My mother just lent me this book , The Paper Garden, by Molly Peacock about Mrs. Mary Delany's amazing paper flower collection. Mrs. Delany lived in England and Ireland from 1700-1788 . She was always a lively,creative woman, but her tour de force happened after she turned 72. She had been widowed for a few years and was still feeling a huge loss from the death of her husband. One day she noticed that a geranium petal was the same colour as a piece of paper she had. That set her creative wheels in motion, and soon she was assembling the most amazing collages out of cut paper which she stuck on a black paper background. The rose on the cover of the book is not a painting; it is cut out of paper and the different colours are layers of different hand-painted coloured paper. The British Museum has a large number of her almost 1000 flower collages, and on their website you can view enlarged versions that really allow you to appreciate her masterpieces.
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Wonderful story, wonderful work. I have that book as well as the coffee table book.
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