Artist or Artistic? The Drawings of Mary Delany

Irish Arts Review

Artist or Artistic? The Drawings of Mary DelanyAuthor(s): Hilary PyleSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 27-32Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491948 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ARTIST OR ARTISTIC? THE DRAINGS OF MARY DELANY

In July of 1986, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge held an ex

hibition entitled 'Lady Artist or Artistic Lady?'. This gathered together flower paintings of the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries in England, in a sort of eulogy of women artists of that time. They were generally barred from for mal training, because of the social unac ceptability of drawing from the nude, though Mary Moser, originally from Switzerland, in fact became one of the founder members of the Royal Academy, along with another Swiss artist, and friend of Reynolds, Angelica Kauff

mann. Both were professional artists. But what was the standing of some

one like Mary Delany, whose book of drawings in the National Gallery of Ireland has recently been attracting in ttrest? It was shown in the Pen and Pencil Exhibition in Belgium in 1973/74 and, last year, at the landscape ex hibition at Kenwood.1 Mary Delany would have regarded herself as an art istic lady, no doubt, though she de scribed a Mrs. Murray, about whom we know nothing else now, and with whom she dined in the 1740's, as "a lady painter". Mary Delany was modest about her own work; so diffident that she wrote somewhat despairingly to her sister, in 1745, that it was because of her husband that she persisted in her drawing. "His approving of my works, and encouraging me to go on, keep up my relish to them".2

Her reputation as a prominent per sonality and letter-writer of her age has never been questioned. There are several biographies, or memoirs, based on her letters: and her mosaic work was admired by Horace Walpole and many others. Her drawings, however, have never re ceived serious attention, except in so far as they show features of landscape and demesnes in their mid-eighteenth cen tury phases.3 Yet they merit looking at in some detail. What is of particular interest is that

she started drawing shortly before her marriage to Dean Delany in 1743, and, with his encouragement, continued to draw regularly until his death in 1768, when her career as a draughtsman ceas ed. The only drawing in her album4 after 1768 was done in 1773. 'A view of Thorp cloud from the top of Ilam Moor', near where her niece lived. In other words, the period of her work as an art

Mary Delany has most often been remembered as 'Mrs. Delany the letter-writer.' The exhibition in

New York in 1986 of her botanical paper mosaics and fabric designs high-lighted another of her skills.

Here, Hilary Pyle writes of this talented woman's prowess

in drawing.

istic draughtsman coincides almost exactly with the years of her residence in Ireland.

Mary Delany herself was bom in Wilt shire in 1700, a daughter of Bemard

Granville, and niece of Lord Granville, who was a friend of Pope and Swift.5 At her uncle's house, when she was seven teen, she was introduced to and per suaded to marry, Alexander Pendarves of Roscrow in Comwall, an elderly drunken widower, who at least gave her enough freedom to develop her own personality. In 1724, Pendarves died, and she left Cornwall to live in London.

A glance at the inventories of family portraits,6 dating back to Sir Bevil Granville, her great-grandfather - "slain at the Battle of Landsdown by the Ras cally Roundheads and Rebels AD 1643" - gives an indication of the background out of which Mary Granville's widely acclaimed taste developed. Sir Bevil's eldest son, and other members of the family, were painted by Kneller, his sis ter by Michael Wright, and Mary's own parents by Wissing, painter to James II, and by the Florentine portrait painter who came to London, Andrew Soldi. Soldi also portrayed her husband, Patrick Delany, when he was Dean of Down.

Mary Granville, later Delany, through out her life maintained an interest in portrait painters, and was to advise family and acquaintances about artists.

Her grand-nephew was painted, probab ly through her instigation, by Hoppner, and her grand-niece by Sir Thomas Lawrence, whom she is said to have in troduced to the King.7 There are por traits of Mary Delany herself from the age of twenty-five by various artists; that by Opie is in the National Portrait

Gallery in London. Her first visit to Ireland ran from

1731 into 1732. Here her ingenuity in shell-work Led her to decorate the Bi

shop's grotto at Killala with the assist ance of her artist friend, Miss Donnellan. She met Patrick Delany for the first time on this visit, and spent much time

with him, and the Dublin literati, though he was shortly to be married to

Margaret Tennison. Mary Pendarves kept up a correspond

ence with Swift, after her Irish visit, and Delany impressed her sufficiently for her to ask in her letters "particular ly" for Dr. Delany. His wife died in 1741, and in 1743 he wrote a letter of proposal to Mary Pendarves, which she instantly accepted. Her first achieve

ment, after her marriage, was to secure for him, through her influence, the

Deanery of Down. She started drawing seriously at the

age of thirty, and oil painting at forty -

the period of the first drawings in the National Gallery volume.

