Album of fish, plants, and insects Pl.42 (1772)
藜
Album of fish, plants, and insects Pl.42 (1772)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.39 : 1
First Look
论画以形似，见与儿童邻。
—— 宋·苏轼《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》
To judge painting by likeness alone is the view of a child.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles on the bird. Take the posture before the plumage. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the yellow is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 4.7% of the sheet, foliage 0.4%, the cast amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Insect plates show the host plant and all four stages at once — egg, larva, pupa, adult — with wing venation, scales and antennal segments accounted for: the most technical branch of natural-history art. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow. Feather colour is structure, not pigment: light bent by barbules. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 6% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. Take a loupe to three places: petal edge, leaf vein, caption. An unbroken line means engraving; colour crossing the outline means a hand. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.
Poetic Resonance
何处拂胸资蝶粉，几时涂额藉蜂黄。
—— 唐·李商隐《酬崔八早梅有赠兼示之作》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the yellow the bird itself becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China the butterfly is dream and lovers, the cicada purity, the firefly a lamp for reading; in Europe the insect began as specimen before it became symbol. This plate leans yellow, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
Set by life stage: butterflies in spring and summer, moths into autumn, beetles from May to July. Four stages on one sheet span a whole year. Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) first showed insect stages with their host plants — the result of raising caterpillars in the Surinam forest with her daughters. The year 1772 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The bud and the ripe fruit on one branch tell the season; the name in the title often tells the journey.
The Book and the Hand
“Album of fish, plants, and insects” carries only Chinese School's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
What to Take Away
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1772 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Album of fish, plants, and insects Pl.42 (1772) is plate 42, from Album of fish, plants, and insects, drawn by Chinese School. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: China, 1772.
