Menzies’ Gooseberry
Menzies’ Gooseberry
About this plate
Menzies’ Gooseberry is plate 675, from Edwards' Botanical Register, drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, James Ridgway, 1829-1847.
Twelve ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.64 : 1
- published 1829
- Plate 675
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
真山水之川谷，远望之以取其势，近看之以取其质。
—— 宋·郭熙《林泉高致·山水训》
Mountains and valleys: from afar take their momentum, up close take their texture — the two distances from which any picture is read.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles on the bird. Take the posture before the plumage. 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 left: the upper half carries 16 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
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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 1.7% of the sheet, foliage 3.4%, the cast amber with a second note of red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Bird plates usually choose the perched pose: one foot gripping, one loose, the flight feathers laid in first, coverts over them, then the horny gleam of bill and eye.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
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Composition
Tall and narrow, the bird perched mid-branch with generous margins above and below. (about 1.64 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 18% of the sheet, centred near the 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
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.
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Season
Bound to migration: north in spring, south in autumn, each species answering to a few weeks. Audubon's plates often read 'adult, spring' — plumage at its height. The year 1829 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
Audubon's Birds of America (1827–1838) came from specimens he shot himself, wired into lifelike poses and drawn from life — which is why the birds look so alive, and why the method is uncomfortable. The volume was made in 1829-1847, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.
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The Book and the Hand
“Edwards' Botanical Register” was drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley and published 1829-1847. This plate is Plate 675. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
青山黄鹤楼，白水黑龙潭，野猿啼碎胆。
—— 《中吕·红绣鞋·竹衫儿并刀》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the bird itself becomes its resting point.
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The Written Tradition
鹤鸣于九皋，声闻于天。
—— 《诗经·小雅·鹤鸣》
The crane cries in the deep marsh, and its voice reaches heaven.
The Book of Songs opens with calling ospreys — birdsong is the first sound in Chinese poetry; European natural history turned birds from omens into species in the eighteenth century. 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 crane is longevity, the magpie joy, the wild goose a letter, the eagle prowess; in the Americas each bird carries a different totem. One bird, unrelated meanings. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
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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 1829.
