The Ranunculus Moth (Phalæna), The double Orange Ranunculus (Ranunculus Asiatcus) (1773)
兽亚纲
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- slightly upright 1.28 : 1
First Look
夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。
—— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》
Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.
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.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Ranunculus is given; species-level names came later. The Chinese name 兽亚纲 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 13.7% of the sheet, foliage 10.8%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Bulbous plants store the year underground — bulb, corm or tuber — then send up a few thick leaves and a single scape, with six tepals in cup, funnel or star.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
The sheet is slightly tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant takes about 29% 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
燕麦青青游子悲，河堤弱柳郁金枝。
—— 唐·李白《春日獨坐寄鄭明府》
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
The tulip was an imperial emblem in Istanbul and a speculative bubble in Amsterdam; the hyacinth sprang from a boy's blood in Greek myth. What bulbs share is concealment: next year kept underground. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
Early spring to early summer, genus by genus: tulips and hyacinths first, gladiolus and amaryllis later. Three homelands: the Mediterranean, Central Asia and South Africa. The tulip came from Ottoman gardens and became a Dutch mania. The year 1773 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. See this kind of plate in the flowering season if you can: once you have met the living flower, you stop reading only colour.
The Book and the Hand
“One hundred and twenty copper-plates of English moths and butterflies” carries only Benjamin Wilkes'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
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1773 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
The Ranunculus Moth (Phalæna), The double Orange Ranunculus (Ranunculus Asiatcus) (1773) is plate 14, 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.
