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Reviews of Books
Simon P. Newman, University of Glasgow
A New World: England's First View of America. Exhibition shown at the British Museum, London, March 15–June 17, 2007; the North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, October 20, 2007–January 13, 2008; the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., March 6–June 1, 2008; Jamestown Settlement, Williamsburg, Va., July 15–October 15, 2008.
A New World: England's First View of America. By Kim Sloan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 256 pages. $60.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).
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When the first Elizabethan Englishmen and Englishwomen set foot on the distant shores of the New World, "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."1 John White, perhaps more than any single individual, gave expression to that first aesthetic contemplation, in the process forever shaping the ways in which his contemporaries and then subsequent generations of historians envisioned the indigenous peoples of mainland North America and their first encounters with English settlers. To this day, more than four centuries after he painted them, White's watercolors of native peoples, flora, and fauna continue to provide historians and students with some of the most vivid and detailed representations of first peoples and first contact. |
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For the first time in a generation, the British Museum has exhibited White's delicate and fragile watercolors and drawings, and this exhibition, A New World, will travel to three locations in the United States during late 2007 and 2008. The paintings are remarkably vivid, especially given that water damage following a nineteenth-century fire robbed many of their strikingly (and unusually for watercolors) bright hues. The exhibition includes the reverse imprints on blank facing pages occasioned by the soaking of the originals. White's representations of plants, birds, animals, and insects were drawn with a clarity and precision worthy of later naturalists, yet he imbued his pictures of pineapples, fireflies, groupers, pelicans, and lizards with an early modern Englishman's sense of wonder and delight. |
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We know surprisingly little about White, despite his production of two accounts, one letter, and some seventy-five paintings and drawings during or as a result of the five voyages that he made to the New World from 1584 to 1590 and his service as one of the first governors of the early English settlements. Most of his artwork was intended for a patron, perhaps Sir Walter Ralegh or even Queen Elizabeth I, and thus he recorded relevant aspects of the voyages of discovery, including the English ships, the forts the English constructed, and the various environments, people, and wildlife they encountered. |
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For early Americanists White's portrayals of indigenous peoples are of greatest interest. His paintings of the native community of Secotan or of Algonquians fishing, for example, have been reprinted countless times in a wide variety of secondary texts, including almost all survey textbooks. With so few images available to us from the era of English first contact, White's illustrations continue to shape students' first impressions and academics' more nuanced analyses. This exhibition is organized to encourage viewers to consider the Elizabethan context for these images and how and why White constructed his representations of Indians and their world as he did. A fascinating set of illustrations of past and present Europeans, from a veiled, colorfully dressed Turkish woman to a Tartar in conical hat and striped robe, illuminate the diverse and exotic forms of dress and self-presentation of European contemporaries. White's images of ancient Britons are even more striking because they present white Europeans, albeit historical ones, as dangerous and even savage. Admittedly, a blue-painted, tattooed, long-haired, and naked Pictish warrior holding a man's severed head might have been regarded by White's contemporaries as the ancestor of the Scots rather than the English, and as late as the eighteenth century the English continued to regard their Scottish neighbors as little more than savages. Nonetheless that Algonquian men and women could be presented as more civilized than ancient Picts suggests a more nuanced view of Indians than many later British immigrants would display. |
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Such paintings situated White's images of indigenous peoples in very interesting ways. His portraits of a relatively large number of indigenous people, along with his representations of Indians at work and play in larger settings, simultaneously communicate their savagery and their correlation with and utility to the civilized English. With an anthropologist's eye, he captured an Indian mother's method of carrying her infant, the dignity and bearing of an elder from Pomeiooc dressed in winter garb, or a chief dressed for a hunt or feast. The level of detail is remarkable, from the body markings and tattoos to the array of hairstyles, the weave of cloth, and the objects carried, down to the small European doll held by a young girl. White's achievements have been as valuable as any other source for understanding daily life and culture at the time of first contact. Though his paintings of larger groups and events sacrificed some of this individual specificity, they too remain remarkable for their detail. A festive dance at Secotan, perhaps a Green Corn Festival, shows men and women dancing, singing, and shaking rattles, arrows, and small leafy branches. White's carefully labeled perspective of Secotan shows cornfields at various stages of growth, protected by members of the community; habitations and ceremonial structures; and Indians involved in a variety of activities. The painting presents an organized community, with people performing a variety of roles and contributing physically and spiritually to the general welfare. |
