Forthcoming Exhibitions in 2010
Mary Delany, Portlandia Grandiflora, 1782, collage of coloured papers with watercolour and body colour on black ink background, © The Trustees of the British Museum
19 February - 1 May 2010
Mrs Delany and Her Circle
Mrs. Delany, née Mary Granville (1700-1788), was
a significant figure in the practice of natural history in Georgian
England and, in the words of Edmund Burke, "the woman of fashion
of all ages." During her long life she was a pattern of accomplishment
and curiosity for her contemporaries and became a model to subsequent
generations.
Drawing upon works from Private collections, the Royal Collection and public institutions such as the British Museum, Natural History Museum, British Library and the National Gallery of Ireland, the exhibtion will be the first to survey her entire life and to essay the full range of Mrs. Delany's creative endeavors. It will bring together art, fashion, and science: fields that are now generally conceived as separate realms of cultural practice, but that were intimately connected in the varied circles in which Mrs. Delany thrived. The centre pieces of the show will include sections of Delany's court mantua, the court dress magnificently embroidered with naturalistic flowers dramatically displayed against a black satin background, which she wore to a ball in the early 1740s. This exhibition is the first time that these surviving sections fabric have been brought together. Other notable loans include her 'paper mosaic' botanical studies of flowers, part of her magnum opus the Flora Delanica, which were so admired by Horace Walpole and which are on loan from the Bristh Museum.
This exhibition, organised by Sir John Soane's Musuem and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, is accompanied by a major publication Mary Delany and her Circle published by the Soane and the Yale Center for British Art.
19 February - 1 May 2010
Promiscous Assemblage, Friendship,
and
The Order of Things
Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship & The Order of Things is an extraordinary site-specific installation for the Breakfast Room of No.13 Lincoln's Inn Fields created by artist Jane Wildgoose to accompany and complement the exhibition Mrs Delany and her Circle. First shown at the Yale Center for British Art at New Haven, Connecticut, USA, this beautiful installation is a celebration of the enduring and productive friendship between Mrs. Delany and Margaret Cavendish, second Duchess of Portland.
Wildgoose's extravagant cabinet of curiosities evokes the "Promiscuous Assemblage" described in the catalogue that accompanied the sale of the Duchess's "Portland Museum" compiled by the botanist John Lightfoot and published in 1786. This magnificent collection of natural history specimens, fine and decorative arts, as well as curiosities, with which Mary Delany was familiar, was sold in the year following the Duchess's death at a 38-day auction comprising over four thousand lots.
Wildgoose's meticulous creation offers a perspective on the ways in
which the natural history collections of the 18th-century can be understood
to reflect the delicate interlacing of the manners, taste, friendships
and material culture of the people who assembled them.