Brave New Watercolor World

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By WILLIAM L. SHARFMAN, Special to the Sun
March 24, 2008

Between 1584 and 1590, the Elizabethan gentleman and artist John White made five voyages to the New World from England under Sir Walter Raleigh's aegis. During one journey, in 1585, he traveled through present-day North Carolina and painted the flora, fauna, and Native Americans. His series of watercolors would give Europeans their first images of the New World and would shape their understanding of the visual landscape for the next 200 years.

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Yale Center for British Art

A detail of John White’s ‘Indians Fishing’ (1580s)

These watercolors, owned by the British Museum, were exhibited in London last spring for the first time since the 1960s. Now, the Yale Center for British Art has mounted them in a more didactic, but no less accessible, exhibit titled "A New World: England's First View of America."

The priority in Raleigh's expeditions was to claim and colonize the New World in the name of the queen, making it Protestant realm. White's expedition landed at Roanoke Island, in the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina.

An aim in White's pictures is marketing or promotion, to make what was then called Virginia an appealing place in which to settle or invest. The settlers in the 1585 expedition, chiefly military personnel, at first got along well enough with the Algonquins by trading beads for food. There came a predictable time, however, when every Algonquin man, woman, and child probably had all the beads they could wish for, and tired of supplying the settlers with food. This was the beginning of the end for the eventual "lost colony of Roanoke." Sir Francis Drake, who had been exploring to the south, stopped by in 1586, and offered the colonists a lift home, which they gladly took. (There are wonderful maps and manuscripts from Drake's stopover on display.)

White, who was the governor of the settlement, left for England to bring back ships, people, and provisions for the troubled 1587 colony. But because of the warring Spanish Armada, the British could spare no ships at all, and it was not until 1590 that he returned to the lost colony of Roanoke, with few signs of the settlers to be found. White's many paintings of New World flora and fauna divide into two categories: interesting or exotic, and edible or valuable. And they made an impression in England.

Two examples of the edible, hence valuable: White shows the "Platano, or Planten," whole and in cross section, to show both the anatomy and the edible inside of a plaintain or banana. The "pyne fruite" or pineapple is identified as a fruit by the title, and was prevalent in the West Indies, too, where it adorned front doors as a sign of hospitality. White's drawings influenced English architects who incorporated the theme by creating decorative stone pineapples in front of English homes and estates. Banana plants and fruits were taken along both as provisions and with the idea of planting them in the new colony.

The flying fish (bolador) shows White trying to capture detail and colors fully. The fish's wings were rendered either in silver pigment, which has oxidized, or lead white, which has chemically degraded, so we have to imagine the shimmering silvery appearance they would have had. The dorsal fin is detailed, the wings more impressionistic. The blue body color has dissipated in offset. Part of White's intended mission was scientific, but partly, too, he was simply making edible species recognizable.

Some paintings are narrative, in an attempt to show what was going on. The Indian village Secotan shows an open organization of function and habitation. The same ring of dancers with tobacco pouches and rattles is in another picture. Maize grows here, with huts for those who keep birds from the corn. White depicted fully developed and hierarchical Algonquin civic, community, social, and family lives.

The wife of a Pomeiooc chief, with her daughter, suggests how well the English and the Algonquins got along. The woman's beads and stance are native. The daughter is showing her mother a doll that has come from the English, elaborately dressed. The daughter also wears beads highly prized by the Indians. The suggestion is one of ample opportunities for trade. The panoramic fishing picture shows recognizable fish where they're found in a salt marsh, and the catching method used included weirs, nets, and spears.

Initially, a very limited group of people would have seen these watercolors, even though multiple copies and albums were made. In 1590, however, German engraver Theodor de Bry, who had a workshop in London, embarked on publishing albums with written accounts of the New World and engraved versions of White's pictures. A committed Protestant, de Bry undertook distribution in English, French, German, and Latin, and these were put out quickly and widely seen. The exhibition includes examples of de Bry's engraved versions of White's pictures with text by Thomas Harriot, a scientist who accompanied him to the New World.

White's pictures are from a single album acquired by the British Museum in 1866. The album had been in a Sotheby's warehouse, where in 1865 it suffered fire, then water damage. It was likely done for Sir Walter Raleigh, since it was under his six-year patent (1584–90) from Queen Elizabeth that the expeditions were mounted. Raleigh's coat of arms is on one of the maps.

But it's not just the artwork that is fascinating in this exhibit. On pages here and there we can see offset images created due to water damage and folding. There is an entire album of offset prints left on interleaving between the "real" pages, finely detailed and paler, a fascinating second album created from the dousing of the original. In addition to the paintings on the walls, gems from Yale's extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, atlases, and globes convey the history and context of the period. And interesting surprises abound: The map of North America from the 1630s shows "a branch of the south sea not yet discovered" — just west of the Appalachians.

Until June 1 (1080 Chapel St., New Haven, Conn., 203-432-2800).

Brave New Watercolor World

Museums

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