Sketch Book for the Artist

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
described in 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 x 91 / 4 in (277 x 234 mm)
JOHN WHITE

H

UMANS 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. We have drawn them in

manuscripts to explain our genesis and to count 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.

When lost to explain our own emotions, we turn and take the features of beasts.

In 19th-century Europe this became a "science." Paranoid newcomers crammed 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

cartoon relations. Over 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 moment of discovery, and to bring home drawn

documentaries of their finds. Here (left) we see John White's exquisite record of a flying

fish, which very likely leaped onto 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, museum-mounted skeletons of birds.