Torenia asiatica

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• upright 1.55 : 1
• published 1854
• Plate 364

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.

   The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles on the bird. Take the posture before the plumage. 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 right: the upper half carries 8 points further right than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is Torenia asiatica: 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 光叶蝴蝶草 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 15.9% of the sheet, foliage 16.1%, the cast red with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Insect plates show the host plant and all four stages at once — egg, larva, pupa, adult — with wing venation, scales and antennal segments accounted for: the most technical branch of natural-history art. Filed under green — a moss green. Feather colour is structure, not pigment: light bent by barbules. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the bird perched mid-branch with generous margins above and below. (about 1.55 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant takes about 34% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the easy measure most florists kept to. 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. Take a loupe to three places: petal edge, leaf vein, caption. An unbroken line means engraving; colour crossing the outline means a hand.

6. 06

   Season

   Set by life stage: butterflies in spring and summer, moths into autumn, beetles from May to July. Four stages on one sheet span a whole year. The year 1854 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The best time to read such a plate is its flowering season: three minutes under the tree explains what no text can.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) first showed insect stages with their host plants — the result of raising caterpillars in the Surinam forest with her daughters. 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 364. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   穿花蛱蝶深深见，点水蜻蜓款款飞。

   —— 唐·杜甫《曲江二首》

   Butterflies thread the flowers, seen deep within; dragonflies touch the water and fly on, slow and deliberate.

   The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the green the bird itself becomes its resting point.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    昔者庄周梦为蝴蝶，栩栩然蝴蝶也，自喻适志与！不知周也。

    —— 《庄子·齐物论》

    Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering and content, and did not know he was Zhou.

    The Book of Songs notes which insects stir in which month — one of the earliest phenologies; the Bencao Gangmu lists a hundred insects under medicine. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In China the butterfly is dream and lovers, the cicada purity, the firefly a lamp for reading; in Europe the insect began as specimen before it became symbol. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.

12. 12

    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.