Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored de Bry Engravings of ...
Transcript of Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored de Bry Engravings of ...
The images shown in this presentation are from a rare hand-colored edition of the book in the North Carolina Collection at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The North Carolina Collection has digitized the illustrations in an online exhibition at http://www2.lib.unc.edu/dc/debry/
Commentary in this slide presentation has been adapted from the North Carolina Collection’s online exhibition as well.
Picturing the New WorldThe Hand-colored de Bry Engravings of 1590
About This Volume
The de Bry edition of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report was published in Frankfurt in 1590. There were editions printed at roughly the same time in four different languages: English, Latin, French, and German. Many copies of this first edition have survived and are now housed in libraries around the world. Among these are a handful of copies in color. The technology did not exist at the time to mass-produce color illustrations, thus these copies would have been colored by hand.
The artists who applied color to the printed engravings clearly did not have access to John White’s original watercolors. The hand-coloring on the engravings differs from White’s originals, often dramatically so. Nowhere is that more evident than in the depictions of many of the Native Americans in the illustrations shown on this website. While the native inhabitants of North Carolina are shown in White’s watercolors to have brown skin and black hair, they appear in the hand-colored engravings with pale skin and blonde hair. One explanation for this is that they were colored by a German artist who simply assumed that people around the world looked like the ones that he or she encountered every day.
Title page of the German translation of Thomas Harriot’s “A Briefe and True Account of the New Found Land of Virginia,” published in Frankfurt, 1590
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Coat of Arms
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Adam and Eve
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Map of Raleigh’s Virginia
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The arrival of the Englishmen in Virginia
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
A Weroan or great Lord of Virginia
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
One of the Chief Ladies of Secota
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
One of the religious Men in the Town of Secota
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
A young gentle Woman Daughter of Secota
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
A Chief Lord of Roanoac
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
A Chief Lady of Pomeiooc
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
An aged Man in his Winter Garment
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
How the chief Ladies of the Town of Dasemunkepeuc carry their Children and dress
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Conjurer
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Way in which they make Boats
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Manner of Fishing in Virginia
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The broiling of their Fish over the Flames
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The seething of their Meat in earthen Pots
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Their sitting at Meat
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Their Manner of praying with Rattles about the Fire
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Their dances which they use at their high Feasts (left side)
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
Their dances which they use at their high Feasts (right side)
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Town of Pomeiooc
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Town of Secota
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Idol Kiwasa
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The Tomb of their Weroans or Chief Lords
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The sundry Marks of the Chief Men of Virginia
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The true Picture of One Pict
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The true Picture of a Woman Pict
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The true Picture of a young Daughter of the Picts
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The true Picture of a Man of the neighboring Nation to the Picts
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
The true Picture of a Woman of the neighboring Nation to the Picts
Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection
About Theodore de Bry
Theodore de Bry (1528-1598) was trained as a goldsmith and engraver in the Flemish town of Liege. When the first accounts of Spanish and British explorers to South and North America began to be published in the 1580s, de Bry became interested in producing illustrated editions of these early reports of the Americas. In the late 1580s he traveled to London, where he made a series of engravings based on the watercolors of John White. De Bry and his family settled in Frankfurt, Germany, where in 1590 he produced an illustrated edition of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. De Bry worked with another engraver, Gijsbert van Veen (1558-1630), whose signature appears on four of the plates. A Briefe and True Report would be the first volume of de Bry’s ten volume “America” series, which included illustrated editions of other accounts of exploration in the Americas. While de Bry’s engravings of native North and South Americans were based either on paintings, written descriptions, or both, his images reflect his decidedly European bias. Nonetheless, these were the first images that many people were to see of North and South America and helped to encourage European interest in the “new world.”
Sources:
Paul Hulton. America, 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White.Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press and the British Museum, 1984.
“Theodor de Bry.” Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed 26 October 2006. http://www.groveart.com/
Thomas Harriot. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition. Introduction by Paul Hulton. New York: Dover Publications, 1972.
Jacques Busbee. “Art as a Handmaiden of History.” In The North Carolina Booklet vol. 10, no. 1 (July 1910), pp. 4-11.
Davidson, James West and Mark Hamilton Lytle. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. New York: Knopf, 1982. See chapter five, “The ‘Noble Savage’ and the Artist’s Canvas: Interpreting Pictorial Evidence.”