The push-pull tension of establishing a life in a new country and maintaining it there, as well as being drawn to those she loved in the country she’d left, never diminished throughout the years of her marriage. If the garden is the symbol of stability, her carriages are her emblems of perennial motion. They had just as much carriage trouble as anyone now has car trouble: buying new carriages, traveling with them on shipboard (a bit like a car train), breaking down, getting stuck, being endlessly delayed, with all the expense and frustration we experience now with automobiles. Yet inside this life of motion is a core of constancy. The fact that the Dean kept his promise to return her to England gave her life a steadiness. The rooted garden and the uprooting trips combined stability and forward motion, reinforced her native optimism, and bolstered her conviction that life is made for keeping busy.
Although their own garden was sinuously laid out, at least in Mrs. Delany’s drawings of it, it probably retained some shapes of the original garden that the Dean had created with Richard Helsham. Both Mary and Patrick deplored the ridiculous lengths some individuals went to as a result of the dramatic shift in eighteenth-century landscape planning influenced by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Intimate with their own land, personally involved with all that was grown there, they hated the idea of wrecking landscape for the sake of a trend. When she and the Dean considered redesigning the Delville garden, she mused about the natural contours of the land, and then decided “it would be a pity” to destroy them. “We had thoughts of having a bowling-green before our house in the garden front; but the hill, which descends gradually to the brook, looks so natural and pretty as it is, that it would be a pity to make it level: and so we determine to keep it a lawn, and to have sheep.”19 They scoffed at Lord Chief Justice Singleton, whose estate was halfway between Delville and Downpatrick. Singleton, “like a conceited connoisseur,” was “doing strange things, building an absurd [outdoor] room, turning fine wild evergreens out of the garden, cutting down full grown elms and planting twigs! D.D. has no patience with him, and I shall be under some difficulty to-day to know how to commend anything.”20
Everything that flowered stimulated Mrs. Delany’s ideas, and she turned out to be a garden innovator, too, an early adopter of the ideas of staging we casually use today. She drew one of her designs – a way to display her auriculas – on a January day in 1746 and then sent it to her sister. “We have a little odd nook of a garden, at the end of which is a very pretty summer-house, and in the corners of it are houses built up for blowing auriculas; it is upon the whole of a triangular form, long and narrow, much like this scratch.” She drew a sketch and included this key: “AA, the blow-houses on pillars. B, the summer-house or temple. C, frame for nine-pins.”21
When you stage a blooming plant, as she did, setting it against a backdrop, the blooming plant is almost like an actor beneath a proscenium arch. It’s an easy leap from the plant to the painted image. The play of foreground and background creates a vista both in a garden and in a painting. But in life sometimes the smallest leap needs a hand. As her biggest fan, Patrick Delany’s appreciation staged her, just as she staged her auriculas. She became his brilliant focus – and he became her vista, the expansive background that his generosity of spirit provided.
He also had a project in mind. He wanted to add a chapel to Delville, and his talented wife was the perfect person to supply the paintings for the chapel walls. For the most part, these paintings were copies of other works. She tackled a Madonna and Child after Guido Reni, as well as a Transfiguration. With these works she put to use all the information Hogarth had given her, all the lessons she’d had from Goupy, all the times she’d watched over the shoulder of her friend Letitia Bushe, and all she’d taken in from Rupert Barber (a painter the couple patronized by allowing him a little house on their land).
Aside from the paintings in the chapel, she copied portraits by Van Dyck, Lely, and Rubens and made some original portraits of her family, including her parents, aunt, and uncle. Most of this work has been lost, though the indomitable cataloguer Lady Llanover made a list of it, fifty-nine “Pictures Painted by Mrs. Delany in Oils and Crayons.”22 Her original paintings were made to remember loved ones: aides-memoire. She certainly had no idea of creating them for public consumption.
Kim Sloan, Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours Before 1880 at the British Museum, gave me a cup of tea in her office, in a room off a room off a room off a room, deep in the museum’s medulla oblongata. We huddled in her book-lined, wainscoted nook and the soft-voiced Sloan, her hair clipped back in a twist, found and served me a slice of ginger cake. In her book, A Noble Art, she explains the world of what we would call amateur artists.23 The paintings and drawings that survive from her marriage would never have catapulted Mrs. Delany into the category of professional artist. There is a charm to the surviving original works, such as the portrait of her goddaughter, Sally Chapone, but also an amateurish, studentish quality. The drawings that survive, especially those in a notebook in the National Gallery of Ireland, have a whimsical assurance and zest. Drawing and painting in the years of her marriage were activities to be taken seriously, but they also fell into a category of personal interest, more than a hobby but less than a calling, something better to be engaged at even than music. “Painting has fewer objections, and generally leads people into much better company.”24
Mrs. Delany painted in the course of the obligations of her days, which meant entertaining people, not so much by invitation as by looking up to find them dropping in (she was a cleric’s wife, after all, and expected to receive his congregants). She ran a household with servants and conducted a social life with concerts and assemblies, traveling to events at Dublin Castle; she shopped, she visited, she gave dinners to neighbors and dignitaries. Her friend Ann Donnellan came and stayed for long periods of time, as did her painting-pal Letitia Bushe. As her nieces and nephews grew up, they came and stayed. She became a substitute mother for Patrick Delany’s niece. Her goddaughter, Sally Chapone, daughter of her childhood friend, moved in with them.
