Lis Rouge (1719)
Sluyte eal|Lis Rouge (1719)
Lis Rouge (1719)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.33 : 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 where the green is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Lis rouge: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 11.0% of the sheet, foliage 14.1%, the cast amber with a second note of red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. A bulb of overlapping fleshy scales gives the lily its Chinese name, 'hundred-fold'; six tepals reflex as the flower opens, around six stamens with long, T-shaped anthers. a moss green. 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 27% 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
更乞两丛香百合，老翁七十尚童心。
—— 宋·陆游《窗前作小土山蓻兰及玉簪最后得香百合并种之戏作》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the green the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In the West the white lily is Marian purity, held by the angel of the Annunciation; in China the name sounds like 'a hundred years in harmony', a wedding wish. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
Early to high summer, June and July. Temperate north — China, Japan, Europe. Long used in Chinese medicine, lilies were hunted in East Asia by nineteenth-century collectors and transformed European gardens. The year 1719 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The bud and the ripe fruit on one branch tell the season; the name in the title often tells the journey.
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
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1719 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Lis Rouge (1719) is plate 16, 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.
