Wild Geranium. Cranes-bill (1856)
Wild Geranium. Cranes-bill (1856)
Wild Geranium. Cranes-bill (1856)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.40 : 1
First Look
搜尽奇峰打草稿。
—— 清·石涛《苦瓜和尚画语录》
Exhaust the strange peaks, and then make the sketch.
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 where the yellow is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Geranium is given; species-level names came later. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 5.8% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Garden annuals and low perennials: many small, brilliantly coloured flowers to a stem, with leaves palmately lobed, pinnate or entire — the mainstay of the Victorian bedding scheme. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 61% of the sheet, centred near the 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. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
已收身向园林下，犹寄名于禄仕间。
—— 唐·白居易《洛下閑居寄山南令狐相公》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the yellow the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
Bedding plants carry no imperial weight; they mean the everyday — window sill, border, festival, gift. Victorian floriography grew up among exactly these flowers. This plate leans yellow, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
under glass they could be had from March. Gathered from everywhere by plant hunters and the glasshouse trade: pelargoniums from South Africa, campanulas from European mountains, lobelias from North America, fuchsias from Chile. 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. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Wild Geranium. Cranes-bill (1856) is plate 50, 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.
