Feuilles and Fruits (1787)
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Feuilles and Fruits (1787)
About this plate
Feuilles and Fruits (1787) is plate 2, from Cours de botanique, drawn by Pierre Philippe Alyon. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Paris, Chez l'auteur et Aubry, 1787.
Twelve ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.63 : 1
- published 1787
- Plate 2
Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.
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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.
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.
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Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
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Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 4.1% of the sheet, foliage 8.3%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Fruit plates pair the whole fruit with a section: the outline identifies the variety, the cut reveals skin thickness, core size and seed arrangement — the evidence of registration.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
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Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.63 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 14% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.
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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.
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Season
Late summer into autumn, variety by variety; a fruit portfolio spans the whole harvest. The year 1787 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The best time to read such a plate is its flowering season: three minutes under the tree explains what no text can.
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Provenance
Temperate fruits came mostly from Eurasia, later from the Americas. Nineteenth-century nurseries printed varietal albums for trade and exhibition: every fruit on the page was a saleable claim. The volume was made in 1787, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.
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The Book and the Hand
“Cours de botanique” was drawn by Pierre Philippe Alyon and published 1787. This plate is Plate 2. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
昔日居邻招屈亭，枫林橘树鹧鸪声。
—— 唐·刘禹锡《酬朗州崔员外与任十四兄侍御同过鄙人旧居见怀之什时守吴郡》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the fruit becomes its resting point.
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The Written Tradition
主胸中瘕热逆气，利水谷。久服，去臭下气通神，一名橘皮。生川谷。
—— 神农本草经·橘柚第一百一十一
The Book of Songs has a quince given and a jade pendant returned — fruit as ritual gift already in pre-Qin China. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.
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Symbolism
In China the pomegranate means many sons, the peach long life, the orange good fortune; in Europe the apple is temptation and knowledge, the grape abundance and sacrifice. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
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What to Take Away
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1787.
