Charlamowsky (1924)

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast amber
• upright 1.32 : 1
• published 1924
• Plate 58

Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.

1. 01

   First Look

   真山水之川谷，远望之以取其势，近看之以取其质。

   —— 宋·郭熙《林泉高致·山水训》

   Mountains and valleys: from afar take their momentum, up close take their texture — the two distances from which any picture is read.

   The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. 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 right: the upper half carries 10 points further right than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 14.8% of the sheet, foliage 0.4%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Fruit plates pair the whole fruit with a section: the outline identifies the variety, the cut reveals skin thickness, core size and seed arrangement — the evidence of registration.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.32 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 17% of the sheet, centred below centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.

5. 05

   Line and Colour

   After 1900 photography and colour reproduction ran alongside watercolour: accuracy rose, the cut of the burin disappeared. 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.

6. 06

   Season

   Late summer into autumn, variety by variety; a fruit portfolio spans the whole harvest. The year 1924 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The plate records ten days of peak; the other three hundred are leaf, fruit and rest.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Temperate fruits came mostly from Eurasia, later from the Americas. Nineteenth-century nurseries printed varietal albums for trade and exhibition: every fruit on the page was a saleable claim. In the same volume the kin are shelved together; set several plates side by side.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Swedish fruit varieties (Svenska fruktsorter)” was drawn by Henriette Sjöberg and published 1924. This plate is Plate 58. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   江村连夜有飞霜，柿正丹时橘半黄。

   —— 宋·陆游《江村》

   The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the fruit becomes its resting point.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    庭下如积水空明，水中藻荇交横，盖竹柏影也。

    —— 宋·苏轼《记承天寺夜游》

    The courtyard seemed flooded with clear water, weeds crossing in it — in fact the shadows of bamboo and cypress.

    The Book of Songs has a quince given and a jade pendant returned — fruit as ritual gift already in pre-Qin China. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In China the pomegranate means many sons, the peach long life, the orange good fortune; in Europe the apple is temptation and knowledge, the grape abundance and sacrifice. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.

12. 12

    What to Take Away

    Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1924.