We're in the galleries at the
Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art looking at a
painting by an artist named
James Wooldridge. It's called
the "Indians of Virginia."
These are Algonquian Indians in
what was called Virginia, but
it's actually the outer banks of
what we now call North Carolina.
The painting was done for the
Earl of Conway. His grandfather
was a shareholder in the 1609
Virginia Company.
This is a painting that is a
third-generation view of the
people and the place that we're
seeing. The painting was based
on a very popular series of
prints that were made in the
late 16th century. Those prints
were based on a highly detailed
set of watercolors that were
produced by a man named John
White.
John White has a series of
watercolors based on his voyages
to this place, probably
1585.
That voyage took place because
Queen Elizabeth had granted Sir
Walter Raleigh the right to
explore areas that had not yet
been claimed in the Americas in
order to bring back gold and
silver. White was sent as a
cartographer, as a naturalist,
as part of this exploratory
journey. He was the first
governor of the very famous
settlement that we know as the
Lost Colony, the colony of
Roanoke. This painting, the
prints that it was derived from
and ultimately, the watercolors
that those were derived from
were an attempt at documentation.
Contemporary historians are
still looking back to these
paintings and prints for
evidence. Yet we also know that
these are products of European
society. I'm not sure it's
possible to untangle this
relationship between what was
observed and the conventions
that were imposed on those
observations.
We're looking at portrait
conventions, European artistic
conventions overlaid on
documents or images of actual
people. Just simply taking one
figure as an example. Look at
the standing man in the front.
What we see is someone standing
in a contrapposto stance,
which was common from
classical Greek and Roman
art. That shift of the
weight, this is a familiar
stance for the viewers of De
Bry's engravings. Because of
that, there's something familiar
and easily accessible right away.
The documentary part of that
could have been what the figures
were wearing, how their bodies
were decorated, but the
conventions of the stance come
from European sources.
What we're seeing is this blend
of the exotic, of the foreign,
with something that was deeply
familiar. There may be artistic
reasons for that, but there were
probably also economic reasons
to make this world familiar, to
make this world not completely
apart.
There are settlements, so that
would have been a familiar
concept to build cities. There
is agriculture, so there's
cultivated crops. There's
organized religion. Whether that
religion is familiar or not
makes less of a difference as an
overarching idea that there are
some similarities to our culture
from a European viewpoint.
It seems as though trade might
be able to be established, for
example. It's also a land of
plenty. We see the fish, we see
the crops really thriving. All
of that would be enough of a
balance of there's something new
here that I want to be a part of,
but it's not too scary. For
Europeans for about 200 years,
these were the images that
served to fuel the imagination
of what that so-called New World
looked like and its inhabitants.