prospect of uncovering the techniques of less well-known artist excited me, but it was immediately apparent that there were a number of obstacles to doing so, in particular the inaccessibility of information, and the uniqueness of Delany’s work. I struggled to find analogous practices in other artists. The world of amateur art is much less well-documented than the work of professionals, and in a period when the recently established Royal Academy dominated the artistic scene and painting manuals and guides abounded, the private, domestic practices of amateurs were often eclipsed. Women make up a large part of this group, and a woman such as Delany, who had worked in a variety of media all her life, developed her practice out of a particular set of personal circumstances and was not guided by a formal artistic education. It was therefore necessary for me to try and get inside her mindset, in order to understand what tools Delany might’ve had to hand, what manner of working she would be familiar with, and what kinds of materials were available outside of the academy in the 1780s.

The pocketbook from Queen Charlotte, held in the Royal Collection, was the first clue: looking at the scissors, bodkin and knife, it was possible to conjecture how they might have been put to use, cutting pieces of paper and helping position them on a black background. Then chemical analyses of the collages themselves, conducted by the British Museum, yielded results that suggested some kind of starch-based adhesive had been used to stick down the pieces of paper. I cross-referenced these findings with contemporary treatises on glue and artists’ adhesives, and found a variety of options available, including flour and water paste, which art historian and conservator Kohleen Reeder has shown was mentioned by Delany in an early letter. Putting myself in the shoes of an amateur artist such as Delany, who, being a widow, divided her time between the homes of different friends, showed me the need for materials that were both versatile and readily available. Accordingly, it seems likely that, out of the various glues available at the time, Delany would have chosen something more domestic like flour and water paste, rather than the messy and expensive isinglass, a book-binding glue made from fish-bladders that had to be kept warm. For similar reasons, she may have used finer sable and bird’s-quill brushes for painting, and squirrel-hair brushes to apply glue. However, even contemporary treatises note that the names of different kinds of brushes can be misleading: paint brushes were usually called ‘pencils’ in this period, and one author, John Payne, commented that “pencils for Painting in Miniature are not made of Camel’s hair, but of the tips of squirrel’s tails, and of these there are two kinds, the dark brown and yellowish red. The latter kind, are, for what reason I know not, called Sable Pencils”. The gap between our modern terminology and contemporary descriptions is clear from this, as today a sable paintbrush usually is made from actual sable hair. The unreliability of historical naming was therefore a stumbling block to my research, as it made it difficult to determine the true materials at times.

Historian and curator Ruth Hayden had identified a Mrs Nuens as someone who helped Mary Delany grind her watercolour pigments when she lived in Ireland (as watercolours in this period did not come pre-prepared in cakes, but in lumps of pigment which had to be ground to a paste). This insight suggests that others may have helped Delany in her work, grinding colours for her, which would’ve been messy work and required strength which a woman in her eighties might not possess. I researched a number of the colours Delany used for her painting and found contemporary treatises on watercolour painting, such as The Handmaid to the Arts and The Art of Painting in Miniature, which told me more about colour preparation. The black paint used to create the backdrops to the collages was probably lamp-black, which had to be smoked over the fire till “it is freed from the oily substance it originally contained” (from The Art of Painting in Miniature). The complexities of preparing the paints with which Delany coloured her collages really made me appreciate the craftsmanship that went into her art. Despite not being a professional artist, Delany had a developed sense of craft and a sophisticated understanding of how different methods could be used to represent her flowers. Years of experience cutting silhouettes meant she cut most of her pieces free-hand, an impressive achievement. Researching Delany has shown me just what a unique and adept artist she was, and the upcoming exhibition at Beningbrough will place this research in context and help to shine further light on the incredible skill showcased by amateur women artists such as Delany, who are all too often overlooked.

Miriam Waters is an undergraduate currently studying for a BA in English Literature and Language at Magdalen College, Oxford. At present, her research is focused on Early Medieval English poetry and philology, but she is also interested in material culture and heritage research, and volunteers at various museums in her spare time.