Carolina Maple (Acer carolinianum) (1925)
无患子科
Carolina Maple (Acer carolinianum) (1925)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- slightly upright 1.29 : 1
First Look
搜尽奇峰打草稿。
—— 清·石涛《苦瓜和尚画语录》
Exhaust the strange peaks, and then make the sketch.
Slightly taller than wide; the eye lands above centre. 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. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 11 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 无患子科 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 10.6% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Wildflowers are rarely tidy: small blooms, slender stems, leaves imperfect and often chewed. That untidiness is exactly what records wind, light and soil.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is slightly tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 11% of the sheet, centred below centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
After 1900 photography and colour reproduction ran alongside watercolour: accuracy rose, the cut of the burin disappeared. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. If you mean to copy it: this is a photomechanical record — match the colours directly, do not imitate the printing grain.
Poetic Resonance
离离原上草，一岁一枯荣。野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。
—— 唐·白居易《赋得古原草送别》
Lush grass on the plain, once a year it withers and thrives; wildfire cannot burn it away — the spring wind blows and it grows again.
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.
Symbolism
In Chinese verse wildflowers bloom unseen, owing nothing to praise; in the West they mark a place — one species, one landscape's character. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
By latitude and altitude. Native plants of woodland floor, bog, roadside and rock crevice. The year 1925 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Read the locality and the flowering season both with a discount: one is hearsay, the other a ten-day peak.
The Book and the Hand
“North American wild flowers” carries only Mary Vaux Walcott's name. From drawing to plate the sheet passed through several hands — the engraver aimed at accuracy, the colourist at speed, and between them lies each plate's unevenness.
What to Take Away
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1925.
About this plate
Carolina Maple (Acer carolinianum) (1925) is plate 138, from North American wild flowers, drawn by Mary Vaux Walcott. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Washington, D.C., The Smithsonian Institution, 1925.
