John White: Renaissance England's First Important Ethnographic Illustrator

Abstract

John White was England's first important ethnographic illustrator. Collaborating with one of the Renaissance's most innovative scientists, Thomas Hariot, while working as an expedition artist on Sir Walter Raleigh's 1585 attempt to colonize Virginia, White produced influential illustrations of American Indians that were published as etchings and widely distributed in Theodor de Bry's America (1590). Apprenticed as an artist in Elizabethan England, White redirected this traditional training as a limnist and a costume painter to scientific, ethnographic purposes.