The Flora Delanica: Mary Delany and women's art, science, and friendship in eighteenth-century England (Mary Granville Delaney)

This dissertation investigates social and cultural factors surrounding the production of the Flora Delanica, a collection of floral art produced with botanical intent late in the eighteenth century by an elite gentlewoman, Mary Granville Delany (1700–1788). For her Flora , Mary Delany invented a new artistic process we now call paper collage, and used it to create almost a thousand botanically accurate images, each composed of possibly hundreds of precisely cut and intricately layered pieces of coloured paper.; This project is feminist interdisciplinary research, and it shapes new knowledge for several fields. It offers a new and detailed scrutiny of an artist and her work, and calls for art history to reconsider the art products commonly labelled “women's” art, such as needle art, shellwork, cut paper, and small-scale drawing and painting. It also examines the complex circumstances which shaped eighteenth-century women's practice of science, and provides for the history of science new evidence of the scientific work and aspirations of Delany and her close friend the Duchess of Portland. Archival materials reveal that Portland, who amassed the largest natural science collection in eighteenth-century England, also practised expert botany to the point of recording her detailed observations of previously unidentified species. To women's studies, this dissertation offers a new emphasis on women's friendships as collegial relationships, showing how these associations served mutually to stimulate and encourage women's achievements. It also presents new exploration and analysis of factors that helped to stimulate and determine the parameters of some of the significant creative and intellectual work of elite eighteenth-century Englishwomen.