Books: New Found Lands

By: John Dorfman

January 2008

a briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia: The 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin Edition
By Thomas Hariot University of Virginia Press, $200 cloth, $35 paperback

Among the unsung heroes of art history are the copperplate engravers who painstakingly illustrated printed books in the days before easier and quicker methods of reproduction became available. One of the greatest of these artistic craftsmen was Theodor de Bry, a Dutchman based in Frankfurt who was also one of the greatest book publishers in Europe during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In that age of discovery, de Bry made his name by publishing sumptuously packaged travel narratives for which he himself made the pictures. Probably the most famous of these is Thomas Hariot’s a briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590), which provides a fascinating glimpse of the very first contact of English-speaking peoples with the inhabitants of America.

The University of Virginia Press has done a great service by making a facsimile of this book available (in two formats, a slipcased, clothbound limited edition for $200 and a high-grade paperback for $35), not only because of the quality of the reproductions but because of the version of the book chosen. What we have here, courtesy of the Mariners Museum in Newport News, is the very rare Latin edition, intended by de Bry to encourage interest in Protestant settlement of the New World among the learned of continental Europe, since English was a painfully provincial language at that time (an English translation is provided). The book contains hand-colored engravings and was the most lavishly produced of the various editions of Hariot’s narrative. The coloring of the plates was performed by an even more unsung hero of art known in German as the briefmaler. Using tiny brushes, paints and gold, these workers filled in every space between the lines of a black-on-white engraving, disdaining the popular method of stenciling, which gave a broader, clumsier effect.

In this edition, the briefmaler took care to color each kernel of Indian corn either yellow, red or blue. That detail is important, for despite the vivid illustrations of painted, befeathered Indians—based on sketches by John White, the expedition’s artist—the book’s real focus is botanical. Hariot was a scientist and mathematician, and his backers were practical politicians who wondered whether the New World could feed an ever-expanding number of hungry Caucasian mouths. Indian corn was thought to be a wonder crop. The ways of the Algonquian tribesman were interesting, but what Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh wanted to know was, would a colony work? As it happened, it would, but only after painful fits and starts lasting 20 years. The group of adventurers Hariot left behind disappeared, known to posterity as the lost colony of Roanoke.

In addition to their need to situate "Virginia" (the land between Florida and Canada) in the scientific order of things, the men of the 16th century felt the need to place its inhabitants in the scheme of history as they understood it. In this book we find the proto-anthropological images of Indians sandwiched between pictures of Adam and Eve and the pre-Christian Picts of Britain. For Hariot, de Bry and their co-conspirators, the Indians’ nakedness was that of man before the Fall, and their religion was that of their very own pagan ancestors.Georges Seurat: The Drawings
Jodi Hauptman, with essays by Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff and Richard Thomson MoMA, $49.95

What could be more counterintuitive than a book on Georges Seurat with no color
in it? The Post-Impressionist’s name has been so indelibly dyed with complementarily colored dots that it is really a shock to open this book and see page after page of black and white. And yet Paul Signac called them "the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence." Of the 138 drawings here reproduced, recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, some are preparatory sketches for paintings, but many are self-sufficient, and nearly all are powerfully expressive works in their own right. Seurat started his pitifully short career—he died at 31 of meningitis—as a draftsman, and periodically returned to drawing as a way to refresh his artistic practice. For a while, he actually gave up color altogether when he despaired of his ability to solve the optical problems he had posed to himself.

When drawing, Seurat used his medium in a particularly transparent way, and as several essays in this book observe, there is a visual analogy between the effect he got in his drawings and the famous "pointillism" of his mature painting style. (He and Signac preferred to call it Divisionism, a reference to the way colors could be divided up into their components on canvas and optically reunited in the viewer’s eye.)

Seurat was unvarying in his choice of drawing materials: black conté crayon and Michallet paper, a laid variety that clearly shows the grid of lines created by the mold. When the conté glides over the paper, it leaves a grainy pattern behind, which forms a substratum for the image. There are very few hard edges in Seurat’s drawings, and figures seems to blend into and out of the background. Light always emerges from darkness. As Jodi Hauptman points out, there is a quality of profound silence in these drawings, as if we were "watching through soundproof plate glass." Seurat himself was known as a silent man, reluctant to speak except to close friends.

One of the most striking drawings in this book is a large portrait of the artist Aman-Jean, which was Seurat’s first publicly exhibited work. Classical in its composition, seen with today’s eyes it is pointillism in black and white. The portrait was shown in the ultra-establishmentarian Salon in 1883, which is ironic considering that after Seurat’s death, the Louvre refused to accept a gift of hundreds of works offered by his family. Today, he is remembered for paintings of monumental scale, such as "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (1884–86; now at the Art Institute of Chicago), but as Aman-Jean wrote in a letter, "It is drawing, thoroughly understood, that put Seurat on the right path."