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As Joyce E. Chaplin points out in an excellent essay in the exhibition catalog, the realism of White's representations of Indians belies the very careful molding and presentation of his subjects. As well as revealing something of White's unique perspective on the New World and its inhabitants, these paintings and drawings were clearly designed to present their subjects in a certain light. As Englishmen contemplated an Atlantic world of their own, Ralegh, White, and others were surely all too aware that their own accounts and images were freighted with particular significance. White and his fellow English observers are conspicuously absent from scenes they witnessed and to some degree influenced, and he consciously crafted his art to support and further English plans for colonization of the New World and its peoples. The land's natural abundance, easily harvested by ignorant savages, was readily apparent in his work, and the health and clothing of his subjects suggest a healthy and temperate climate. |
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White's Indians seem welcoming and somehow rather more than mere savages, and yet there is an implicit threat underlying these representations. Their agriculture, fishing, and hunting, together with their clothing and various tools and utensils, all demonstrate Indians' relationship to and need of the very land that the English hoped to colonize, while the Indians' ever-present weaponry and proud stance and gait embody a potential obstacle to English dominance. Indian productivity is a constant theme: no Indians are visibly hungry or malnourished, and food, being cultivated, hunted for, or prepared, appears in many of White's works. Such images extended to Indian fertility, for infants and children featured in many pictures. Perhaps what is most strikingly absent from the paintings is a strong sense of virgin land, since White's was a populated New World, teeming not only with natural bounty but also with people. |
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White's images of the Inuit were unusual in that they included Englishmen, recording violent encounters between the newcomers and indigenous peoples. Yet in all his many representations of the Algonquians, White and his compatriots are glaringly absent from the scenes they witnessed and participated in. Only in an artifact held by an Indian child does the European presence become manifest, a telling indication of the role that European trade would come to play in the subjugation of native peoples. Chaplin proposes that White "shows the Indians as if they were actors in a drama that the English watched" (63), potentially useful popu- lations in English colonization but people from whom the English would remain distant. |
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Even after half a millennium, White's paintings color our view of native peoples and their world. Yet, as this exhibition and catalog demonstrate, people have often forgotten White's authorship, confused him with others, and even pirated his work. Until the nineteenth century, few people ever saw White's gentle and compelling paintings, and from the late sixteenth century onward most Europeans and later Americans were far more likely to encounter engravings and prints based on White's paintings but which included some subtle and some more egregious changes that reflected later attitudes toward the New World and its indigenous peoples. Theodor de Bry's engravings were among the most significant, and Ute Kuhlemann's essay explores his reconstruction of White's Virginia. A great many later engravings and paintings, including those that illustrate modern textbooks and secondary works, have often been based not on White's originals but on de Bry's revisions and on more imaginative renderings of North American Indians more mythical than real. |
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Curator Kim Sloan provides background and context for White and his work in three deeply researched essays as well as in the text accompanying the beautifully reproduced watercolors from the exhibition. But though the catalog is a wonderfully produced book and a worthy successor to the work of Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn almost fifty years ago, it is no substitute for the paintings themselves. Two different yet intimately related lost worlds are here, both the lost world of indigenous people from the era immediately before and during first contact and the lost world of the first English colonists to settle on mainland North America. The latter included White's own granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America. Both worlds disappeared, as did White's daughter and granddaughter, who remained at Roanoke when he returned to England for much-needed supplies. White's carefully crafted paintings represent some of the most enduring images of these worlds and, given that they may be displayed no more than once in a generation because of their fragility, colleagues should seize the opportunity to see these surprisingly moving and powerfully evocative images. When, in advance of the exhibition, several Virginia Indian chiefs visited the British Museum to see these paintings, what struck them most were the similarities between what White represented and what continues in the ritual activities of present-day Indians.2 On both occasions when I visited the exhibition in London, the galleries were crowded with visitors, many of them North American tourists. "But they look so ordinary, so gentle," whispered a North Carolina retiree to her husband as they gazed at White's painting of an Indian woman and her daughter. And they do. |
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Notes
1F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr., Cambridge, 1991), 140.
2Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, eds., The American Drawings of John White, 1577–1590: With Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964); Louise Jury, "Elizabethan Art Offers Early Glimpse of the New World," [London] Independent, Mar. 15, 2007.
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