It has been suggested that the Indian depicted on the bottom right of the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ De Cive – the representation of primal libertas – was inspired by John White’s watercolors. Below is Plate 48 from America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White edited by Paul Hulton (U. North Carolina Press and British Museum, 1984).
3 Comments
Hey Craig, yes, i’ve been not very present on the blogs as of late … thanks for the note.
I used to have another painting from the same series up in our bedroom. We got it in North Carolina at the cite dedicated to memorializing the lost roanoke colony. There it was suggested that White’s paintings were important because they were done before the rise of the whole noble savage trope.
The “noble savage” seems to arise with Rousseau. He is more or less the first significant thinker to prefer savagery to civilization. Previous thinkers, such as Hobbes and Locke, viewed the savage as “natural” and “natural” was always second to “artifice.” It seems to be the case that the frontispiece to De Cive drew upon late sixteenth and early seventeenth century depictions of Native Americans. Hobbes, of course, was a shareholder in the Virginia Company and most likely followed news from the New World quite closely. (Noel Malcolm has an excellent article on this.) It’s highly unlikely that he was not familiar with White’s work.
The edition of White’s works also includes engravings made by De Bry based upon his watercolors. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues made similar sketches of the Natives in Florida. They are available in a two volume edition. I haven’t looked at any depictions of South American Natives yet.
I was reminded of White’s work recently when J. and I visited The Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They have an exhibit on artistic representations of Peru 1550-1880 going on right now (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/peru/) which includes some of the portraits done by Guaman Poma, a non-aristocratic Incan whose very early Chronicle was used extensively by Ronald White for his *Stolen Continents*.
Post a Comment