Gorteria asteroides
黑斑菊属
Gorteria asteroides
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.75 : 1
First Look
六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。
—— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》
The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.
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
The binomial is Gorteria asteroides: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 黑斑菊属 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 6.9% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Chrysanthemums are herbaceous with deeply lobed, downy leaves. Each 'flower' is a head — ray florets around the rim, disc florets in the centre, hundreds of small flowers in one.No colour group is recorded. 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 covers only 8% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. 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
不是花中偏爱菊，此花开尽更无花。
—— 唐·元稹《菊花》
It is not that I favour the chrysanthemum among flowers; when it has bloomed, there are no more flowers.
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, seclusion and long life — and, after Tao Yuanming, the will to go home; in Japan, imperial authority. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Deep autumn, around the Double Ninth in the ninth month — after the first frost, when everything else is gone. Native to China, adopted in Japan as the imperial crest, carried to Europe by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and remade by Victorian breeders. The year 1781 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
“Icones Plantarum Rariorum” carries only Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin'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 1781.
About this plate
Gorteria asteroides is plate 264, from Icones Plantarum Rariorum, drawn by Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Vindobonae, C.F. Wappler, 1781-1793.
