NEW HAVEN, CT.-This spring, the Yale Center for British Art will present an extraordinary exhibition of watercolors and drawings by John White (fl . 1585–93), the Elizabethan gentleman-artist most responsible for shaping England’s first view of America and its inhabitants. In 1585, White sailed with the earliest expedition to “Virginia” (on the coast of present-day North Carolina) and produced a series of beautiful watercolors that documented his voyage.

These drawings of the region’s Algonquian Indians and local flora and fauna constitute the only surviving original visual record of England’s first settlement in North America. The exhibition A New World: England’s First View of America will feature nearly one hundred works, including all of White’s drawings of the Algonquian Indians; his maps and charts; watercolors of the Inuit; North American and West Indian plants and animals; depictions of ancient Britons; and associated works by his contemporaries. It will also include rare maps, manuscripts, and printed works related to early European voyages of exploration to America from Yale collections and elsewhere, including the Pierpont Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, and a number of private collections.

English interest in establishing a settlement in North America only emerged toward the end of the sixteenth century. In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh received a patent from Queen Elizabeth I to finance and settle a colony in “Virginia.” Raleigh hoped to find minerals and other valuable commodities, to establish a safe harbor from which to harass Spanish ships, and to create a permanent foothold for England in America. He sent an expedition in 1585 that included John White and the renowned scientist, Thomas Harriot (1560–1621). Together, they produced drawings, maps, and written records of what they found to satisfy curiosity about the New World, to encourage further investors, and to attract colonists for an English “plantation.”

Upon arrival, the Englishmen explored the coastline and built a small fort on the island of Roanoke. White depicted the native people and their way of life in a series of spectacular watercolors of the Indians and their villages of Pomeiooc, Secotan, and Roanoke. He also produced stunning drawings of local animals and plants, portraying for the fi rst time many species native to the New World.

John White returned from “Virginia” a year later with visions of Paradise, the perfect place for the English to settle in the New World. White and Raleigh made plans for a permanent colony of one hundred and fi fteen men, women, and children at the “Cittie of Raleigh” on the Chesapeake, and White was appointed Governor with twelve assistants. The expedition set off in 1587 but landed at Roanoke with insufficient supplies. White was sent home to obtain assistance; when he finally returned in 1590 the colonists had disappeared and the legend of the “Lost Colony of Roanoke” was born.

John White’s drawings have been vitally important in forming the way in which Europe viewed America and its inhabitants. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to revisit the Lost Colony of Roanoke through White’s drawings and to catch a glimpse of the land and people of North America at the moment when Europeans encountered the continent’s native inhabitants for the first time. White’s legacy has been sustained for more than two hundred and fifty years due to the reproduction and adaptation of his work by later artists.

A selection of these subsequent reinterpretations also will be displayed in the exhibition. The exhibition includes a five-minute video, On the Traces of Pocahontas (2007), directed by Max Carocci and Simona Piantieri, showing modern descendants of the Algonquians depicted by John White visiting the British Museum Print Room in London in 2006. They view the drawings and reflect upon their importance to their own history.

A New World: England’s First View of America has been organized by the British Museum, which houses the complete collection of White’s work. The exhibition is generously supported by the American Friends of the British Museum and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition has been organized by Kim Sloan, Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery and Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1880 at the British Museum. The organizing curator at the Yale Center for British Art is Elisabeth Fairman, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.

An illustrated catalogue, published by the University of North Carolina Press, reproduces in full the celebrated but rarely seen British Museum collection of watercolors by John White. An introduction is followed by chapters on John White and on the indigenous inhabitants and their historical context. The book explores White’s various roles as colonist, surveyor, and artist who recorded the natural history of the region and also provided Elizabethan England with its fi rst glimpse of a now lost Native American culture.