Mary Delany's mosaicks

I wanted to share a British Museum Facebook post from yesterday:

Papaver Rheus

Mary Delany was born ‪#‎onthisday‬ in 1700. She began making paper collages, or ‘mosaicks' as she called them, at the age of 72. The idea came to her while staying with her companion, Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, in Buckinghamshire. She had noticed the similarity of colour between a geranium and a piece of red paper that was on her bedside table. Taking up her scissors she imitated the petals. Upon entering the room, the duchess mistook them for real: 'Her approbation was such a sanction to my undertaking... and gave me courage to go on with confidence'. Delany later wrote that her work was intended as an imitation of a ‘hortus siccus’ or collection of dried flowers. In creating a ‘mosaick’, she would cut minute pieces of coloured paper and stick them on a black background to represent each part of a specimen. She created nearly 1,000 collages before failing eyesight caused her to stop in 1782. They filled ten albums which came to the British Museum in 1897. Here are some of these wonderful collages.

If the link above stops working, as these things do, search the galleries by "Mary Delany" and then refine with "Drawn by".

Some of the wonderful mosaicks:

Amaryllis Belladonna

Iris Squalens (Triandria Monogynia)

Magnolia Grandiflora

Nigella Damascena

Parnassia palustris (Pentandria Tetragynia)

Quercus Robur