Paintings of Native Americans on display at British Musuem
Updated on 12 March 2007
Watercolours painted in the sixteenth century by English artist John White provided Elizabethan England with its first glimpse of the New World - but how realistic were they?
Watercolours, like the one pictured above (A Festival Dance) were painted in 1585.
They illustrated the new world - of native Americans and how they lived - and would have astonished the Elizabethan Court much as the first television pictures from the moon astonished the world centuries later.
Yet John White's depictions of native Americans and their way of life were to some extent propaganda - as a new exhibition at the British Museum shows.
Extraordinary though it may seem, we know practically nothing about John White - the man who painted them.
In the Elizabethan times - as sailors still do - you crossed the Atlantic, following prevailing trade winds and currents. John White - gentleman artist and adventurer - staked everything on the New World.
To help establish an English colony at Roanoke in what was then Virginia, he would make the dangerous Atlantic crossing - not once, but five times.
The Queen herself didn't invest in the American adventure but she encouraged it. And a favourite courtier, Sir Walter Raleigh found the capital to send ships.
It's for Raleigh and the court that White paints a version of Paradise. The native Algonquin Indians are smiling, welcoming and relatively civilized. They farm, they rotate crops.
They fish the rivers - build weirs to corral the fish. They have a form of religion. They bury the dead - in special temples.
John White painted a map of the voyage. The English established a military fort at Roanoke first. The colony came soon afterwards - 115 men, women and children - including White's only child, a daughter.
Within three years, everyone had vanished. White, having returned home for supplies, only found an abandoned settlement.
The watercolours are so delicate they're only brought out for exhibition once in a generation. The last time was 1964.
