Rhamnus volubilis
Coll ool|鼠李属
Rhamnus volubilis
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.74 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
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 Rhamnus volubilis: 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 鼠李属 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 14.4% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. A bulb of overlapping fleshy scales gives the lily its Chinese name, 'hundred-fold'; six tepals reflex as the flower opens, around six stamens with long, T-shaped anthers.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 15% 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. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
方石斛栽香百合，小盆山养水黄杨。
—— 宋·陆游《龟堂杂兴十首 其五》
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 the West the white lily is Marian purity, held by the angel of the Annunciation; in China the name sounds like 'a hundred years in harmony', a wedding wish. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
the flowers last only days, so artists drew them just as they opened. Temperate north — China, Japan, Europe. Long used in Chinese medicine, lilies were hunted in East Asia by nineteenth-century collectors and transformed European gardens. The year 1781 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
“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
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1781 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Rhamnus volubilis is plate 543, 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.
