Odontoglossum luteo-purpureum.
文心兰属
Odontoglossum luteo-purpureum.
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- broad 0.73 : 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.
Broad and horizontal: the eye travels side to side. Find where it stops. 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. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 22 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Odontoglossum luteo-purpureum: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 文心兰属 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 21.8% of the sheet, foliage 2.2%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Orchids carry pseudobulbs or fleshy roots; six tepals, one modified into a lip that serves as a landing stage, and a column uniting stamens and pistil — a structure unique to the family. Filed under orange — an amber orange, built in washes from a pale ground. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
The sheet is broad. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 25% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Take a loupe to three places: petal edge, leaf vein, caption. An unbroken line means engraving; colour crossing the outline means a hand. If you mean to copy it: block in the broad shapes and colours first, detail last; lithographic softness comes from thin washes — two or three pale layers will get you close.
Poetic Resonance
扈江离与辟芷兮，纫秋兰以为佩。
—— 战国·屈原《离骚》
I gird on river angelica and secluded angelica; I twist autumn orchids into a chaplet to wear.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China the orchid is the gentleman who blooms unseen; in Victorian Europe it was luxury and obsession, a single new species worth a fortune. 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
Varies by genus: temperate terrestrials flower in spring and summer, tropical epiphytes almost year-round. the orchids drawn for European portfolios came largely from the cloud forests of Central America and Southeast Asia. The year 1888 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The bud and the ripe fruit on one branch tell the season; the name in the title often tells the journey.
The Book and the Hand
“Reichenbachia. Orchids” carries only Frederick Sander'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 1888.
About this plate
Odontoglossum luteo-purpureum. is plate 138, from Reichenbachia. Orchids, drawn by Frederick Sander. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: St. Albans, F. Sander & Co., 1888-1894.
