Set of 8 Melamine Coasters

To create a new form of art must be the dream of every aspiring artist and to do this at the remarkable age of 72 years old is a remarkable achievement. Mary Granville (1700-1788) spent her happiest married years in Ireland and, encouraged by her second husband, Dean Patrick Delany, she developed her original artistic talents. It is for her collection of botanical pictures created out of coloured papers, at an age when most people’s powers are declining, that she will be best remembered. Her ‘paper mosaicks’, as Mrs. Delany called her collection occupied her until October 1782 when failing sight constrained her to stop, but she had completed nearly one thousand. She placed her pictures in ten volumes, which are now in the British Museum in London; it is by kindness of the Trustees that the Irish Georgian Society had these coasters made.