Camellia Mme de Cannart d’Hamalè
Linden publ|卡非尔李
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.53 : 1
First Look
夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。
—— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》
Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.
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 orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Camellia is given; species-level names came later. The Chinese name 卡非尔李 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 19.2% of the sheet, foliage 18.3%, the cast amber with a second note of red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Camellias are evergreen shrubs with thick, waxen, serrate leaves; the double flowers overlap like roof tiles and fall whole, petals still attached. Filed under orange — an amber orange, 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 39% of the sheet, centred a little right of 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. 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. 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
东园三日雨兼风，桃李飘零扫地空。惟有山茶偏耐久，绿丛又放数枝红。
—— 宋·陆游《山茶》
Three days of wind and rain in the east garden: peach and plum are swept away. Only the camellia endures, putting out a few more red sprays from the green.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China the camellia is the friend that endures; in Europe it became Eastern beauty and unattainability, and after La Dame aux Camélias, a token of brief life. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
a single flower may last a fortnight. Southwest China and Japan, with Yunnan the centre of diversity. The year 1854 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. See this kind of plate in the flowering season if you can: once you have met the living flower, you stop reading only colour.
The Book and the Hand
“L'Illustration horticole” carries only Charles Antoine Lemaire's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1854.
About this plate
Camellia Mme de Cannart d’Hamalè is plate 153, 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.
