John White

Background

John White was probably born in England about 1540 .

Career

In his collection are several studies of native life in Florida, Greenland, and the Caucasus, which, if they are his original work rather than copies from other artists, as may be possible, prove that he was already an experienced traveler by 1585. He was commissioned by Raleigh to go with the expedition of that year to Roanoke Island, now in North Carolina, to provide pictures of life in the new world that might stimulate interest in further ventures. Scientific paintings of the flora and fauna of America, as well as of the customs and habits of the native Indians, comprise the major portion of his surviving paintings. At least sixty-three of the paintings were probably done from life in America. They become, therefore, some of the earliest and most valuable of the material for the study of the natural history and aboriginal life of this continent. Twenty-three of his paintings, including two not found among the originals, were engraved by Theodore de Bry for an edition in 1590 of Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of . Virginia. He included also adaptations of two maps by White of the Virginia coast, which for half a century thereafter greatly influenced geographers in their delineations of the coastline south of the Chesapeake Bay. White's paintings of natives were used, copied, redrawn, mutilated, and reinterpreted so that for some three centuries they conditioned all pictorial representation of the American Indians. In 1587 a John White was sent by Raleigh to be governor of his second colony in Virginia. That John White reëstablished the colony of Roanoke. It has been customary to identify the artist as one and the same with this governor, though the identification has lacked satisfactory proof. Strong support for this thesis is provided by the discovery, in the manuscript for Thomas Moffett's Insectorum (1634) in the British Museum, that an illustration of White's "Tiger Swallow Tail Butterfly" bore in that manuscript copy the illuminating inscription "Hanc è Virginiâ Americanâ Candidus ad me Pictor detulit 1587. " Since the governor was the only known White to have gone out on that expedition, the fact that "Candidus Pictor" returned from Virginia in that year with this picture makes possible a reasonably positive identification of the painter and governor as one. He probably went back to England with Grenville in 1585, to return to Virginia as governor in July 1587. Among the settlers of this expedition was his own daughter, Ellinor, who became the mother of Virginia Dare, the first child of English parentage born in America. The governor's judgment as a leader was apparently not commensurate with his skill as a painter, for he was persuaded late in August to return to England for provisions. The war with Spain interrupted his plans for the colony's relief, and it was August 1590 before he arrived back at Roanoke. The colony had disappeared. Denied time to make a really effective search, he returned home leaving its fate a mystery to this day. From his "house at Newtowne in Kylmore, " Ireland, in February 1593 he sent Hakluyt an account of this his "fift & last voiage to Virginia".

Achievements

• Though the written records of his life are limited to fragmentary and frequently uncertain accounts, he left a charming and important series of paintings, done in water colors, which prove him to have been an artist of no mean ability and constitute his chief claim to fame. He was among those who sailed with Richard Grenville to the shore of present-day North Carolina in 1585, acting as artist and mapmaker to the expedition.