The New World

As English merchant adventurers became interested in the idea of creating colonies in the New World some new exciting subject matter presented itself to one of these early artists, John white travelled to the State of Virginia (named after Elizabeth I ‘The Virgin Queen’,) leading an expedition and recorded in watercolour the scenes he witnessed whilst amongst the North American Indians.

These paintings due to their rarity and as valuable records of a departed traditional way of life in the New World stand as unique contributions to the national culture of England despite having been produced in an age embarrassed by its very richness and variety.

1587 AD: John White - Watercolourist - An English artist in the New World.

John White painted the members of the Virginian tribes close to the first English settlement in Virginia and also accompanied Martin Frobisher in his search for a North West passage where he was able to capture the first images of the Inuit in Baffin Island.

The virgin Queen Elizabeth had presided over an England of energy, fortune and exploration. It was an age of glittering achievement in poetry and prose literature, with great men like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Johnson and John Donne whilst the glorious swan song for ‘Gloriana’ was the music surrounding her, composed by native musicians like Thomas Morley, William Byrd, Thomas Campion and Thomas Tallis in a completely English idiom, the fantasia. She had supported and encouraged the native artist in a way no other monarch had before and the piercing purity of the Elizabethan lute song sounds hauntingly down the centuries as counterpoint to the images in Hilliard’s sparkling miniatures.