Flora Delanica Block #12 Canada Lily or Tiger Lily
(Lilium Canadense) by Becky Brown.
Our twelfth and last block recalls Mary Delany's last years.
Mary Granville Delany by John Opie 1782
with added lilies.
National Portrait Gallery
Mary is often remembered with this portrait painted when she was in her eighties. She'd probably prefer you think of her as thirty, the interior age she may have viewed herself. As a fellow old lady I'd guess she was surprised every morning to see that elderly face in the mirror.
A miniature of Mary in her young womanhood
Tiger Lily by Nancy Phillips in wools
With her peers long gone in her last decade Mary cultivated friendships with a younger generation, including the Queen, the royal family and novelist Frances Burney who served as Queen Charlotte's "Second Keeper of the Robes." Fanny in her thirties had a hard time dealing with the court (a bit dull) and the royal temperaments (can we say crazy?) but she enjoyed Mary Delany's company, recording a visit to her apartment at Windsor, "entirely hung round with pictures of her own painting, & Ornaments of her own designing, partly from the antique & partly fanciful."
Frances Burney (1752-1840) painted by Edward Francis Burneyin the 1780s. National Portrait Gallery
Fanny was reminded of her own grandmother. Mary, she observed, appeared "remarkably upright.""I had heard of her being blind. Blind, however, she is certainly is not for she neither [was] led about the room nor seems at any loss how to move....the fine perception, however, by which she painted, drew, cut out, worked & Read, is wholly dimmed."
Portrait of Mary Delany in the 1780s by John Hoppner
Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum
That hat, literally the height of fashion, may have looked
dashing on Fanny and Georgiana the Duchess of Devonshire
but....
A blue plaque on St. Alban's Street near the entrance to
Windsor Castle recalls Mary and Fanny.
Detail of Becky's beautiful lilies
With our last block we have to say goodbye to Mary Delany. I, for one, am as sad as her friends were 250 years ago. We can leave her with praise quoted by an editor of her letters in the 1930s who tells us that Dubliner Edmund Burke declared her "not only the woman of fashion of the present age, but she was the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages."
Lilium Canadense
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:
Create a word file or a new empty JPG file that is 8-1/2" x 11".
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.
A little Photoshopping
Becky has set her 12 flowers with alternating pieced X's and
added applique.
First there is a pieced border.
And she's working on an outer applique.
Spectacular!
I let fabrics do most of the work and added dots
with a fabric marker.
Nancy stitched French knots!
Here's her finished Flora Delanica.
Nancy Phillips's wool applique quilted by
Virginia Longarm of Goochland, Virginia.
A Little More Mary Delany
Ranunculus Asiaticus, a variety. Persian Buttercup. Collection of the British Museum.
Here's my finished top with 13 blocks (added an extra in center lower row.)
Further Reading & Viewing
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diary_and_Letters_of_Madame_D_Arblay_177/f4fpE_luaQcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=delany
Such a beautiful block. Funny to think that all these centuries later, we're still interested in the dysfunctional court lives.
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