Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells,
And pretty maids all in a row.
The tradition of floral still life painting inevitably conjures the Dutch Baroque masters—sumptuous arrangements showing tulips, roses, peonies, and more in tight buds, full bloom, and wilting petals. The message was clear: the vitality of youth and beauty, indeed life itself, is all too brief. The traditional canon centers on 17th-century masters: Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Jan Davidsz de Heem, and the acclaimed female painter Rachel Ruysch. This tradition, however, came long before and continues long after the Dutch masters embedded grand themes of mortality into carefully composed floral bouquets. Among the many artists who continued this tradition is a now-lesser-known but once highly esteemed 18th-century English artist who deserves reconsideration alongside those earlier celebrated names: Mary Moser, RA (1744–1819). One of only two female founding members of the British Royal Academy, Moser’s vibrant compositions rivaled the technical prowess of her continental predecessors while carving a distinctive path of her own.
Born in London to George Michael Moser, Swiss-born drawing master to King George III, Mary received rigorous artistic training from childhood. The father-artist lineage—common enough among male painters—was nearly essential for women entering the profession in the 18th century. While her father was known primarily for his work as an enameller and goldsmith, he was also active at St. Martin’s Lane Academy from its founding in 1735. Mary’s work reveals clear affinities with the Dutch tradition, particularly the elaborate bouquets and dramatic lighting effects associated with Ruysch and van Huysum. But where the Baroque artists often infused their arrangements with memento mori symbolism, Moser’s paintings pulse with a celebration of botanical abundance.
Still life painting flourished during a period of intense fascination with natural science and, perhaps more significantly for the English sensibility, innovations in garden design. Lancelot “Capability” Brown was transforming the cultivated British landscape, replacing geometric formality with naturalistic sweeps of rolling lawns and serpentine paths creating the illusion of the untouched picturesque. Moser translated this horticultural enthusiasm into paintings for fashionable interiors, most spectacularly in her commission from Queen Charlotte to decorate a room at Frogmore House, the Queen’s country retreat near Windsor. Queen Charlotte envisioned “an arbour open to the skies,” and Moser responded with a harmonious integration of canvases depicting flowers culled from the Queen’s own botanical collection. The room achieves a delicate balance between Neoclassical architectural restraint and the exuberant profusion of painted blooms—a visual translation of the period’s landscape revolution brought indoors.
Moser’s achievement must be understood within the constraints she navigated. Along with celebrated history painter Angelica Kauffmann, she was one of only two women among the 34 male founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768—a remarkable distinction that nonetheless came with significant limitations. Both women were barred from life drawing classes with nude models, training deemed essential for mastering human anatomy. Even when drawing from plaster casts, they were instructed to omit the “sensitive regions.” Social propriety additionally excluded them from committee meetings and official Academy dinners among their male counterparts.
Johann Zoffany’s painting The Academicians of the Royal Academy famously captures their marginalized status in a group portrait of the founding members gathered around a nude male model as if participating in a life drawing session. Depicting such a scene required excluding the women, thus preserving their marginalized status: Moser and Kauffmann appear not seated among the members but as portraits hanging on the back wall—an acknowledgment of their founding membership and simultaneous denial of their full participation. A later version, The Royal Academicians in General Assembly (1795) by Henry Singleton corrected the mistake by placing them in the room albeit in the back. While Kauffmann was recognized for her achievements in portraiture and, later, history painting, Moser’s choice of subject may have further limited her standing and therefore slightly behind her female companion. Flower painting ranked low in the academic hierarchy championed by founding president Sir Joshua Reynolds, as it did in continental academies. That the Royal Academy admitted no other female member until Dame Laura Knight in 1936 underscores both the exceptionalism of Moser and Kauffmann’s achievement and the institution’s resistance to change.
Beyond the painted surface, Moser served as royal drawing teacher and active participant in London’s artistic circles. While she occasionally ventured into portraiture and narrative work, her legacy resides in those dramatic floral compositions—cascading arrangements that capture the ephemeral beauty of gardens with meticulous precision. The decorative scheme at Frogmore House endures as her most ambitious work, a synthesis of artistic mastery and the distinctly English preoccupation with cultivated nature. In navigating the strictures imposed upon her, Moser demonstrated not the contrariness of her nursery rhyme counterpart, but a persistent determination that allowed her extraordinary talent to flourish.
Editor’s Note: “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” first appeared in print around 1744 in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, the year of Mary Moser’s birth. Entirely coincidental, sure, but satisfying nonetheless.