kimblr.com

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.
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.

nysun.com