The Privet Hawk-Moth (Sphinx ligustri), The Privet (Ligustrum vulgare) (1773)
红节天蛾
The Privet Hawk-Moth (Sphinx ligustri), The Privet (Ligustrum vulgare) (1773)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- slightly upright 1.27 : 1
First Look
论画以形似，见与儿童邻。
—— 宋·苏轼《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》
To judge painting by likeness alone is the view of a child.
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 the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 13 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Sphinx is given; species-level names came later. The Chinese name 红节天蛾 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 6.6% of the sheet, foliage 5.9%, the cast red with a second note of 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.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 16% of the sheet, centred below centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful. 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
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 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. 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. Much of what that generation knew of such birds came from specimens and cages; read locality and season both as hearsay.
The Book and the Hand
“One hundred and twenty copper-plates of English moths and butterflies” carries only Benjamin Wilkes's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
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 1773.
About this plate
The Privet Hawk-Moth (Sphinx ligustri), The Privet (Ligustrum vulgare) (1773) is plate 22, 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.
