Flore d’Amérique, dessinée d’après nature sur les lieux Pl.119 (1843)
FLORE D'AMÉRIQUE Collection des Flours et Fouits des plus remarquables, tirée sur les lieux (de gsondes LE CORNARET. (martima diandra.) duite er France produit des d ne fome aser singuline la d’p
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 9.9% of the sheet, foliage 4.0%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of amber. 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. 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 covers only 17% 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
鹤氅毳疏无实事，木棉花冷得虚名。
—— 唐·白居易《新製綾襖成感而有詠》
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. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
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. 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
“Flore d'Amérique, dessinée d'après nature sur les lieux” carries only Etienne Denisse's name. From drawing to plate the sheet passed through several hands — the engraver aimed at accuracy, the colourist at speed, and between them lies each plate's unevenness.
What to Take Away
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Flore d’Amérique, dessinée d’après nature sur les lieux Pl.119 (1843) is plate 119, 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.
