Calodracon terminalis, var Moorei
Calodracon terminalis, var Moorei
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.58 : 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 where the red is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Calodracon terminalis: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 50.2% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast red 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. Filed under red — a red close to carmine, 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 fills 52% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole.
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
木末芙蓉花，山中发红萼。涧户寂无人，纷纷开且落。
—— 唐·王维《辛夷坞》
Lotus blossoms at the branch tips put forth red calyces in the hills. By the silent ravine, they open and fall, open and fall.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the red 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. This plate leans red, 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
Early to high summer, June and July. 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 1854 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
“L'Illustration horticole” carries only Charles Antoine Lemaire's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
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. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Calodracon terminalis, var Moorei is plate 470, from L'Illustration horticole, drawn by Charles Antoine Lemaire. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Gand, Belgium, Imprimerie et lithographie de F. et E. Gyselnyck,1854-1896.
