Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare)
滨菊属
Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.60 : 1
First Look
竖划三寸，当千仞之高；横墨数尺，体百里之迥。
—— 南朝宋·宗炳《画山水序》
A vertical stroke of three inches stands for a cliff of a thousand fathoms; a few feet of ink holds a hundred li.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. 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.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Oxeye daisy: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 滨菊属 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 2.6% of the sheet, foliage 15.3%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Chrysanthemums are herbaceous with deeply lobed, downy leaves. Each 'flower' is a head — ray florets around the rim, disc florets in the centre, hundreds of small flowers in one.No colour group is recorded. 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 26% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
Before 1700 most botanical figures came from woodcut: thick, hard lines in relief, colour brushed on afterwards. 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
过了登高菊尚新，酒徒诗客断知闻。
—— 宋·范成大《重阳后菊花二首》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China, seclusion and long life — and, after Tao Yuanming, the will to go home; in Japan, imperial authority. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Deep autumn, around the Double Ninth in the ninth month — after the first frost, when everything else is gone. Native to China, adopted in Japan as the imperial crest, carried to Europe by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and remade by Victorian breeders. The year 1510 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
“Book of Flower Studies” carries only Master of Claude de France's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1510 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) is plate 28, from Book of Flower Studies, drawn by Master of Claude de France. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: France, 1510–1515.
