Oenothera fruticosa. Sun-drop (1856)
Oenothera fruticosa. Sun-drop (1856)
Oenothera fruticosa. Sun-drop (1856)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.37 : 1
First Look
六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。
—— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》
The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.
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.
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
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 2.5% of the sheet, foliage 0.7%, the cast red with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Wildflowers are rarely tidy: small blooms, slender stems, leaves imperfect and often chewed. That untidiness is exactly what records wind, light and soil.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 68% of the sheet, centred a little left of centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole.
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
离离原上草，一岁一枯荣。野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。
—— 唐·白居易《赋得古原草送别》
Lush grass on the plain, once a year it withers and thrives; wildfire cannot burn it away — the spring wind blows and it grows again.
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
In Chinese verse wildflowers bloom unseen, owing nothing to praise; in the West they mark a place — one species, one landscape's character. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
By latitude and altitude. they resent transplanting and will not mass in a border — the difference between a wildflower and a garden flower. The year 1856 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Read the locality and the flowering season both with a discount: one is hearsay, the other a ten-day peak.
The Book and the Hand
“Wild flowers of Georgetown, DC” carries only Rebecca Nourse'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
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1856 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Oenothera fruticosa. Sun-drop (1856) is plate 65, from Wild flowers of Georgetown, DC, drawn by Rebecca Nourse. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Georgeotwn, D.C., 1856.