' Hogarth,

whom she met in 1731, was one influ ence. Her teacher was Louis Goupy, a

miniature painter, thought to be the nephew of Bernard Lens, enameller to George II. Goupy encouraged her to copy, and the catalogues of the family collections6 list copies by her from Correggio, Van Dyck, Raphael, Lely, Salvator Rosa, Guido Reni and other artists, in oil or crayon, being mainly portraits or religious subjects. These hung at Calwich, l1am, Wellesbourne or in her own house. Her only original

work in oil, the 'Raising of Lazarus', be longing to Lady Bute, was based on a print by Rembrandt. She may have been encouraged by Goupy to copy first in pencil. There are accurate imitations of paintings, in pencil and wash, in the ini tial pages of her drawing book. When Goupy died, she turned her

attention to Hayman, though it is un likely that she had any direct instruct ion from him. However, she tended to

work in the company of others as the letters tell, practising shell-work with

Miss Donnellan, with whom she plan ned grottos, and designing for embroid ery with Mrs. Francis Hamilton. She

mentions a picnic she was organizing to Ardglass with Mrs. Murray, "to carry cold meat and make a merry day of it; and I am to provide paper and pencil for ta king views". And, on another occasion, Letitia Bushe, a long standing friend, whose engraved view of Killarney she sent to her sister, Mrs. Dewes, finished an oil painting while with her, "I finish

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ARTIST OR ARTISTIC? THE DRAWINGS OF MARY DELANY

ing some drawings". Her final, and maj or botanical work, the Hortus Siceus, or Flora,8 composed of paper mosaic, she commenced when she was seventy-four, as companion to the Duchess of Port land. The Duchess, in the same room,

was cataloguing her collection of prints. These mosiacs left England for the first time last September, when they were ex hibited at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York as 'Mrs. Delany's Flower

Collages from the British Museum'. Some of her fabric designs were shown too, as well as her incredibly fragile court dress: and it is hoped that they may come to Ireland on exhibition later this year, to Kilmainham Hospital.

Most of the ninety or so drawings in the album in the National Gallery of Ireland, have been executed on loose sheets of paper, and pasted into the book. They vary in size, the earlier ex

amples from about 16.2 x 17.9 to 26.3 x 36.7 centimetres; and, from 1746, rising to 36.3 x 46 centimetres, the full size of the page. They are mainly of the

middle proportions, roughly framed with ruled line or lines, and with title penned beneath. All are signed, some with initials; and most are dated.

There is a decorative design for a frame, unfinished, worked directly on to a page at the beginning of the book; and, towards the end, are compositions dating from the early part of 1745/6, which have been worked within the drawing book itself, occupying full pages.

From this, it seems that for some time she had no particular plan for the book, seeing it purely as a sketching book, and that she generally found it convenient to work on loose sheets of paper. In 1745, she told her sister that

she had taken two views of Down "and they are placed in the book, which will travel with me to England". From then she appears to have adopted a system of pasting the loose drawings into the al bum, in rough chronological sequence, to make them accessible to interested friends. With the exception of the more elaborate large landscapes towards the end, they give an account of what most impressed her wherever she stayed, in England and Ireland. The book had be come a visual diary.

The areas she worked in are limited. She drew in the mid-counties of Eng land, at family houses, and remarkable places not far from them. She was twice at Kenwood on the outskirts of London. In Ireland, she drew the surroundings at her home in Delville, looking out on to Dublin Bay; and quite extensively in five of the counties of Ulster, where her

r ~ . >X 4!

_k~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~L i

.SrW/2

Lucan, Co. Dublin, 1749.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


husband's duties as Dean of Down took him. She sketched in South Dublin, but her only trip south of the Pale seems to have been to Killarney in 1767.

Her preoccupation, especially after she became mistress of Delville, was

with "improvements", which were taking place on a wide scale in the mid eighteenth century. She advised her brother, Bernard, about his plans for re designing his estate at Calwich, in Staf fordshire. She visited Warwick Castle, the year Lancelot Brown was landscap ing the park - and Canaletto was paint ing his views of the Castle. She spent occasional days at Lucan, near Dublin, looking at the improvements her friends the Veseys had made. She did several drawings at Wroxton, in Oxfordshire, during the alterations, in 1746, 1747 and 1754, and recorded, on separate occasions, the cascade, the winding of

the widened river, the gothic temple designed by Sanderson Miller, and the Chinese house, which is now gone. She called this an Indian house but studied it sufficiently to give the roof a more spirited, oriental tilt than did Booth, in his illustrations on the nearly contem porary plan of the grounds.9

At Cornbury, also in Oxfordshire, she placed herself on the far side of the river to appreciate "yF improvements"

made by the Earl of Clarendon "in ye stone quarry", writing to Mrs. Dewes,

"I never saw any spot of ground more beautiful than the park. I have taken a sketch of one part, which was originally a stone quarry, and is now improved into the wildest, prettiest place you can imagine - winding walks, mounts covered with all sorts of trees and flowering shrubs, rocks covered with moss, hollows filled with bushes intermixed with rocks, rural seats,

and sheds; and in the valley beneath a river winds and accomplishes the beauty ...

