[3] Her eldest son was born at Amiens, a few months before the Battle of Waterloo and she had to return home in haste in 1815.
[3] His health also failed around the same time, and Mary had to deploy her artistic talents in order to support her family.
Her fruit and flower pieces bore unmistakable marks of taste, feeling, and close observation of nature.
Her first works, in the 1810s, were of detached specimens of fruit, cut sprigs of garden or wild flowers, and sometimes birds' nests.
As she progressed, she painted living, growing plants, especially wild flowers, depicting violets, cowslips, wood anemones, primroses, snowdrops, crocuses and the most beautiful roses, in her annual supply of work to art exhibitions.