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A New World: England’s First View of America
by Kim Sloan
The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2007
Most Popular
John White wasn't the most exacting painter that 16th-century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief, has two right feet; his study of a scorpion looks cramped and rushed. In historical context, though, these quibbles seem unimportant: no Englishman had ever painted America before. White was burdened with unveiling a whole new realm.
In the 1580s, England had yet to establish a permanent colonial foothold in the Western Hemisphere, while Spain's settlements in Central and South America were thriving. Sir Walter Raleigh sponsored a series of exploratory, and extraordinarily perilous, voyages to the coast of present-day North Carolina (then called Virginia, for the "Virgin Queen" Elizabeth) to drum up support for a colony among British investors. White, a gentleman-artist, braved skirmishes with Spanish ships and hurricanes to go along on five voyages between 1584 and 1590, including a 1585 expedition to found a colony on Roanoke Island off the Carolina coast. He would eventually become the governor of a second, doomed colony the British established there, but in 1585 he was commissioned to "drawe to life" the area's natural bounty and inhabitants. Who lived there, people back at court wanted to know; what did they look like; and what did they eat? This last question was vital, because Europe had recently entered a mini ice age and crops were suffering. Many of White's watercolors serve as a kind of pictorial menu. His scene of the local Algonquians fishing shows an enticing array of catches, including catfish, crab and sturgeon; other paintings dwell on cooking methods and corn cultivation.
"The message was: 'Come to this place where everything is neat and tidy and there is food everywhere!'" says Deborah Harkness, a science historian at the University of Southern California who studied White's watercolors and has written a book on Elizabethan London.
Occasionally, though, White seems to have been captivated by less digestible fare. He painted a magnificent watercolor study of a tiger swallowtail butterfly, and on a stop for provisions in the West Indies he rendered a "flye which in the night semeth a flame of fyer"—a firefly. These oddities, as much as his more practical illustrations, lodged in the Elizabethan imagination: engravings based on them were published in 1590, kindling interest in England's distant claims.
Today White's dozens of watercolors—the only surviving visual record of the land and peoples encountered by England's first settlers in America—remain vital documents for colonial scholars, who rejoiced when the works were exhibited earlier this year by the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. Owned by the British Museum, White's originals must be kept in storage, away from the damaging effects of light, for decades at a time; their transatlantic visit was a rarity.
Little is known about White's background. We do, however, know he married Thomasine Cooper in 1566 and they had at least two children. Before the 1585 expedition he may have been employed in Queen Elizabeth's Office of Revels, and he was almost certainly a gentleman—well educated and well connected; watercolor was considered a genteel medium, far more refined than oil. White sketched in graphite pencil and colored with indigo, vermilion and ground gold and silver leaf, among other pigments.
It's unclear when he actually completed his iconic American series, but he made his observations in the summer of 1585. After crossing the Atlantic, his ship stopped briefly in the West Indies, where White saw (and at some point painted)—in addition to the firefly—plantains, pineapples, flamingos and other curiosities. Soon afterward the ex-plorers sailed north to the Carolina coast.
As they built a crude fort on Roanoke, White went on excursions and began depicting the native Algonquian peoples. He detailed their ceremonies, ossuaries and meals of hulled corn. He carefully rendered the puma tail dangling from one chief's apron and a medicine man's pouch of tobacco or herbs. "White was documenting an unknown population," says Peter Mancall, an early American historian at the University of Southern California who delivered the opening lecture for the Yale exhibition. "He was trying to show how women carried their children, what a sorcerer looked like, how they fished."
Abigail Tucker, In "Brave New World," (Smithsonian December 2008), you close the article with the statement "...the next major set of American Indian portraits would not appear until George Catlin painted the peoples of the Great Plains more than 200 years later." From August 16 to November 2008, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University in Alabama presented "The Indian Gallery of Henry Inman." Inman was hired by Thomas McKenny in 1828 to copy original Indian Gallery portraits that were painted by Charles Bird King in the 1820's. McKenny used Inman's oil copies as the basis for the color lithographs used to illustrate the "History of the Indian Tribes of North America." The King collection was later destroyed by fire at the Smithsonian Institution in January 1865. I suggest consideration of a future collaborative article with Professor Kathryn Braund, Professor of History at Auburn University who wrote the text for the above exhibit's brochure on which my comments are based. I believe that the King/Inman portraits are a "major set of American Indian portraits" which focused on distinguished Southeastern Creek and Cherokee leaders and warriors of the 19th century and were worthy of that distinction well before Catlin's work appeared.
Posted by William E. Wolfe on November 29,2008 | 10:05AM
I love your photos they are so beautiful.they are the most loving and wonderful picturs I"v ever seen in my 11 years of life.I"v seen so cool things in my life but this is the most wonderful thing.I wish I was there to see it I beat it was so beautiful.I love it! Good job:)
Posted by Brianna Ramirez on December 4,2008 | 06:09PM
The last illustration in the set (of the layout of the "village") reminds me of on of those overhead photos of the "lost tribe" discovered last year. One of the photos that showed the tribesmen and the structures looked quite similar (at least in my mind).
Posted by dutch on December 18,2008 | 11:31AM