Sixteenth-century watercolor reportage from the New World
Between 1584 and 1590, gentleman-artist painter John White rode along on five British journeys to the New World. His job was to "draw to life" what he encountered. Sometimes he succeeded, but even when he didn't he still made beautiful art. Smithsonian has a profile of White, including a fine selection of his watercolors. From Smithsonian:
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."Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World"
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We had a cracking exhibition of John White's work at the British Museum a couple of years ago - a lot of our cultural clichés of "American Indians" can be traced back to the wide-scale reproductions of his work (sometimes modified by other hands to make them more exciting.)
Hey, I'm scanning in a bunch of his work at my job. No, seriously, there's a book with like 1,000 images (not all of which are his, obviously), and we're scanning in every freaking image in the book, because one of the art professors is a dick.
His work is pretty cool, though IIRC he bases a lot of it on older woodcuts. (or maybe the woodcuts were based on his work?)
FYI, his granddaughter, Virginia, was the first English child born in America, in what was then called Virginia, but is now Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was the same Roanoke Colony that disappeared without a trace and whose fate remains a mystery to this day.
clearly, these diferse images be copyistshopped. I canst tell by ye pictsels.
Those are awesome.
On the Smithsonian site, it says, "By John White, Watercolor, c. 1585. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved." Aren't these in the public domain, by definition? Are the photos, being more recently taken, not in the public domain? What gives?
John White was Jacques Le Moyne's bitch.
@#1> I was fortunate enough to be in London while they were on display there. I'd managed to snap one photo before I was politely asked to stop.
The Lost Colony play, which has been performed every year in Roanoke since 1937 (with the exeption of the four years it was shut down so that the lights wouldn't tip off German U-boats in the sound), still bases their costume design on White's watercolors.
The theater has caught fire twice, most recently in September 2007. A devotee of the production spotted the glow from across the sound and called the fire department, but the costume shop was largely lost, including at least five thousands costumes among which numbered the historic collection from the production's early years. It was rebuilt in 233 days.
I had the pleasure of a tour of the new theater last summer, and they had large reproductions of White's work all over the costume shop for reference.
I'm just in the process of writing a bunch of desriptions of many of these pictures, having written a Open University teaching unit around them. I'm not sure what the copyright issues from it were: luckily all that is sorted out in another department.
They're all printed very nicely in _A new world_ by Kim Sloan (978-0-7141-2650-0), which is the catalogue of the recent BM exhibition. Also of interest is the Dover books reprint of _A briefe and true report of the new found land of viginia_ by Thomas Harriot (0-486-21092-8), which is a facsimile of de Bry's 1590 engravings of White's drawings: itself the only access that most C16th punters would have had to White.
In the pair of them, there's a great illustration of the way that vision follows preconceptions. White paints a fishing scene in which he draws what is unmistakably a horseshoe crab. He gives it little claws, though. In de Bry's egraving of the same scene, the horsehoe crab retains its tail and single-piece carapace, but it now has legs and claws proportioned like a conventional crab.
On page 18a of this
http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/smith.html
reproduction of SMith's 'Ould Virginia' you can see a 1624 engraving by Robert Vaughan, purporting to be an account of the life of Capt John Smith, which re-works the de Bry engravings.