Althea (1719)
Althea (1719)
Althea (1719)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.46 : 1
First Look
论画以形似，见与儿童邻。
—— 宋·苏轼《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》
To judge painting by likeness alone is the view of a child.
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. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 7.5% of the sheet, foliage 9.7%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Camellias are evergreen shrubs with thick, waxen, serrate leaves; the double flowers overlap like roof tiles and fall whole, petals still attached.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 21% 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. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful. 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
自立冬，将残腊，雪片似江梅，血点般山茶。
—— 《双调·新水令·题西湖四时》
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 camellia is the friend that endures; in Europe it became Eastern beauty and unattainability, and after La Dame aux Camélias, a token of brief life. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Late winter into early spring, blooming in the cold of the first lunar month. Southwest China and Japan, with Yunnan the centre of diversity. The year 1719 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
“Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum Surinamensium” carries only Maria Sibylla Merian's name. From drawing to plate the sheet passed through several hands — the engraver aimed at accuracy, the colourist at speed, and between them lies each plate's unevenness.
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 1719.
About this plate
Althea (1719) is plate 64, from Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum Surinamensium, drawn by Maria Sibylla Merian. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Amstelaedami, Apud Joannem Oosterwyk, 1719.
