Gallery.
´White’s collection of watercolor paintings were both varied and numerous. Many of the subjects of White’s works depict the day to day practices of Native American life as he observed them, from hunting techniques, food preparation and the ordering of native villages such as this image of Secotan.
´However, most of White’s painting contain and underlying theme; that of investing his pictures with a mind for his audience. Prospective English colonists at home.
Establishing the colony of Roanoke was ultimately a business endeavor, and Raleigh’s selection of White can be seen a potential selling tool in order to make the colonies more attractive to anxious potential colonists at home. For example, notice Secotan’s plotted and ordered village layout, not too dissimilar to an Elizabethan village
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John White's Depictions of Algonquian Life.
´Perhaps White’s most recognized image, that of an Algonquin warrior, holding a war bow and bedecked in tattoos and jewelry denoting wealth and status.
´Images such as these, would have a heavy influence on European perceptions of Native Americans. John Dryden’s ‘noble savage’.
´However, like White’s depiction of Secotan, his paintings of human subject too are designed to conjure a familiarity with his audience.
´Both the warrior posture and bow are perhaps purposefully reminiscent of the feted English archer, the ‘hero's’ of Agincourt, which would had been familiar to the English mind of the Elizabethan era.
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Fauna
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''Drawing to Life''.
As instructed by Sir Walter Raleigh, John White was instructed to 'draw to life' the peoples, landscapes, flora and fauna of the Carolina coast. These included incredible images of some of the wildlife and sea life encountered by the colonists. White's task was not purely an anthropological one, but zoological also.
A 'Lost' Colony.
´John White’s paintings were widely distributed in Europe; they were presented before the Queen and Raleigh, and even engraved by Theodore de Bry who published them in his America in 1590.
´White left Roanoke in the late 1580’s, determined to aid the struggling colony by beseeching Raleigh for desperately needed supplies. However, Roanoke was doomed to become infamous. Unable to return immediately due to the Spanish Armada crisis at home, by the time White returned to Roanoke in 1590, the colony had vanished. The word CROATOAN etched into a tree the only tell-tale sign of the colony’s fate.