Flore d’Amérique, dessinée d’après nature sur les lieux Pl.090 (1843)
FLORE D'AMERIQUE. Collalion dl Feuis &Truts ds ha (Qe graud elle GRACIEUSE (Briophillum Calficimum.) Plante offcinale, fraiches sur le rond du malade on en obtient fa lement plusieurs sujets ar l
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.51 : 1
First Look
论画以形似，见与儿童邻。
—— 宋·苏轼《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》
To judge painting by likeness alone is the view of a child.
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 the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
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 11.1% of the sheet, foliage 5.8%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Tropical plants defy temperate habits: heavy, saturated flowers with strong scent, leathery or dissected leaves, stems that climb, swell, or reduce to spines.No colour group is recorded. 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 21% 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. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing. 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
日啖荔枝三百颗，不辞长作岭南人。
—— 宋·苏轼《食荔枝》
Three hundred lychees a day — I would not mind being a southerner all my life.
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 China these plants carry no classical symbolism; their meaning is newness — new worlds, new species, new trade routes. They show natural history's expanding edge. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
The tropics have no four seasons, only wet and dry. Central and South America, Southeast Asia, India, Ceylon. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists either sailed with the ships or drew from living specimens under glass. The year 1843 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
“Flore d'Amérique, dessinée d'après nature sur les lieux” carries only Etienne Denisse's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
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 1843.
About this plate
Flore d’Amérique, dessinée d’après nature sur les lieux Pl.090 (1843) is plate 90, from Flore d'Amérique, dessinée d'après nature sur les lieux, drawn by Etienne Denisse. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Paris, Gihaut, 1843-1846.
