L’Herbe Aux Puces vivace (1787)
Poyllium majus supinum|L'H
About this plate
L’Herbe Aux Puces vivace (1787) is plate 68, 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 amber
- upright 1.61 : 1
- published 1787
- Plate 68
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
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
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 is sparing, 0.7% of the sheet against 3.1% of foliage, the cast tending amber — as with pale or white blooms, outline and tone do the talking. A botanical plate: one plant lifted from field or glasshouse and set at the centre of the sheet, root, stem, leaf, flower and fruit in turn, made legible, citable, transmissible.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
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Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.61 : 1) 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. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
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Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful.
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Season
Plates usually record flowering, the fortnight when a plant is most identifiable; the rest of the year it is only a mass of leaves. The year 1787 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Note the season. Phenology is the most practical tool of appreciation.
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Provenance
Various: local hillside or a plant brought from overseas. The nineteenth-century botanic garden and glasshouse were their first address away from home. The localities on the plate are those of a century ago; plants travel and places change their names.
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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 68. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
天地有大美而不言，四时有明法而不议。
—— 《庄子·知北游》
Heaven and earth have great beauty and do not speak.
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.
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The Written Tradition
写气图貌，既随物以宛转；属采附声，亦与心而徘徊。
—— 南朝梁·刘勰《文心雕龙·物色》
In tracing the spirit and drawing the shape one follows the object; in choosing colour and sound one lingers with the heart.
China had the Bencao Gangmu and the Illustrated Study of Plant Names and Realities; Europe moved from herbal woodcuts to chromolithography. Both trusted pictures to finish what words could not. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.
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Symbolism
The symbolism of such a plate lies not in flower lore but in record: the belief that a plant deserves to be drawn accurately — the plainest ethic of the scientific age. 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
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1787.
