Richardia albo-maculata
Richaidia albo- maculata|墨苜蓿属
Richardia albo-maculata
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.51 : 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.
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 green is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 10 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Richardia albo-maculata: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 墨苜蓿属 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 1.2% of the sheet, foliage 29.7%, the cast yellow-green 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. a moss green. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant takes about 38% of the sheet, centred a little left of centre — the easy measure most florists kept to.
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
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 green the corolla becomes its resting point.
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. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Plates usually record flowering, the fortnight when a plant is most identifiable. Various: local hillside or a plant brought from overseas. The nineteenth-century botanic garden and glasshouse were their first address away from home. 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. 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
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Richardia albo-maculata is plate 168, 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.
