Promiscuous Assemblage - Flowers, shells, insects, and artwork

The painstaking labor of Victorian artist Mary Delany (British, 1700-1788) boggles the mind. Her artwork -- graceful, detailed, and as fresh and accurate as the more famous French botanical artist Pierre Joseph Redoute (1759 - 1840) -- has moved into the third floor of the Sir John Soane Museum, 13 Lincolon's Inn Field in London. (http://www.soane.org/next.html. Here's a wonderful place to pass a few hours enveloped by another era entirely. Soane designed the British Houses of Parliament, amassing a treasury of objects and artwork that fills every wall and corner and surface of his townhouse. Adding to the charms of his home,    Delany's artwork, recently returned from several months at the Yale Center for British Art, offers a visual treat on top of a treat.  If you like flowers and men and women of genius, you'll find happiness in excess right here. 

Living amongst such a collection must have been a feat. It is difficult to imagine how Soane's wife, two sons, servants, and pets, not to mention guests, managed to reach across the breakfast table, let alone change their clothes. For Soane was an inveterate collector, like so many educated people of wealth and prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries when, as Kipling wrote, "The sun never set on the British Empire." Vast the scope, and utterly without scruples the reach of archeologists, scholars, and amateur enthusiasts alike who plundered Greece, Rome, and Egypt for relics. The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum are a perfect example. Thus, Sir John Soane's home is itself a "promiscuous assemblage," as the Duchess of Portland's famous museum collection was called, of Greek and Roman terracotta, Medieval objects, artwork by Hogarth, Reynolds, Canaletto, and others, as well as classical and Egyptian antiquities, to summarize briefly. Among Soane's many possessions is a dazzling signet ring belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he much admired.

But Mary Delany's work is the subject here. She had a passion for natural history (Linnaean's system of categorizing plant and animal species had just come into vogue) and the decorative arts, a love of flowers, shells, and china -- shared by her friend the Duchess of Portland. Her botanical collages made from tiny bits of painted paper, are only a part of this exhibition, but they reveal her extraordinary eye and hand, as well as her vast knowledge of botany. So do her journals of plant illustrations, her embroidery - more flowers exquisitely stitched on large panels of black velvet. The exhibition includes her intimate oil portraits and landscapes. Clearly, Delany was a cultivated woman of genius, character, and rare accomplishment, equipped with a gift for friendships, too. Much of her shell collection, also on display at the Soane Museum, belonged to the Portland Museum, whose contents was auctioned off in April 1786.  The cabinets of tiny drawers filled with shells will delight the miniaturist. Indeed, like the 21st-century Maine artist, Brian White, whose shell-flower-embellished wedding dresses have appeared at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, Delany spent her spare hours making shell flowers to cover a chapel ceiling and a chandelier.

The Sir John Soane Museum offers an intimate glimpse of minds drawn to the world of beauty in art and nature. If you find yourself in London, take in this amazing show.

Transcendental Blooms

Five o’clock Friday morning, speeding down Route 2 on a mission to pick up blooms for the Fruitlands Museuma' Open House this Saturday. What’s needed: 10 or 11 arrangements – seven cocktails, four centerpieces for 60-inch round tables – one raised piece among them, and one long and low arrangement for a rectangular table.

The setting: A rural venue with a Transcendental - Shaker - American Indian legacy. A red farmhouse of simple antique Colonial rooms has been turned into the Alcott Restaurant and Tea Room. Sunlight brings delicious notes of spring through the old windows, and beyond – a stunning view over the Nashoba River Valley to Mount Monadnock, a view that resonates with at least four centuries of recorded history, a view that drew Bronson Alcott and other aspirants to this very spot in 1843, when the Transcendentalists set up their (alas, short-lived) Utopian experiment known as Fruitlands.

The flowers must be romantic, rustic, elegant, pretty. It's a treat to rely on whim and inspiration at the flower market. This is seldom possible in the busy wedding season when I order blooms ahead for arrangements long discussed and visualized. A rare opportunity, a time to learn new things. And I do. I discover a new (to me) dendrobium orchid with slender twisting petals in a subtle pink and white stripe. It looks far more exotic than the usual rounded-petaled dendrobium, and is irresistible. My only rationale - compared to Marie Antoinette's extravagances, this is tiddly winks.

Soon the car is filled with brown paper sleeves of creamy freesia, blue delphinium, burgundy ranunculus, purple genestra, white and purple stock, pink dendrobium orchids, seeded eucalyptus, steel grass, white lisianthus, sweet pea of a dangerous pink, pussy willow, and curly willow. More than I need? Invariably. And yet it always turns out every stem finds a place, and I couldn’t have done with less.

Here are two arrangements I came up with for the open house – a long-and-low for the reception table; it has a traditional look, except for a few details - steel grass cut short in a sort of Japanese-like fan, and an asymmetry that gives it new life, and a cocktail vase of those new dendrobium orchids.