Album of flower and insect studies Pl.07 (18th century)
藜
Album of flower and insect studies Pl.07 (18th century)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- broad 0.72 : 1
First Look
真山水之川谷，远望之以取其势，近看之以取其质。
—— 宋·郭熙《林泉高致·山水训》
Mountains and valleys: from afar take their momentum, up close take their texture — the two distances from which any picture is read.
Broad and horizontal: the eye travels side to side. Find where it stops. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 17 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
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 7.7% of the sheet, foliage 1.7%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. 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 orange — an amber orange. Feather colour is structure, not pigment: light bent by barbules. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is broad. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 10% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
The exact date is lost. Woodcut before 1700, copper in the eighteenth century, steel and lithography from the 1820s, chromolithography by the century's end. 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
槐陌蝉声柳市风，驿楼高倚夕阳东。
—— 唐·韦庄《关河道中》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange 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 orange, 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. No firm date survives, so the season is inferred from the subject. Much of what that generation knew of such birds came from specimens and cages; read locality and season both as hearsay.
The Book and the Hand
“Album of flower and insect studies” carries only Anonymous'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
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Look long enough at an old plate and you stop seeing the plant and start seeing the person who gave it a day.
About this plate
Album of flower and insect studies Pl.07 (18th century) is plate 7, from Album of flower and insect studies, drawn by Anonymous. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: China, 18th century.
