There have been two previous editions of John White's artwork published over the span of the last several decades. In 1964 Paul Hulton and the eminent historian of Ralegh's Roanoke ventures, David Beers Quinn, assembled a two-volume collection entitled The American Drawings of John White. Only 600 copies were published. Twenty years later, Hulton assembled an additional volume, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. The current volume, A New World: England's First View of America, was edited and assembled by Kim Sloan, the curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum. Sloan and her colleagues intended this book to serve both as a catalog to accompany the British Museum's wonderful 2007 exhibition of White's work and as a history of Ralegh's Roanoke ventures. This beautifully illustrated book is, indeed, an immensely valuable addition to the literature on European expansion and adds much to our knowledge of White and the world in which he worked.

John White traveled to North America on perhaps as many as five expeditions between 1577 and 1590. Most important for our purposes, in 1585 he sailed with the expedition Sir Walter Ralegh sent to Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina. He probably did not remain at Roanoke for the entire life of the colony, and it is likely that he returned home with Sir Richard Grenville late in the summer of 1585, several months after he arrived on the Carolina Sounds. Two years later, White would return to Roanoke. In 1587, Ralegh appointed him governor of the planned “Cittie of Ralegh.” White led a group of colonists across the Atlantic, but he returned home within a short time to seek additional supplies. He was not able to return until 1590. By that time the settlers he led had disappeared, becoming the famous “Lost Colonists” of American myth and memory. Among them was Virginia Dare, White's granddaughter and the first English child born on American shores.

White, as students of early English expansion understand, was not merely the leader of a star-crossed colony. While on the Outer Banks in 1585, White visited a number of Algonquian villages, depicting in his artwork the peoples of the region, their villages, and important elements of their culture. (Other paintings, perhaps, may have been lost when the colonists hurriedly abandoned the island in 1586, but we cannot be sure.) White also painted pictures of fish, birds, and plants that colonists might find of use as they began the difficult work of planting an English outpost on American shores. His paintings, in many ways, have become the archetypal images of Native Americans at the time of their first contact with Europeans. Some students of White's work have described them as propaganda, designed to arouse interest in Sir Walter's plans for colonization by depicting peaceful and simple natives. Others have seen in White's depictions of Algonquian culture the interests of a proto-anthropologist, a man capable of producing remarkably unbiased images of native peoples. Both views are discussed in A New World. However one feels about White's work, and whatever one believes the agenda of the artist to have been, there is, of course, no doubting his significance, and Sloan and her colleagues are to be commended for assembling a splendid volume.

Previous editions of White's work have placed the paintings in an order that made sense chronologically based on what we know about the history of the 1585 colony—in other words, the paintings were reprinted in an order that reflected when White would have witnessed the subjects that he painted. Sloan and her colleagues at the British Museum, however, have attempted to reconstruct the original album in which White's work was arranged. As a result, Sloan asserts, the catalog “presents us with a very Elizabethan view of the world, as the sequence follows that of most cosmographies and travel accounts published at the time” (95). Readers of The New World will find the reproduction of White's work in this volume to be of extraordinarily high quality, and readers familiar with earlier editions will find the plates here clearer and the colors more vivid and true to life. (Sloan and her colleagues do describe how White's paintings have changed over the course of four centuries, losing some of their color as a result of a nineteenth-century fire and changes in the chemical composition of certain elements White used to mix his colors.) Sloan's discussion of the plates, well informed by recent scholarship and research across a number of disciplines on a broad range of subjects, is always useful and informative.

Sloan has assembled a collection of interesting essays that will help readers appreciate White's artwork. Sloan herself brings us up to date on what we know about White's background and his career in the “curious and gentle art of limning.” Joyce Chaplin explores White's motivations and the importance of his work in the promotional effort designed to support English overseas enterprise. Christian Feest looks at White's work in the context of early European ethnographic representation, and Ute Kuhlemann examines the partnership between White and the Flemish engraver Theodor De Bry, who both publicized White's work and altered it as he presented it to European readers. Readers, no doubt, will find things to object to and disagree with in each of these essays, but they will also find themselves thoroughly versed in the scholarly debates surrounding the meaning of White's work. For that, and for the beautiful reproductions, this book should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Native Americans, early European expansion into the Atlantic World, and Elizabethan art.