![Amarillis [Boophone disticha] (1817) (Amarillis [Boophone disticha] (1817)) - Drawings of plants collected at Cape Town](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/029-original.webp)
Amarillis [Boophone disticha] (1817)
布风花
Amarillis [Boophone disticha] (1817)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- slightly upright 1.19 : 1
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.
Slightly taller than wide; the eye lands above centre. 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. The pose leans right: the upper half carries 8 points further right than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 布风花 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 8.1% of the sheet, foliage 1.2%, the cast 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.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
The sheet is slightly tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 14% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
梨花淡白柳深青，柳絮飞时花满城。
—— 宋·苏轼《东栏梨花》
Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green; when the catkins fly, flowers fill the town.
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 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. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
the flowers last only days, so artists drew them just as they opened. 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 1817 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
“Drawings of plants collected at Cape Town” carries only Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann'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. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Amarillis [Boophone disticha] (1817) is plate 29, from Drawings of plants collected at Cape Town, drawn by Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: 1817-1820.
![Acanthus carduifolia [Blepharis sinuata] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/028-thumb.webp)
![Amarillis [Crinum lineare] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/030-thumb.webp)
![Gardenia Nov. Sp. [Hyperacanthus amoenus] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/002-thumb.webp)
![Gardenia Nova Sp. [Burchellia bubalina] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/003-thumb.webp)
![Gloriosa [Gloriosa superba] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/004-thumb.webp)
![Hexand. Mono. [Mimusops obovata] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/005-thumb.webp)
![Hibiscus [Hibiscus calyphyllus] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/006-thumb.webp)
![Icosandria monog. [Ochna arborea] (1817)](/upload/nat/drawings-of-plants-collected-at-cape-town/007-thumb.webp)
