The Goat-Moth (Phalæna Cossus), The Willow (Salix alba) (1773)
白柳
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- slightly upright 1.27 : 1
First Look
江馆清秋，晨起看竹，烟光日影露气，皆浮动于疏枝密叶之间。
—— 清·郑板桥《题画竹》
On an autumn morning at the river lodge I looked at the bamboo: mist, sunlight, dew, all drifting among the sparse and dense leaves.
Slightly taller than wide; the eye lands on the bird's head, a little above centre. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 白柳 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 21.9% of the sheet, foliage 6.6%, the cast amber. 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 orange — an amber orange. Feather colour is structure, not pigment: light bent by barbules. 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 takes about 31% of the sheet, centred below centre — the easy measure most florists kept to.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. 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. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.
Poetic Resonance
眼中高岸移深谷，愁里残阳更乱蝉。
—— 金朝·元好问《外家南寺》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the bird itself becomes its resting point.
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. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
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. 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. The year 1773 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
“One hundred and twenty copper-plates of English moths and butterflies” carries only Benjamin Wilkes's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
Next time you watch a bird: posture first, then where the plumage is deepest, and only then the field guide. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
The Goat-Moth (Phalæna Cossus), The Willow (Salix alba) (1773) is plate 31, from One hundred and twenty copper-plates of English moths and butterflies, drawn by Benjamin Wilkes. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, Benjamin White at Horace's-Head, 1773.
