Rosa gallica
Bessa pinx hera|蔷薇目
Rosa gallica
About this plate
Rosa gallica is plate 7, from Herbier général de l'amateur, drawn by Jean Claude Michel Mordant de Launay. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Paris, Audot, Libraire, 1816-1827.
Ten ways of seeing
- yellow key
- upright 1.60 : 1
- published 1816
- Plate 7
First Look
夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。
—— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》
Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.
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
The binomial is Rosa gallica: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Here the epithet gallica means “of Gaul” — the name records the feature the namer noticed first. The Chinese name 蔷薇目 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Roses are shrubs or scramblers with pinnate leaves of three to seven serrated leaflets; the double flowers open in crumpled, inward-curling layers around a small knot of yellow stamens. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.60 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Blank paper is not unfinished work: it 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. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful. 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
玲珑云髻生花样，飘飖风袖蔷薇香。
—— 唐·白居易《简简吟》
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
In Europe the rose means love and secrecy ('sub rosa'); in Chinese verse the rambling rose leans and clings — lingering attachment rather than ardour. 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
Late spring into early summer, peaking in May — the first flush of the garden year. Widespread in the temperate north. Chinese gardeners knew roses since the Han. The year 1816 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The volume was made in 1816-1827, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.
The Book and the Hand
“Herbier général de l'amateur” was drawn by Jean Claude Michel Mordant de Launay and published 1816-1827. This plate is Plate 7. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1816.
