Gymnogramma Laucheana, var. gigantea
Verschaffet publ|Gymnogramma Laucheana, var. gigantea
Gymnogramma Laucheana, var. gigantea
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- broad 0.66 : 1
First Look
竖划三寸，当千仞之高；横墨数尺，体百里之迥。
—— 南朝宋·宗炳《画山水序》
A vertical stroke of three inches stands for a cliff of a thousand fathoms; a few feet of ink holds a hundred li.
Broad and horizontal: the eye travels side to side. Find where it stops. 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.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Gymnogramma laucheana: 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 18.5% of the sheet, foliage 26.0%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. 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 yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
The sheet is broad. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 46% 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. 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
落红不是无情物，化作春泥更护花。
—— 清·龚自珍《己亥杂诗》
Fallen petals are not heartless things; turned to spring mud, they shelter the flowers still to come.
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 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 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
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. 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
“L'Illustration horticole” carries only Charles Antoine Lemaire'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
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. 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
Gymnogramma Laucheana, var. gigantea is plate 29, 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.
