Flora Delanica #10: Blue Bottle Cornflower (Centaurea
Cyanus) by
Becky Brown
We could use a little blue vegetation in our sampler.
Friend Horace
Walpole described Mary Delany at 74 as the inventor of "the art of paper
mosaic". He highlights her use of colored material, which may be what amazed her
peers about the Flora Delanica. The pictures were not the black and white of the popular paper art silhouettes or "shades". (She was only 72 when she began using colored papers. Horace, man about
town and gossip, was wrong there.)
The Royal Collection owns this silhouette of Mary Delany
by
Thomas Wheeler, pictured in The Connoisseur in July, 1932.
Silhouettes
often featured additional chalk, paint and here gum arabic.
To put Mary Delany's career in
context one has to view her own interest and skill in cutting silhouettes. This
double portrait attributed to her is in the collection of Longleat House where she
spent time before her first marriage. She was obviously quite talented with her knife and scissors.
A late silhouette of Mary Delany from an 1820 edition of
her letters. This copy once belonged to Lytton Strachey.
Blue Bottle Cornflower by Barbara Brackman
I took a lot of shortcuts.
Silhouettes
increased in popularity in the early 19th century as black paper and sharp
scissors became more available. In Mary's time some cutters used a knife like a scalpel and
everyone had to create handmade black papers by mixing paint of lampblack, soot
or charred bone. Mary was said to blacken her paper for the Flora Delanica by
painting with India ink.
"The plant or flower which she proposed to imitate she cut out; that is, she cut out its various leaves and parts in such coloured Chinese paper as suited her subject, and, when she could not meet with a colour to correspond with the one she wanted, she dyed her paper to answer her wishes. She used a black ground, as best calculated to throw out her flower; and not the least astonishing part of her art was, that, though she never employed her pencil to trace out the form or shape of her plant, yet, when she had applied all the [?] which composed it, it hung so loosey and gracefully, that every one was persuaded it must previously have been drawn out and corrected by a most judicious hand. The effect was superior to what painting could have produced ; and so imposing was her art, that she would sometimes put a real leaf of a plant by the side of one of her own creation, which the eye could not detect, even when she herself pointed it out."
The six daughters of King George III & Queen Charlotte parading
behind their parents.
Royal Collection, attributed to William Rought
Princess Elizabeth (1770-1840) at about 12 in 1782 by
Thomas Gainsborough
One of the princesses was also a dedicated paper snipper. Princess Elizabeth (1770-1840) grew up with Mary Delany as a guest during family evenings dedicated to reading, sewing, games and crafts. Mary described the royals sitting "around a large table on which are books, [needle]work, pencils and paper" with the younger children drawing and stitching. Elizabeth's earliest surviving silhouette is thought to have been cut when she was ten. She could not have had a better teacher than Mary.
Royal Collection Trust
Henry Edridge painted this portrait of Princess Elizabeth
with her scissors and a white paper shape in 1804.
The Princess cut this silhouette and placed it
in an album she made for Dorothea Banks, wife of the naturalist
Joseph Banks whom we discussed last month.
In 1930 Queen Mary bought the album, now in the
Royal Collection.
Blue Bottle Cornflower by Nancy Phillips
Mary did not "invent" the paper mosaic, she adapted a common art form to colored paper with the same careful observation and skilled handwork at which she'd been working much of her life.
Blue
Bottle Cornflower (Centaurea Cyanus) by Mary Delany
Inverted to show the layers
The
Block
#10
Cornflower
Applique
on the diagonal to a square cut 10-1/2" or on the vertical center of a
rectangle cut 9-1/2" x 12-1/2".
One
Way to Print the Pattern:
Click on the image above.
Right click on it and save it to your file.
Print that file out 8-1/2" x 11". Note the inch square block for reference.
Adjust the printed page size if necessary.
Poinciana
Pulcherrima
Wool details by Nancy Phillips
And Ilyse Moore
Further
Reading & Viewing
George III & Charlotte's daughters were a resilient group of women who lived under rather insufferable parentage where Princess Elizabeth described their lives as vegetating. Read Flora Fraser's Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III.
Preview:
https://www.amazon.com/Princesses-Six-Daughters-George-III/dp/1400096693
Read much, much more about British silhouette art at this website Profiles of the Past.
http://www.profilesofthepast.org.uk/content/silhouette-methods-cut-paper-or-card
Lovely blocks
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