Hyssopus ; … Gentiana Centaurium minus ; … Melilotus
Centaauruum minus|红色百金花
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.38 : 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
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 红色百金花 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 1.3% of the sheet, foliage 2.1%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. The sacred lotus lifts shield-shaped leaves above the water with a seed pod standing at the centre; waterlilies float their notched leaves and rest their flowers on the surface.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
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
若耶溪边采莲女，笑隔荷花共人语。
—— 唐·李白《相和歌辞 采莲曲》
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 the lotus is the gentleman unstained by mud; in Buddhism it is the seat of the pure land. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
each flower opens at dawn and closes by afternoon, lasting three days. waterlilies are worldwide, and Victorian hybridists made hundreds of garden forms. The year 1797 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Read the locality and the flowering season both with a discount: one is hearsay, the other a ten-day peak.
The Book and the Hand
“Collection de curiosites du Royaume des plantes” carries only Petr Martynovich Gofman's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1797.
About this plate
Hyssopus ; … Gentiana Centaurium minus ; … Melilotus is plate 18, from Collection de curiosites du Royaume des plantes, drawn by Petr Martynovich Gofman. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: St. Petersburg, 1797–1810.
