The Crimson Japan Lily
The Crimson Japan Lily
The Crimson Japan Lily
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.66 : 1
First Look
江馆清秋，晨起看竹，烟光日影露气，皆浮动于疏枝密叶之间。
—— 清·郑板桥《题画竹》
On an autumn morning at the river lodge I looked at the bamboo: mist, sunlight, dew, all drifting among the sparse and dense leaves.
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
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 13.6% of the sheet, foliage 22.7%, 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. a moss green. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 45% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole.
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. Take a loupe to three places: petal edge, leaf vein, caption. An unbroken line means engraving; colour crossing the outline means a hand. 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
木末芙蓉花，山中发红萼。涧户寂无人，纷纷开且落。
—— 唐·王维《辛夷坞》
Lotus blossoms at the branch tips put forth red calyces in the hills. By the silent ravine, they open and fall, open and fall.
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. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
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 1829 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. See this kind of plate in the flowering season if you can: once you have met the living flower, you stop reading only colour.
The Book and the Hand
“Edwards' Botanical Register” carries only Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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.
About this plate
The Crimson Japan Lily is plate 1199, 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.
