Anguloa clowesii (1857)
郁金香兰
Anguloa clowesii (1857)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.73 : 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 where the yellow is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch. The pose leans right: the upper half carries 13 points further right than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Anguloa clowesii: 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 郁金香兰 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 15.3% of the sheet, foliage 1.8%, the cast yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Orchids carry pseudobulbs or fleshy roots; six tepals, one modified into a lip that serves as a landing stage, and a column uniting stamens and pistil — a structure unique to the family. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. 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 17% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. If you mean to copy it: block in the broad shapes and colours first, detail last; lithographic softness comes from thin washes — two or three pale layers will get you close.
Poetic Resonance
暂驻旌旗洛水堤，绮筵红烛醉兰闺。
—— 唐·刘禹锡《夜燕福建卢侍郎宅因送之镇》
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 China the orchid is the gentleman who blooms unseen; in Victorian Europe it was luxury and obsession, a single new species worth a fortune. This plate leans yellow, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Varies by genus: temperate terrestrials flower in spring and summer, tropical epiphytes almost year-round. the orchids drawn for European portfolios came largely from the cloud forests of Central America and Southeast Asia. The year 1857 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
“Illustrations of orchidaceous plants; a series of one hundred figures, chiefly selected from the Botanical register and British flower garden” carries only Sarah Anne Drake, Edwin Dalton Smith'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
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1857.
About this plate
Anguloa clowesii (1857) is plate 59, from Illustrations of orchidaceous plants; a series of one hundred figures, chiefly selected from the Botanical register and British flower garden, drawn by Sarah Anne Drake, Edwin Dalton Smith. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, Willis and Sotheran, 1857.
