A Classical Urn with Gooseberries, Apricots, Currents, Cherries, Peaches and Pineapple set on a Flower Covered Plinth (1838)
蜾蠃属、桃亚属、凤梨科
A Classical Urn with Gooseberries, Apricots, Currents, Cherries, Peaches and Pineapple set on a Flower Covered Plinth (1838)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- square 0.84 : 1
First Look
六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。
—— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》
The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.
Nearly square, plant and detail each holding a corner. 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.
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 14.0% of the sheet, foliage 0.4%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Flowering trees and shrubs put out branches first; blossoms open before or with the leaves, usually five thin, translucent petals around a cluster of fine stamens. Filed under orange — an amber orange, built in washes from a pale ground. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is square. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 18% of the sheet, centred below centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. 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
和风杨柳岸，微雨杏花天。
—— 五·秦观《清溪逢故人》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
Plum is solitude, peach is marriage, apricot is spring itself, crabapple is a fragile fate; the hibiscus, opening at dawn and falling at dusk, is impermanence. 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
Mid spring: plum first, then peach and apricot, cherry last — the season keeps its order. cherry and crabapple went east to Japan and west to Europe. The year 1800 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. See this kind of plate in the flowering season if you can: once you have met the living flower, you stop reading only colour.
The Book and the Hand
“Johan Laurentz Jensen” carries only Johan Laurentz Jensen'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. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
A Classical Urn with Gooseberries, Apricots, Currents, Cherries, Peaches and Pineapple set on a Flower Covered Plinth (1838) is plate 11, from Johan Laurentz Jensen, drawn by Johan Laurentz Jensen. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Danish, 1800 – 1856.
