Mon Jardin a Ceylan Pl.210 (1896)

Twelve ways of seeing

• upright 1.36 : 1
• published 1896
• Plate 210

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

   凡画山水，意在笔先。

   —— 唐·王维《山水论》

   In painting, the intention precedes the brush.

   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 the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Tropical plants defy temperate habits: heavy, saturated flowers with strong scent, leathery or dissected leaves, stems that climb, swell, or reduce to spines.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.36 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. 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. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing.

6. 06

   Season

   The tropics have no four seasons, only wet and dry; flowering follows the first rains, so a month on the plate often means 'after the rain'. The year 1896 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

   Central and South America, Southeast Asia, India, Ceylon. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists either sailed with the ships or drew from living specimens under glass. The volume was made in 1896, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Mon Jardin a Ceylan” was drawn by George De Alwis and published 1896. This plate is Plate 210. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   荔枝新熟鸡冠色，烧酒初开琥珀香。

   —— 唐·白居易《荔枝樓對酒》

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

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    庭下如积水空明，水中藻荇交横，盖竹柏影也。

    —— 宋·苏轼《记承天寺夜游》

    The courtyard seemed flooded with clear water, weeds crossing in it — in fact the shadows of bamboo and cypress.

    Ji Han's fourth-century Records of the Plants of the South is China's earliest regional flora; Europe's counterpart was the exotic flora brought home by voyages — both by-products of empire and trade. Keep the line; it will surface the next time you meet the same plant.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In China these plants carry no classical symbolism; their meaning is newness — new worlds, new species, new trade routes. They show natural history's expanding edge. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.

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 1896.