Rose (ca 1905)
Ten ways of seeing
- broad 0.68 : 1
First Look
竖划三寸，当千仞之高；横墨数尺，体百里之迥。
—— 南朝宋·宗炳《画山水序》
A vertical stroke of three inches stands for a cliff of a thousand fathoms; a few feet of ink holds a hundred li.
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
Roses are shrubs or scramblers with pinnate leaves of three to seven serrated leaflets; the double flowers open in crumpled, inward-curling layers around a small knot of yellow stamens.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. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
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. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
水晶帘动微风起，满架蔷薇一院香。
—— 唐·高骈《山亭夏日》
The crystal blind stirs as a breeze rises; a trellis of roses perfumes the whole courtyard.
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 Europe the rose means love and secrecy ('sub rosa'); in Chinese verse the rambling rose leans and clings — lingering attachment rather than ardour. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Late spring into early summer, peaking in May — the first flush of the garden year. the ever-blooming modern rose is a nineteenth-century crossing of European and Chinese stock. No firm date survives, so the season is inferred from the subject. The bud and the ripe fruit on one branch tell the season; the name in the title often tells the journey.
The Book and the Hand
“Zeichnung zur Fibel” carries only Hans Thoma'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. Look long enough at an old plate and you stop seeing the plant and start seeing the person who gave it a day.
