Rose (Thé) Maréchal Niel

Twelve ways of seeing

One plate, read twelve times over: its name, its colour, the burin and the brush, the shape of the sheet, the season, the soil it came from, the book it belongs to, its language of flowers, the poem it answers to, the lore behind it, how to look, and what remains.

1. 01

   The Name

   The plate is titled “Rose (Thé) Maréchal Niel”, numbered Plate 464. No reliable binomial survives on the plate, so it must be cited by its original title. Neither a Chinese name nor a reliable binomial survives: the plate can only be cited by its printed title, and left to speak for itself.

2. 02

   Form and Colour

   Roses are shrubs or scramblers with pinnate leaves of three to seven serrated leaflets; the double flowers open in crumpled, inward-curling layers around a small knot of yellow stamens. Filed under orange — an amber orange. The colour is built in washes: a pale ground first, then deepening at the petal base and in shadow. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the touch of the brush.

3. 03

   Line and Colour

   In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Images grew more accurate and less personal. Look closely at the line and the colour: an unbroken line means engraving, colour crossing the outline by half a millimetre means hand-colouring. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins above and below — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.53 : 1). No details are appended: this is a plate for looking, not for keying out.

5. 05

   Season

   Late spring into early summer, peaking in May — the first flush of the garden year. The year 1854 on the plate is the year of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier.

6. 06

   Provenance

   Widespread in the temperate north. Chinese gardeners knew roses since the Han; the ever-blooming modern rose is a nineteenth-century crossing of European and Chinese stock. In the same volume the kin are shelved together; set several plates side by side and the differences declare themselves.

7. 07

   The Book

   “L'Illustration horticole” was drawn by Charles Antoine Lemaire and published 1854-1896. This plate is Plate 464. The image is in the public domain; the hand-colouring on the paper is still one person's hand, two centuries ago.

8. 08

   Symbolism

   In Europe the rose means love and secrecy ('sub rosa'); in Chinese verse the rambling rose leans and clings — lingering attachment rather than ardour. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   有情芍药含春泪，无力蔷薇卧晓枝。

   —— 宋·秦观《春日》

   The peony, feeling, holds spring tears; the rose, strengthless, lies across the morning branch.

   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

    Classical Lore

    Tradition places roses in the Han imperial park; Song and Ming manuals named the double forms 'Baoxiang' and 'Ten Sisters', and Qing compendia separated rose, rugosa and monthly rose. Chinese flower books ranked plants by character; European floras described them by form and name. This plate belongs to the second tradition, yet bears reading by the first. A flora asks what it is; a flower book asks what it means. Read both or half-read the plate.

11. 11

    How to Look

    Read the petals first — outer ones reflexed, inner ones still clasped. Then the thorns and serrations: their sharpness betrays the engraver's hand. Follow the orange: deepest at the petal base, palest at the tip, with the whole transition in between.

12. 12

    Afterword

    Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1854.