Her chief pleasure in seeing these various "improvements" was in accord with the current fashion for the 'na tural' in landscape - a reaction against the formal garden. But there were de grees of the natural. Writing to her sis ter after she had arrived in Ireland she

said, "These fields are planted in a wild

way with forest-trees and with bushes, that look so naturally you would not imagine it a work of art".

Her love of improved nature was as genuine as her drawings and her poetry indicate. She sketched sitting in a tree house, or under a tree, or on a mossy

bank. One seat she particularly liked was called 'the beggar's hut' - in a nut grove at Delville:

"a seat in a rock; on the top are bushes of all kinds that bend over: it is placed at the

- - ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>

I(4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~k

Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow, 1765.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


end of a curving wild path, thick set with trees, and it overlooks the brook ... it just holds the Dean and myself".

While she sketched in Down, on Wood Island, "under the shelter of a young oak in which DD [Patrick Delany] has made a very snug seat", the Dean was "amusing" himself with his workmen, clearing the pretty island.

There was no Deanery (the parish church had been rebuilt by the pre vious Dean, but the Cathedral was in ruins), so the couple lived at Holly

mount - described by Lewis in 1837, in his Topographical Dictionary, as 'one of the principal gentlemen's residences in an extensive desmesne, well watered richly planted'. No doubt the Delanys during their time 'improved' it. To

Mary Delany it was "the house ordin ary, but is well enough for a summer house".

The visual journal shows her to be content with terrain that was easily reached, rather than making special ef forts to pursue the grand or unusual. Before and after her second marriage, she stayed with her nephew, John Dewes, in Worcestershire, at Bradley Oak, or

with her brother at Calwich, in Staf fordshire, and sketched in both places, and at Gloucester, probably on her way to her favourite habitat, Bath. From Staffordshire, Derbyshire was easily ac cessible, and she revelled in the natural beauties of Dovedale and Matlock Tor.

After the marriage, when she took a more confident view of her drawing, she introduced herself into the land scapes - a regular artist's motif - always at work; and the Dean appears with her sometimes, leaning on his stick, watch ing as she sketches, in the comfort of the tree-house at Bradley, or less se

cure, in the shadow of a bush by Han bury Pools, or sightseeing at the local church. They may be the man and wo man in the Welbeck view of 1756, walking with her grand-niece, Miss Port.

She drew her first impressions of the grove of evergreens at Delville, and the ruins at Downpatrick, Ardglass and Saul. In 1746, back in England, she sketched at Kedleston (or "Keidel ston", as she named it) Park. Rath

mines Castle, two miles from Dublin, then in the country, Charlemont Castle in Co. Armagh, Augher (she calls it "Agher") Castle, and Lady Anne

Ward's Temple at Castleward, were all subjects. But architecture was a pivot for landscape.

Her interest in flowers is evident in several drawings where a row of speci

mens - such as daisy, foxglove, or sun flower - stand up in the foreground. In

'ye~~~~~~~~~ A Mr

Beggar's hut in Delville garden, Dublin, 1745.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


1741, she wrote to Mrs. Dewes exult ing in the Duchess of Queensbury's

white satin, embroidered with "brown hills covered with all sorts of weeds.. . and all sorts of twining flowers."

In her letters, too, we find pen pictures of people, or pen caricatures. Speaking about the absurd fashions in January 1746/7, she mentions the enormous hoops and "vast winkers" for the head.

"They are now come to such an extravag ance in those two particulars, that I expect soon to see the other extreme of thread paper heads and no hoops, and from appearing like so many blown bladders we shall look like so many bodkins stalking about."

However, she never extends to car icature in her drawings. Nature was the ruling passion in them, the beauty of a nature improved by man. Figures, when

they occur, provide personality or hu mour, or a pastoral flavour, and are ti midly introduced, not with obvious be nefit to the composition. A stiff crea ture stands on a rock in the view of

Matlock cascade, two others scramble or peep over boulders, hardly visible.

While she took a definite interest in the natural curiosities of Derbyshire, there are no views of Glendalough, or

wild spots of Wicklow, such as the Devil's Glen. It was 1762 before she visited the Giants Causeway. The awe some angles of the hills seem to have impressed her more than the rocky phenomena. Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin compare her - some what unfavourably - with Susanna Drury,10 little of whose work is known but whose gouaches of the Giants Causeway of twenty years before are strong and realistic, the figures con

vincingly related to the rocky environ ment. They were, of course, working in different traditions, Mary Delany's taste being for the Italian manner.

