Paper Mosaicks

Mary Delany

Mary Delany

In 1700, the artist Mary Delany discovered collage. At the age of 72, Mary was struck by how closely a piece of red paper on her bedside table resembled a geranium and took up her scissors. “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” she wrote. Between 1772 and 1783, even when her eyesight failed, Delany produced nearly a thousand botanical “paper mosaicks”. Using as many as 200 minutely cut paper petals for each flower, sometimes incorporating real dried petals and leaves, Mary’s collages were so delicate and accurate that the botanist Joseph Banks once declared you could look at them and “describe botanically any plant without the least fear of committing an error”.