MARY DELANY—aristocrat, gardener, prodigious letter-writer, woman of fashion and friend to George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Swift and King George III, died childless more than 220 years ago. Yet she left a multitude of vivid, vital offspring: 985 botanically accurate and startlingly beautiful portraits of flowers in bloom, collectively known as the “Flora Delanica”. Delany started this project as a widow in her eighth decade. Despite grief, ageing hands and eventually failing eyesight, she invented a new method for creating her flower “mosaicks”: collaging layers of cut, painted paper onto a dense black background, matching her materials to the papery fineness of a flower’s petal. In Molly Peacock’s illustrated biography, the results leap out of the darkness of the past, pulsating with life....The Economist