She painted in the context of planning meals, planning travel, planning her garden, and budgeting for her household bills, not to mention being interrupted by the sheer power of memory, as she was when catapulted back to moments in her life: “I saw in the newspapers that Lord Baltimore was ill: is he dead?” Her memory of Baltimore has the touch of a dried specimen. “He had some good qualities,” she mused; then she speculated about his children. “I suppose he suspects they are not his own,” she said cattily. Yet in the very next sentence she described her stubborn insistence on getting the Madonna just right for the Dean’s chapel. “The Madonna I have painted over twice.”25 Painting and repainting demonstrate a drive to revise, to get things right. “I have been very busy at my picture,” she stubbornly insisted in November 1752, nearly two years later, “have painted twice over the upper figures in the Transfiguration.”26 It’s not only copies in oils that she labored over for the chapel, but shellwork, too. “I am going on making shell flowers, six of the festoons are finished and fastened on; I have ten more to do, and a wreath to go round the window after the communion table.”27 Heavens, did she have to do ten? Unafraid of hard work – in fact, reveling in hard work as the substance of life – she tackled her tasks again and again.
Meanwhile the Dean wrote poetry and sermons and tried to take better care of his parishioners than his predecessors had. His wife, as she had all her adult life, beginning when she was married to Pendarves, continued to do large and small social and financial favors for people. If she loved the craft of an artful clockmaker or a glassmaker or a painter of enamels such as Barber, she tried to get the artist support. Part of this was simply her participation in the system of patronage. She was embedded in it, and she did what was expected of her – but actively, particularly in Ireland, where she felt helpless in the midst of the extreme poverty. Mrs. D. was not Mother Teresa, but she understood very well that the taking up of local social respons
ibility makes life better for both the giver and the receiver. In November 1745, she wrote about a celebration at Dublin Castle where suddenly people appeared wearing clothing made of Irish fabric, a trend that she herself led, and which gave business to the Irish weavers.
On the Princess of Wales’s birthday there appeared at Court a great number of Irish stuffs. Lady Chesterfield was dressed in one, and I had the secret satisfaction of knowing myself to have been the cause, but dare not say so here; but I say, “I am glad to find my Lady Chesterfield’s example has had so good an influence.” The poor weavers are starving, – all trade has met with a great check this year.28
Energy begat energy. She walked for miles, sometimes with a “shepherdess’s crook,” and sketched outdoors.29 “In our walks this morning we were much amused in finding a variety of fine caterpillars.”30 She read and was read to copiously. “D.D. reads to me whilst I work cross-stitch … and exerts his good-humoured cheerfulness.”
“She’s lucky she married Pendarves,” artist Julie Hedrick told me. Honey-haired Julie is an abstract colorist whose paintings are the twenty-first-century Canadian opposite of Mary Delany’s obsession with detail, huge canvases with great swaths of color and light that feel as big as the province of Ontario. At my suggestion, in November 2009 she went off to see the extraordinary display of Mrs. Delany’s work at the Yale Center for British Art curated by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts. I wondered if she would hate it, since it is so unlike her vast, contemporary works. But Julie was enthralled. “If she had first married someone she loved, she would have had children and that would have been the end of her.” Yes, I thought, and if she had married John Wesley or her cousin Thomas, that might have been the end of her in another way. Mary herself posed this question to Anne in March 1751:
Why must women be driven to the necessity of marrying? a state that should always be a matter of choice! and if a young woman has not fortune sufficient to maintain her in the station she has been bred to, what can she do, but marry? and to avoid living either very obscurely or running into debt, she accepts of a match with no other view than that of interest. Has not this made matrimony an irksome prison to many, and prevented its being that happy union of hearts where mutual choice and mutual obligation make it the most perfect state of friendship?31
Magnolia grandiflora, detail (illustration credit 9.1)
By her fifties Mrs. Delany knew the difference between these two kinds of matrimony. Julie Hedrick’s speculation feels right from a twenty-first-century point of view. Mrs. Delany’s first widowhood allowed her the independence to study as preparation for the artist she became; her second marriage trained her as a painter. The seriousness with which Patrick “hired” Mary for the chapel paintings and the gravity with which she took her job created between them the bond of the patron-enthusiast and the artist. Patrick wrote a postscript to Mary’s letter to her sister on March 3, 1753, addressing himself to his sister-in-law.
My dear Sister – The Transfiguration is the sweetest picture I ever saw, and the figures the finest you will ever see till your transfiguration. God in his goodness bless and preserve you and yours!
P.D.
