Bellegrade or Galande Peach (1829)
Belleéarde, or Galande Feach. E D.Srmith dl!
Bellegrade or Galande Peach (1829)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.80 : 1
First Look
搜尽奇峰打草稿。
—— 清·石涛《苦瓜和尚画语录》
Exhaust the strange peaks, and then make the sketch.
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 yellow 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 19.8% of the sheet, foliage 7.2%, the cast red with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Flowering trees and shrubs put out branches first; blossoms open before or with the leaves, usually five thin, translucent petals around a cluster of fine stamens. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 86% 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
去时节杨柳西风秋日，如今又过了梨花暮雨寒食。
—— 《杂剧·迷青琐倩女离魂》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the yellow the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
Plum is solitude, peach is marriage, apricot is spring itself, crabapple is a fragile fate; the hibiscus, opening at dawn and falling at dusk, is impermanence. This plate leans yellow, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
Mid spring: plum first, then peach and apricot, cherry last — the season keeps its order. cherry and crabapple went east to Japan and west to Europe. The year 1829 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
“Flora and pomona, or, the British fruit and flower garden” carries only Charles McIntosh's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. 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
Bellegrade or Galande Peach (1829) is plate 59, from Flora and pomona, or, the British fruit and flower garden, drawn by Charles McIntosh. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, T. Kelly, 1829.
