The baby’s opera – Title page (1876)
Ten ways of seeing
- square 0.98 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
Nearly square, plant and detail each holding a corner. 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
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
A botanical plate: one plant lifted from field or glasshouse and set at the centre of the sheet, root, stem, leaf, flower and fruit in turn, made legible, citable, transmissible.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
Nearly square, plant and details sharing the corners. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.
Line and Colour
In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful. 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
朝饮木兰之坠露兮，夕餐秋菊之落英。
—— 战国·屈原《离骚》
At dawn I drink the dew fallen from magnolia; at dusk I dine on the fallen petals of autumn chrysanthemum.
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 symbolism of such a plate lies not in flower lore but in record: the belief that a plant deserves to be drawn accurately — the plainest ethic of the scientific age. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
the rest of the year it is only a mass of leaves. Various: local hillside or a plant brought from overseas. The nineteenth-century botanic garden and glasshouse were their first address away from home. The year 1876 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
“The baby's opera” carries only Walter Crane's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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 1876.
