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Cut Paper Picture
Late 18th c

This picture came from the collection of Paul Anstee, interior decorator and designer. In his earlier life he was assistant to photographer Cecil Beaton. For most of the 1950's he was the lover of John Gielgud, one of our greatest actors.

There were followers or pupils of Mrs Delaney's work during the late 18th century but little is known about them. Mrs Delaney also used painted black matt laid paper for her flower collages, with a glossy black paper surround. Her flowers were made up of tissue paper and are flatter than this one. I was recently in the British Museum looking at some of Mrs Delaney work and on looking through a magnifying glass one can how she pieced different colour tissue paper together for shading a leaf or flower. Her stems are straight at the bottom rather than slanting.

There was a recent exhibition of Mrs Delaney's embroidery and 'paper mosaic' botanical studies of flowers, part of her magnum opus the Flora Delanica, which were so admired by Horace Walpole. and which are on loan from the Bristh Museum.at The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA and the Sir John Soane's Musuem, London, UK in Spring 2010. Yale recently purchased some of her followers' work, which they included in their exhibition.

Mrs. Delany, née Mary Granville (1700-1788), was a significant figure in the practice of natural history in Georgian England and, in the words of Edmund Burke, "the woman of fashion of all ages." During her long life she was a pattern of accomplishment and curiosity for her contemporaries and became a model to subsequent generations.

Drawing upon works from Private collections, the Royal Collection and public institutions such as the British Museum, Natural History Museum, British Library and the National Gallery of Ireland, the exhibtion will be the first to survey her entire life and to essay the full range of Mrs. Delany's creative endeavors. It will bring together art, fashion, and science: fields that are now generally conceived as separate realms of cultural practice, but that were intimately connected in the varied circles in which Mrs. Delany thrived. The centre pieces of the show will include sections of Delany's court mantua, the court dress magnificently embroidered with naturalistic flowers dramatically displayed against a black satin background, which she wore to a ball in the early 1740s. This exhibition is the first time that these surviving sections fabric have been brought together. Other notable loans include her 'paper mosaic' botanical studies of flowers, part of her magnum opus the Flora Delanica, which were so admired by Horace Walpole and which are on loan from the Bristh Museum.

Cataloguing

in the style of Mrs Delaney, of a lilac blossom in pinky cream, the heart shaped leaves in shades of blue, green, beige with raised veins, on a brown stem, the actual flower with pencil markings, on a black painted paper ground 9 /2 in. or 24 cm long, the glossy mount of black edged with gold and the original gilded frame 15 x 13 1/2 or 38 x 34 cm

Condition

You will probably be able to see from the photo that the leaves have some damage. There is also discolouration (light brown) to them. The lilac blossom is possibly slightly discoloured, but difficult to say.