20th Century collection of Tiffany & Company porcelain, designed by Sybil Connolly ‘Mrs. Delany’s Flowers’. The table ware designed for Tiffany’s was based on Mrs. Delany Flower collages from the 1700’s.
Mary Granville Delany (1700-1788) was considered to be one of the most witty, intellectual, artistic accomplished women in eighteenth century England and Ireland. She mixed in the highest social circles and was a friend of King George III and Queen Charlotte, Dean Swift, Horace Walpole Edmund Burke and Handel among others. She married Dr Patrick Delany, Dean of Down, in 1743 and came to live in Ireland in both Dublin and Down Patrick. She returned to London after her husband’s death in 1768. Throughout her life she produced exquisite embroidery, decorative shell work and landscape sketches inspired by her love of nature. She created her most extraordinary work between the ages of seventy-three and eighty-two when she made nearly 1,000 collages from hundreds of pieces of coloured paper, each rendering in minute detail a different flower. They can still be seen in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum today. Sybil Connolly’s admiration of Mrs Delany’s work led her to organise, with Professor Charles Ryscamp, an exhibition of Mrs Delany’s collages at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York in 1986. Sybil had been asked to design china by John Loring for Tiffanys earlier that year and she decided, in order to draw attention to the exhibition, to use designs which echoed Mary Delany’s collages. In order to bring these designs to fruition she collaborated with Wendy Walsh one of Ireland’s foremost botanical illustrators. The exhibition and the china proved a great success.
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