In 1765, Mary Delany sketched the rocky pool and cliffs of "the Dargel" at Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow, one of her more lyrical views. She ignored the drama of the waterfall that had astound ed Barret and Carver. Two years later, at the age of sixty-seven, she took topo. graphical representations of various features of the lakes at Killarney, as seen from "Mucrass" garden, Aghadoe and Innisfallen Isle, hardly bothering to em bellish them. These are more like the notes of an eighteenth century tourist than the attempts of the aesthete, at

Calwich, Wroxton and Downpatrick, in search of beauty.

Mary Delany worked regularly, from six in the morning until dinner-time.

Saul, Co. Down, 1745.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


While she did much of her work out of-doors, she finished the drawings at home, having a working closet, with a view out to Killiney, where she kept her materials. This explains two distinct manners in her drawings. The first is a primitive, topographical outline, in hard pencil, noting exact details of a view, sometimes with ruler-straight lines. De tails such as swans, or windmills, or the delightful figure running near the nine ty foot rock at Dovedale, are recorded.

The second is a softer, stylized, It alianate manner, no doubt learned from Goupy, fluffing up foliage, attending to the grace or peculiarities of tree trunks, filling out water reflections. She used

wash for shading or shadows, or to bring forward the foreground, and char coal - or more often pen and ink - to emphasize outlines. More elegant fi gures belong to this second stage. But seldom did she knit the two manners

wholly together. Each exists as a sep arate element within the same drawing.

The length of time between "taking"

and "finishing" a view probably varied. On June 11, 1745, she refers to "the ruins of the old cathedral [of Down patrick] ... on an eminence just op posite to Wood Island, from whence I have taken a drawing". The finished drawing in her album is dated June 13th, 1745, a matter of days. Other drawings completed during the winter months show the trees in full leaf, un conscious of seasons: though this, of course, is no clue to when the view was originally taken. She had no interest in the changes of nature, only the won ders 'improved' by her own, or an other's hand.

There is a pastoral air about her land scapes. Country people go industrious ly about their tasks; noble visitors, in simple dress, saunter in the meadows. The sky remains benign. There are two literary views. But she never tightened up her style to become either definitely topographical, or deliberately fanciful. Indeed, her style hardly altered over the thirty years during which she sketched,

beyond developing into a more relaxed manner, after the first close-knit and self-conscious compositions of the early 1740's. In these, the distant landscape is like a backdrop to the foreground. Later, her work acquires more obvious spac iousness.

For Mary Delany, Nature and Art were bound in an indissoluble relation ship of creativity, shared with the divine spirit - a common eighteenth century view.1" It might be expressed in paint ing, music, mosaic or poetry, all of

which media she employed. Her land scapes, letters, and her famous botan ical Flora, now in the British Museum, are assured a permanent place among the creative memorabilia of their time.

And, whether Artistic Lady or Lady Artist, her book of drawings is a re minder of the talents of many other wo men in her position, at that period, whose drawings and paintings were not fortunate enough to survive.

Hilary Pyle

NOTES

1. 'Finest Prospects'. 17 September- 31 October, 1986 (to commerate the takeover of

Kenwood House by English Heritage). 2. Mary Delany's letters, from which I quote,

were first edited by Lady Llanover in the

Autobiography of Mary Granville Vols. 1-3,

1861; second series Vols. 1-3, 1862. An

abbreviated version was edited by R. Brimley

Johnson, Mrs. Delany at Court and among the

Wits, 1925.

3. Country Life 22 February, 1979: D. Jacques,

'Capability Brown at Warwick Castle', 474-6.

Country Life 10 September, 1981: John Cornforth, 'Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire' II, 854-7.

4. National Gallery of Ireland, No. 2722. 5. For a lively account of her early years, see CE.

Vulliamy, Aspasia: the life and letters of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, 1700?1788. London, 1935.

6. National Library of Wales. Mary Delany Collection.

7. W.T. Whitley, Artists and their friends in

England, 1700-1799, 1928. Vol. 2, 330-2. 8. Ruth Hayden, Mrs. Delany: her Life and her

Flowers (British Museum Publications), 1980, pp. 131 ff.

9. John Cornforth, op. cit., 855, fig. 4. 10. The Painters of Ireland c. 1660-1920, 1978, 62. 11. Verses by Mrs Delany in 1784 in Ms. 39898. f.

17. Warren Hastings Papers Supplement. British Museum.

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Artist or Artistic? The Drawings of Mary Delany