Nidularium Innocentii

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• broad 0.70 : 1
• published 1854
• Plate 244

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

   六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。

   —— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》

   The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.

   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 orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is Nidularium innocentii: 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.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 29.6% of the sheet, foliage 14.5%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. A botanical plate: one plant lifted from field or glasshouse and set at the centre of the sheet, root, stem, leaf, flower and fruit in turn, made legible, citable, transmissible. Filed under orange — an amber orange, built in washes from a pale ground. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.

4. 04

   Composition

   Broad and horizontal — the format for groups or a whole plant with its roots. (about 0.70 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 58% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.

5. 05

   Line and Colour

   In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.

6. 06

   Season

   Plates usually record flowering, the fortnight when a plant is most identifiable; the rest of the year it is only a mass of leaves. The year 1854 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Note the season. Phenology is the most practical tool of appreciation.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Various: local hillside or a plant brought from overseas. The nineteenth-century botanic garden and glasshouse were their first address away from home. In the same volume the kin are shelved together; set several plates side by side.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “L'Illustration horticole” was drawn by Charles Antoine Lemaire and published 1854-1896. This plate is Plate 244. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   朝饮木兰之坠露兮，夕餐秋菊之落英。

   —— 战国·屈原《离骚》

   At dawn I drink the dew fallen from magnolia; at dusk I dine on the fallen petals of autumn chrysanthemum.

   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.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。

    —— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》

    The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form to the object; colour according to kind; planning the placing; transcribing and copying.

    China had the Bencao Gangmu and the Illustrated Study of Plant Names and Realities; Europe moved from herbal woodcuts to chromolithography. Both trusted pictures to finish what words could not. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    The symbolism of such a plate lies not in flower lore but in record: the belief that a plant deserves to be drawn accurately — the plainest ethic of the scientific age. This plate leans orange, 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.

12. 12

    What to Take Away

    If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1854.