‘A time travelling conversation about life and art’: the botanical collages of Mary Delany and Georgie Hopton

Since Patrizia Ribul joined the Bath Preservation Trust (BPT) as director in 2023, she has tried to attract a more diverse range of visitors to its flagship museum, No.1 Royal Crescent.

While the Georgian house is the third most visited tourist attraction in Bath, and will be familiar to many as a filming location in the Netflix series Bridgerton and many others, Ribul wanted to draw in more of the local population, encouraging repeat visits.

In 2013, the adjacent building No1 A, previously the house’s servant’s quarters and kitchen, was bought and reconnected, providing a new entrance, shop and gallery space. When Ribul—who was previously the acquisitions programme manager at the Tate—arrived in 2023, the space had been largely unused since the Covid-19 pandemic. She has now put together a schedule of temporary exhibitions that, in her words, are “linked to the themes of the main museum but at the same time caters for wider audiences including local ones and those with an appetite for contemporary visual culture”.

Enter Ingrid Swenson, formerly the director of the influential East London non-profit Peer Gallery from 1998 to 2021, who was appointed as a consultant curator last year to oversee the first two exhibitions that relaunched the gallery. The first, Being There, focused on contemporary portraiture (by the likes of Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Kaye Donachie and Claudette Johnson) was hooked to the acquisition of four Thomas Gainsborough portraits through the Arts Council England’s acceptance in lieu scheme.

The second, The Botanical World of Mary Delany and Georgie Hopton: a Domestic Arrangement opens on Saturday (until 15 June). It pairs Delany’s intricate 18th century botanical collages with contemporary works by the London-based Hopton, all set against wallpaper and fabric designs that Hopton produced with Rapture & Wright especially for the exhibition.

“I’ve always loved visiting exhibitions that blend the contemporary with the historical in bold and surprising ways and have the ability to engage audiences with ideas and themes that resonate across decades or even centuries,” Swenson says. “The initial inspiration for my second exhibition was the 1782 portrait of Mary Delany by John Opie that hangs in the historic house. Delany began making her extraordinary ‘paper mosaiks’ when she was 77 and they were produced around two and a half centuries ago, but still have a remarkable freshness and vibrancy.”

Swenson has admired the work of Hopton, who is represented by Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, for some time. “This was the perfect opportunity to present these artists together as a collaborative project,” Swenson says. With Hopton’s wallpaper and fabrics, the overall effect “is that of a powerful yet welcoming domestic space” Swenson says, with the two artist’s collages hung side-by-side, “as if in a kind of time travelling conversation about life and art, and all things botanical.”

Ribul hopes the exhibitions will provide another visual arts offering in a city that, despite its huge visitor numbers and substantial affluent population, is relatively short on visual—particularly contemporary—art offerings. Ribul points to the positive example of Bath’s Holburne Museum, “which has been re-energised under the directorship of Chris Stephens, demonstrating the appetite a growing visual arts audience has for contemporary art.”

Visitors are important for BPT—as an independent entity, it does not receive any regular local authority or Arts Council England funding, so its main source of income is through museum admissions.

In a similar vein to Delany and Hopton, the next exhibition at No. 1. will pair Jane Austen with a contemporary writer (The Most Tiresome Place in the World: Jane Austen & Bath, 5 July-2 November) and celebrates the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth.

• The Botanical World of Mary Delany and Georgie Hopton: a Domestic Arrangement, No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath, 15 March-15 June