Les liliacees Pl.47

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast amber
• upright 1.58 : 1
• published 1805
• Plate 47

Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.

1. 01

   First Look

   江馆清秋，晨起看竹，烟光日影露气，皆浮动于疏枝密叶之间。

   —— 清·郑板桥《题画竹》

   On an autumn morning at the river lodge I looked at the bamboo: mist, sunlight, dew, all drifting among the sparse and dense leaves.

   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. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 11 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 腹足纲 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 2.0% of the sheet, foliage 11.3%, the cast amber with a second note of red. 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. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.58 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 18% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.

5. 05

   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.

6. 06

   Season

   Early to high summer, June and July; the flowers last only days, so artists drew them just as they opened. The year 1805 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The plate records ten days of peak; the other three hundred are leaf, fruit and rest.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Temperate north — China, Japan, Europe. Long used in Chinese medicine, lilies were hunted in East Asia by nineteenth-century collectors and transformed European gardens. In the same volume the kin are shelved together; set several plates side by side.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Les liliacees” was drawn by Pierre Joseph Redouté and published 1805-1816. This plate is Plate 47. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   故乡寒食荼醾发，百合香浓邸舍深。

   —— 宋·宋祁《山橙花》

   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.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    生川谷。《吴普》曰：百合一名重迈，一名中庭，生冠朐及荆山。（艺文类聚引云：一名重匡）《名医》曰：一名重箱，一名摩罗，一名中逢花，一名强瞿，生荆州，二月八月，采根，暴干。

    —— 神农本草经·百合第一百七十

    The Bencao Gangmu describes the bulb as garlic-like, edible and medicinal; Song writers already noted that the leaves vary while the flowers stay white. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.

11. 11

    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.

12. 12

    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 1805 gave a whole day to a single flower.