‘Painter In a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America’ by Miles Harvey
July 2, 2008
Glimpsed in history’s rearview mirror, events seem to follow one upon the other with fluid inevitability. Thus, the 516-year arc from Columbus’ first wondering footfall on the shore of the New World to this morning’s traffic jam on the 405 appears seamless and foreordained.
Those who find the view from that vantage point unconvincing also will find much to admire in Miles Harvey’s engaging new book, “Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America” — not least its illuminating portrait of just how halting, helter-skelter and contingent a process the early exploration of the New World really was. Eight years ago, Harvey published a well-received exploration of the intersection of graphic representation and history, “The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime.” In this new work, his subject is the artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a mysterious figure whose astonishingly adventurous life included service with a disastrous attempt to plant a colony of French Huguenots on the Florida coast, near what’s now Jacksonville.
Through the mists of time
Harvey has set himself quite a challenge, because while Le Moyne’s significance is clear, much that’s important about him is unknown and unknowable. He left no self-portrait, for example, so it’s impossible to conjure a mental image of the approximately 30-year-old artist who set out with 300 
other, mainly Protestant French soldiers and sailors from the Norman port of Le Havre on April 22, 1564. One of the strengths of this account is that, while the author does not hesitate to speculate about key elements in Le Moyne’s life, he’s modest about what he asserts based on that conjecture and he’s clear regarding the evidence on which he relies.
It’s apparent, for example, that the artist was formally trained, and he appears to have had royal connections, possibly gained through a relative who was chief embroiderer to Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned alongside the short-lived Charles IX of France. The younger Le Moyne may have supplied his relative — and, therefore, the queen — with accurate floral patterns for embroidery. While Le Moyne’s relations were Catholic, he was a Calvinist, and his family may have wanted him out of the country following the first of the religious wars that would culminate in the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.