MARY DELANY (1700 - 1788) A collection comprising; six framed silhouette portraits; a collection of sketches and caricatures including examples inscribed 'Bulstrode 1742' and other examples with publishing date '1st June 1780' and one titled 'I have lost my stomach' Note: Bulstrode was the home of her dearest friend, Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, with whom she spent seventeen summers after Dr Delany's death in 1768. Provenance: by descent through the family of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat, Wiltshire, to Lord Christopher Thynne, from whose estate acquired by the current owner ‘One of the most prolific and well-known amateur artists of the eighteenth century excelling particularly in the applied arts’ (AAI, vol. 2, p. 231), Mary Delany spent some twenty-five years in Ireland having married the clergyman, and friend of Dean Swift, Patrick Delany. Though closely associated with Ireland she was, however, from a notably well-connected English aristocratic family the Granvilles, though her father, a younger son, did not inherit rank or great fortune. Demonstrating her versatility this remarkable group of drawings also nicely illustrates Mrs Delany’s sense of humour and is revealing of her links with two of eighteenth-century England’s great houses. It comprises small drawings, silhouettes and caricatures, some taken from the life and some copied from other sources. The sheets have come from the Thynne family of Longleat, via the late Lord Christopher Thynne, brother of Alexander, the colourful 7th Marquess of Bath. The drawings range over more than four decades, from two drawings which are dated 1742, to a copy of a James Gillray caricature, I have lost my Stomach’, the original of which was published in June 1780. Indicative of the interlocking aristocratic circles in which the artist operated, some of the drawings are inscribed as having been executed at the Duchess of Portland’s house at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire where Delany spent a portion of almost every year from the 1730s until the duchess’s death in 1785. The Bulstrode set was exceptionally cultivated, and the importance of the house and its denizens to Delany’s creative life has recently been well articulated. There Mrs Delany entered a circle: as far reaching as the American Colonies and the South Seas. Along with the duchess’s other properties in London and at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire, Bulstrode was a preeminent site for all facets of curiosity. The duchess’s collections were astonishing in their breadth and depth; they contained antiquities such as the Portland Vase, objets de virtù mineralogy, entomology and botany. (Mark Laird & Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (eds), Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London, 2009), p. 9. Bulstrode served as an ‘incubator of Linnean botany’ in England and the scholarly pursuits conducted there were formative influences on Delany’s great botanical works. Pleasingly, however, one of the drawings in the present lot, inscribed in the artist’s hand ‘Bulstrode 1742,’ shows that less taxing country house pursuits were also on offer, as a portly man wearing a check coat or dressing gown and sitting at a table puzzles over a word game. The drawings’ provenance to Lord Christopher Thynne from Longleat, the great ‘prodigy’ house in Wiltshire, is highly suggestive of their origin as Delany was closely associated with the Thynne family throughout her long life. The wife of Thomas the 3rd Viscount Weymouth (‘chronically indolent and by no means abstemious’) was the daughter of Delany’s great friend the Duchess of Portland (ibid., 41) while Weymouth’s mother, Louisa Granville, was Delany’s cousin. Indeed, Delany’s connections with the Thynnes went further back and she visited first when she was seventeen. Her uncle, Lord George Lansdowne had married the widowed Lady Mary Thynne whose husband had been the first Viscount Weymouth and this ‘began the association of Mary’s family with Longleat, (ibid., 42) which in time ‘reached a third and fourth generation’ (ibid., 58.) Still in the collection of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat, is a silhouette by Delany of the Weymouth family at leisure, with two of their daughters playing chess and the six silhouette offered here almost certainly also represent members of the Thynne family. Mrs Delany’s silhouettes are extremely rare – though of course they share a similar cutting technique to her famous flower mosaics – making the identification of this set of six a very fascinating addition to her documented oeuvre.