This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt: ...image of each drawing was thus printed off on the opposite page. These "off-sets" were bound up in a separate volume and were also acquired by the Museum. In spite of this printing-off, the original drawings have suffered so little that no one would suspect any damage having happened to them, except in one or two cases where a sheet was folded and the design a little confused by the faint reduplication of figures or objects in reverse. These precious drawings, which for three hundred years had lain unnoticed and unknown, are the handiwork of White. Although the originals had been lost sight of for so long, some of them were familiar enough to students of geographical discovery through the engravings made from them (with certain modifications) for the great work on America published in 1590 at Frankfurt-am-Main by Theodore de Bry. Artists of English birth were rare enough in the sixteenth century; so at least we are led to believe. Yet these drawings, by a man who was not a painter by profession, point to a skill and training, still more to a sensitiveness of eye and hand, which astonish one, and make us inclined to suspect that the accomplishment of draughtsmanship was more common in England than we are accustomed to suppose. They are all in water-colors. There is a prevailing, but quite erroneous, notion that water-color painting originated in England with the timid "stained" drawings of the eighteenth century, gradually transformed and enriched by Turner and his compeers in the early nineteenth century. A fairly full range of' color in this medium had been used long before on the Continent, and was used by White in these examples. These are among the earliest English drawings known--not counting of course the miniatures in illuminated ...