Anne, intent not only on keeping the letters but on annotating them for the future, wrote a note on this letter, which Lady Llanover records: “This is the Dean’s writing; he means the picture my sister has just copied, which is from a capital picture of Raphael.”32
Mary thought of her copies of religious paintings as having a distinct spiritual dimension. The subjects were religious but the process of painting was also devotional. On Ash Wednesday of 1753, she planned to fast, to pray – and to paint. However, she was interrupted, ironically, by the secular chat of the Bishop of Killala’s wife (Ann Donnellan’s sister). She and four other people plonked themselves down at Delville and stayed “till nearly four: I was quite harassed and out of humour.”33
Painting and drawing were daytime work. Handiwork she undertook at night. “My candlelight work, is finishing a carpet in double-cross-stitch, on very coarse canvass, to go round my bed.”34 During these years she embarked on a frenzy of embroidery. Lady Llanover lists “a number of chairs” including “backs and seats … all executed in worsted chenille,” “other sets of chairs,” “bed hangings, and chair and sofa covers.”35 In marriage her embroidery continued, now not so much applied to dressing the body as to dressing up the house.
At about the same time that the Dean was building his chapel – and building his wife an outdoor kitchen, too – and about the same time that Mrs. Delany began work on her “commission” to copy religious paintings for the chapel, something else began to seep into the atmosphere. The Tennisons, the family of the Dean’s first wife, were claiming in court that the inheritance he had received at her death was due to them instead. Some of the very largess that allowed the Dean to contemplate building a chapel and a new kitchen had come from the financial ease he had achieved after inheriting from his first wife’s estate. The millstone of the lawsuit would grind against the couple continually for ten long years – as every timber went up in his chapel, as almost every face materialized on her canvases, as almost every auricula blew in their garden, and as almost every fawn was born to their herd of deer (all of whom had pet names after their family and friends). As the chair covers were fitted to their seats, as the words of the Dean’s essays were written, as the guests from the Lord Primate to the neighbors were entertained, as Mary’s friends the Hamiltons joined Letitia Bushe and Ann Donnellan to read and gossip, as the carriages were packed for the journey from Dublin to Mount Panther, the low noise of the lawsuit droned on like a case of tinnitus. In 1750 Mary described Patrick’s situation to her sister: “It is well my good Dean has his garden to relax and relieve his spirits, for now they are much turmoiled with his Tennison lawsuit; it is to come on next term, he prefers his cross bill in a few days.”36
The Tennison suit hinged on a document that Delany was supposed to have kept track of but which was likely burned. An emissary was sent by the Delanys all the way to Jamaica to obtain evidence in his defense. “Should the man we sent to Jamaica return with any good intelligence from the person he was sent to, which we now hourly expect, it will make everything easy.”37 Although some documentation was obtained, everything was not made easy, and the allegations went back and forth. Nine months later, prickly Bernard Granville heard about the suit and, always mindful of his family reputation, wrote to ask what was going on. From Mount Panther Mary confided in Anne, “I had a very easy, cheerful letter from my brother, wherein he desires to know what the lawsuit is about? I have informed him as laconically as I possibly could! ”38
Though the suit pressured their finances, a stress on their reputation had joined it: allegations that the Dean wasn’t spending an appropriate amount of time on his clerical responsibilities and implications that there were irregularities with the tithes brought in under his deanship. “He is most extremely harassed with his law-suits.”39 But the siege of his reputation got worse as he was accused by the Presbyterians – “those querulous people!” – of other religious irregularities, “a mistake committed on his side of a form at law.” A sludge of rumors accreted, and Mrs. Delany herself began to feel responsible. “There is murmuring at his not living more at his deanery, and being absent so long from it when we go to England. This you may believe is vexatious to me, as it is entirely on my account he goes.” Both public disputes, one civil, one religious, hit Delany where his wife would most suffer – in his reputation.
By 1752 Mrs. Delany methodically counted her blessings to bolster her defenses against it all.
I have indeed often thought of late my lot most singularly happy, more so than is generally met with in this world of woe: a husband of infinite merit, and deservedly most dear to me; a sister whose delicate and uncommon friendship makes me the envy of all other sisters; a brother of worth and honour, and a friend in the Duchess of Portland not to be equalled, besides so many other friends, that al
together make up the sum of my happiness.40
Though the emissary to Jamaica confirmed “what the Dean says about the burnt paper” and found that “the original draft” existed, it turned out that the possessor of the original was dead – and the whereabouts of his papers unknown.41 Complications proliferated like an infestation of bugs. The case went on; the court recessed. “Yesterday the Tennisons moved for judgement,” Mrs. Delany reported in early November 1752. “My Lord Chancellor said, ‘Don’t be in a hurry; you shall have time enough to make what motion you please.’ I believe the decree will not be given this Term.”42 At the end of the year she added, “As to loss of fortune, I trust we can very well bear it, and should they take all that came from Mrs. Tennison, we shall still have more left.”43 But two years later the Tennisons balked at compromising, and the Delanys had to decamp to England to continue their suit.
Both Anne Dewes and the Duchess urged the Delanys to try to settle. “I have had a most friendly letter from the Duchess of Portland pressing me with great earnestness and delicacy to comply with a compromise, as does my dear sister.” But Mrs. Delany and the Dean were adamant. They would not relent in the suit unless his reputation was cleared. “I am sure you would not for any worldly consideration have D.D. submit to anything that should in the least degree confirm the odium his adversaries would load him with.”44
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