Molly Peacock on Late Life Creativity

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08.12.2011

An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72

Imagine beginning your life's work at age 72. In the 1770's, Mary Delaney invented the medium we now call collage. Her collection of botanically-correct floral collages is today housed in the British Museum. Poet Molly Peacock fell in love with the work and the artist and has written a meditation on both and on late-life creativity.

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A Woman Becomes An Artist in her Eighth Decade

[Adapted from Chapter One]

Imagine starting your life's work at seventy-two. At just that age, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (May 14, 1700-April 15, 1788), a fan of George Frideric Handel, a sometime dinner partner of satirist Jonathan Swift, a wearer of green-hooped satin gowns, and a fiercely devoted subject of blond King George III, invented a precursor of what we know as collage.