The white Sattin Moth (Phalæna salicis), The white Poplar (Populus alba) (1773)
白色絢孔菌、银白杨
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- slightly upright 1.26 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
Slightly taller than wide; the eye lands on the bird's head, a little above centre. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 21 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 6.1% of the sheet, foliage 13.0%, the cast red with a second note of 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.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
The sheet is slightly tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant takes about 29% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the easy measure most florists kept to.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
少年骑马入咸阳，鹘似身轻蝶似狂。
—— 《晚春感事四首·其四》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and 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. 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 1749 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. 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
“Benjamin Wilkes” carries only Benjamin Wilkes'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
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1749.
About this plate
The white Sattin Moth (Phalæna salicis), The white Poplar (Populus alba) (1773) is plate 77, from Benjamin Wilkes, drawn by Benjamin Wilkes. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: English, ?-1749.
Previous plateThe Lacquey Moth (Phalæna Neustria), 1.Tway Blade (Ophrys ovata), 2.Shining Dovesfoot Cranesblll (Geranium lucidum), 3.Climbing Fumitory, or yellow Vetchling (Fumaria claviculata) (1773)
Next plateThe Buff-tip Moth (Phalæna bucephalu), The yellow dwarf-Willow (Salix vitellina) (1773)
