Hippeastrum (Amaryllis!) pyrrochroum
Hippeastrum (Amaryllis!) pyrrochroum
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- broad 0.67 : 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.
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 red is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Hippeastrum is given; species-level names came later. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 39.3% of the sheet, foliage 1.2%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Bulbous plants store the year underground — bulb, corm or tuber — then send up a few thick leaves and a single scape, with six tepals in cup, funnel or star. Filed under red — a red close to carmine, 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 41% 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
卢家少妇郁金堂，海燕双栖玳瑁梁。
—— 唐·沈佺期《古意呈補闕喬知之》
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
The tulip was an imperial emblem in Istanbul and a speculative bubble in Amsterdam; the hyacinth sprang from a boy's blood in Greek myth. What bulbs share is concealment: next year kept underground. This plate leans red, 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
Early spring to early summer, genus by genus: tulips and hyacinths first, gladiolus and amaryllis later. South African bulbs filled European glasshouses after 1800. 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. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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
Hippeastrum (Amaryllis!) pyrrochroum is plate 483, 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.
