Eruption of the Volcanic Island Sabrina
Ten ways of seeing
- broad 0.75 : 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.
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 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. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
Broad and horizontal — the format for groups or a whole plant with its roots. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Blank paper is not unfinished work: it is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
The exact date is lost. Woodcut before 1700, copper in the eighteenth century, steel and lithography from the 1820s, chromolithography by the century's end. 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
天地有大美而不言，四时有明法而不议。
—— 《庄子·知北游》
Heaven and earth have great beauty and do not speak.
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. No firm date survives, so the season is inferred from the subject. 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
“Views of Spain” carries only Charles Hamilton Smith'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. A plate is meant to be consulted; what it preserves is the time one person spent on one flower.
