Pivoine Alexandre II
Pivoine Alexandre II
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- square 0.80 : 1
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.
Nearly square, plant and detail each holding a corner. 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
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 32.6% of the sheet, foliage 12.2%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Herbaceous peonies die back each year, tree peonies keep woody stems; both have twice-trifoliate leaves and huge double blooms, often blotched at the petal base. Filed under red — a red close to carmine, built in washes from a pale ground. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is square. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 51% of the sheet, centred above 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
唯有牡丹真国色，花开时节动京城。
—— 唐·刘禹锡《赏牡丹》
Only the peony is truly national beauty; when it blooms, the whole capital is stirred.
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 tree peony is 'national beauty and heavenly fragrance', an emblem of prosperity; the herbaceous peony is tenderness — given at parting, hence its name 'jiangli', 'about to leave'. 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
the whole show lasts barely twenty days. Native to China: tree peonies centred on Luoyang, herbaceous ones on Yangzhou. Most garden peonies in Europe descend from eighteenth-century Chinese imports. 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. 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
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1854 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Pivoine Alexandre II is plate 33, 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.
