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Animals
JOHN WHITE
British artist, cartographer,
and pioneer born c. 1540.
On the Roanoke voyages
of Sir Walter Raleigh, White's
commission was to "...drawe
to lief one of each kinde of
thing that is strange to us in
England." He worked with the
scientist Thomas Harriot, who
describedin words what
White drew. Together they
made maps and documented
animals, insects, plants, and
people. This drawing is made
in black lead (metal point)
with watercolor Highlights
of silver would have gleamed,
out are now oxidized and
so appear black
Flying Fish
c. 1590
11 x91/4in (277 x 234 mm)
J O H N WHITE
HUMANS HAVE DRAWN ANIMALS from the beginning of our time. After the subject of
ourselves, they are perhaps our favorite pictorial preoccupation. We have drawn
them on the walls of caves to evoke their kinship and power. W e have drawn them in
m a n u s c r i p t s to explain our genesis and to c o u n t their species into Noah's ark. In
medieval England, the Latin bestiary was one of the most popular picture books—an
illustrated dictionary of one hundred parts, each dedicated to the moralized tale of an
animal or monster The bestiary profoundly influenced the art of its period, and we still
see escapees from its pages carved and grinning as the gargoyles of churches, or
scampering through the initials and borders of pictures from that time.
W h e n lost to explain our own emotions, we turn and take the features of beasts.
In 19th-century Europe this became a "science." Paranoid newcomers c r a m m e d into
swelling industrial cities used handbooks of physiognomy to identify and judge their
neighbors. Facial features were analyzed in terms of their animal likeness, from which
personality and predicted behavior were "deduced." Animals perpetually feed our
imaginations. As children we delight in the humanized trials of Tom and Jerry and their
c a r t o o n relations. O v e r the centuries, bats, birds, fish, dogs, and snakes have
between them engendered harpies, mermaids, werewolves, and dragons.
When less preoccupied with understanding ourselves, we have employed artists
on expeditions, to be there at the m o m e n t of discovery, and to bring h o m e drawn
documentaries of their finds. Here (left) we see J o h n White's exquisite record of a flying
fish, which very likely leaped o n t o the deck of Sir Walter Raleigh's ship Tiger as it
sailed north from the Caribbean to Virginia in 1585. Europeans on board had never seen
such a thing, and this very drawing was to endure many copies and plagiarisms after its
triumphant return to the English court of Queen Elizabeth I.
For the novice artist, animals provide a perfect subject with which to begin. Framed
in the zoo or in domestic cohabitation, their different speeds and patterns of action,
which are so unlike ours, offer challenges and delights to draw. In this chapter we
discover the use of pens and ink through the delineation of insects, and learn how to
capture form and movement from the mannerisms of honking geese, sleeping dogs,
floating turtles, and silent, m u s e u m - m o u n t e d skeletons of birds.