A New World is a beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging catalogue of the British Museum’s rarely exhibited collection of John White’s watercolors. White’s pictures record the people and nature he encountered while accompanying a group of English colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island in 1585. Some of these images, particularly his studies of the native inhabitants of what is now coastal North Carolina, are iconic, while others—fireflies, Puerto Rico, Turks—are considerably less well-known. The catalogue’s six essays, by Kim Sloan, curator of British drawings and watercolors at the British Museum, and Joyce Chaplin, Christian Feest, and Ute Kuhlemann, successfully recontextualize the entire set of images, and the artist’s practice generally, within the sphere of Elizabethan court life. Though the contributors are careful to point to where White’s images offer insights into indigenous cultures and their specific ways of seeing, this is a study of Anglo-European culture and perceptions, an effort “to look at the New World through sixteenth-century eyes, without the preconceived notions of our own times” (6). Ironically, relatively few sixteenth-century eyes would have seen the actual watercolors, which lay mostly forgotten in private hands until purchased by the British Museum in 1866, and even then did not become famous until publication in the twentieth century.

Biographical information on White is scanty, but drawing on her own and others’ recent research into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawing and limning (watercolor painting), Sloan puts forward in the first three chapters a convincing case for White as “a ‘gentleman’ first and ‘artist’ second,” whose practice of art was accordingly closely linked to his activities as a courtier (12). White’s grant of arms (awarded when he became governor of the so-called “lost colony” on Roanoke Island), like his traveling with servants and armor, points to gentry status; but his tastes went beyond the majority of his peers to include the purchase of books, framed pictures and maps, and study of the art of limning. In doing so he was following the advice of writers like Baldesar Castiglione, who praised the “curious” arts as appropriate for a gentleman, that is, as an aide in practical matters like war and heraldry, but also as a means of acquiring the knowledge of nature needed for public service and for favor at court (33). Sketching and limning were suited for gentlemen because they were associated with the realm of design, where knowledge of nature, antiquity, and art were demonstrated, versus the supposedly more artisanal painting in oils. Perhaps less likely to have served an apprenticeship because of his status, White might have accessed training from other sources, including manuals that circulated among court scholars, copying prints, or even fashioning designs for the court’s Office of the Revels.

Positioning White as a gentlemanly virtuoso, an admirer of curiosities skilled in the fine arts, helps Sloan clarify both his role in the voyages and the format of his production. White made five voyages to the Americas, but his surviving seventy-five watercolors document just a couple of months in 1585, the same trip on which Thomas Harriot based his Briefe and true report (1588) of what was then called Virginia. White produced a vade mecum, as Sloan describes it, a gentleman’s ready reference book, containing a collection of the manners, customs, and dress of the peoples of Virginia (225). Individuals are turned into types or put into categories in order to enable handy comparison with other civilizations, past and present. This encyclopedic mindset helps explain the other subjects of White’s watercolors, mostly figure studies of Inuits and Floridians, but also ancient Picts and Turks—exotic tribes all. A second volume of watercolors (purchased by British Museum founder Hans Sloane in 1717, after whom it is named) consisting of some figures, but mostly of flora and fauna, is also reproduced here, and is reattributed as not simply copies of White’s original pictures but an alternate version of them, produced by White or one or more other artists; such multiple but similar sets of drawings were not uncommonly created for different patrons. The isolated specimens (a sandhill crane, a plantain) in the Sloane volume and in the other set of watercolors may exemplify a courtly approach to nature: richly embellished and giving a “cultural history” of their usage rather than a strictly empirical description (170).

Gentlemen companions sometimes brought specialist skills to expeditions, as White did, but they also went in the role of courtier. As such, they sought to advance themselves and the enterprises in which they had invested money and family by helping to cast these largely private, for-profit ventures in a nationalist light, as benefiting English manufactures and deterring Spanish expansion. In her essay “Roanoke ‘counterfeited according to the truth,’” Chaplin, a professor of early American history, stresses that the Elizabethan concept of theatrum mundi—man as a spectacle for the gods—underlies White’s presentation. In his scenes, people are brought on stage for an implied but never present or interacting European spectator, and so are kept at a distance from the proposed colonizers (52). Chaplin proposes this as a characteristic of British imperialism (as opposed to other European modes), perhaps, as Sloan notes (46–7), first tested in Ireland, where all the leaders of Raleigh’s expeditions had served in a military capacity, including the confiscation of land. Chaplin also considers whether White’s largely sympathetic portrayal of the Algonquins as ingenious, industrious, and often smiling was not only a promotional device to attract English settlers and investors but a reaction against the hostile attitudes toward the Inuit during Martin Frobisher’s gold-seeking 1577 expedition to the Arctic. Placing White and his patron Raleigh within the context of court politics, Spanish spies, and the backlash from Frobisher’s hugely expensive failure, Chaplin suggests that the Virginia colonizers understood that demonstrating a willingness to cooperate with the native inhabitants would be necessary for success.

Feest, Director of the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnology) in Vienna and an expert on North American Indians, situates White’s watercolors in the context of early ethnography, or, as he describes it, “a new humanist discourse on alterity and identity” that created categories for observing cultural difference (65). When compared to artists who had not traveled to the Americas, White’s pictures appear less “Europeanized” in features and posture; similarly, when compared to representations of the Tupinambá in South America, usually drawn by artists embroiled in France’s and Portugal’s contest for Brazil, White’s portrayals emerge as less overtly ideological. Feest generally supports the notion of White’s ethnographic accuracy, observing that White’s tendency to treat seeming portraits of individuals as generic examples preserved some specificity of detail. But he also cautions that since no comparable visual record exists for the immediate or wider North American neighborhood until the eighteenth century, what is known of sixteenth-century Algonquins beyond the archaeological record is based, to a certain extent, on White. That he was at least an accurate surveyor is confirmed by modern satellite photography of the coastal area in his maps.

In “Between Reproduction, Invention and Propaganda,” Kuhlemann, an assistant in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, tackles the fact that it was actually Theodor de Bry’s engravings after White’s watercolors that shaped European perception of “otherness.” De Bry’s popular publication in 1590 of Harriot’s account of Virginia, illustrated with White’s drawings, transformed White’s propaganda—originally aimed at British investors and settlers—into a larger narrative about the superiority of Protestant imperialism. Kuhlemann traces De Bry’s connections to courtly circles in England and argues persuasively that while he retains White’s basic characterization of the Algonquin lifestyle as akin to that of Europeans, and also emphasizes the natural abundance of the land, his adherence to Mannerist conventions tended to erode the subjects’ independence, just as illustrations linking the Indians to Adam and Eve and the ancient tribes of Britain subordinated them to a larger European narrative concerning the progress of “civilization.”

Like White’s own iconic views “The Town of Secoton” or “The Manner of Their Fishing,” some of the more general material covered by this catalogue—such as the function of White’s images as propaganda for colonization, the iconographic differences between White’s originals and De Bry’s engravings, or the comparison of his mode of representation to the more sensationalist images of the inhabitants of Brazil—will be familiar to most historians of American art. But the attention of the essayists in A New World to reconstructing early modern structures of thought and feeling (White’s grandchild was the first English baby in the Roanoke colony) does reorient White’s pictures; while they remain in some senses artifacts of the Americas, not least because of their unique status as the oldest surviving images of North American Indians, they are here restored to an important position in the history of British art. They are accordingly given a biographic, aesthetic, and historical treatment commensurate with that status, including resplendent reproduction. Individual catalogue entries are substantial and thoughtful as well, and accompanied by a helpful selected bibliography, chronology, and concordance for De Bry’s engravings.