Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) was an engraver, bookseller, and publisher active in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1590 de Bry published Thomas Hariot's account of the English attempt to colonize the New World, the ill-fated Roanoke Colony. De Bry engraved several plates for this work based on watercolors made by John Smith, another member of the 1585 expedition. He went on to publish an ambitious and complicated series of illustrated volumes describing exploration in North and South America, based on a number of European sources. This work, known as the Great Voyages series or de Bry's America, was issued in several editions that continued to be produced by de Bry's widow and his heirs after his death.
The engraved plates in the series represent indigenous people, plants, and animals. They offered Europeans one of the earliest and most accurate visual representations of the inhabitants and environment of the New World. The illustrations circulated widely and were frequently copied and reproduced. De Bry revised his own engravings of John Smith's Virginia subjects he had published in the 1590 Hariot account for his later editions, and he used the work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a French artist, for the Florida subjects.
<I>Offering the skin of a stag to the sun</I> illustrates part two of the Florida series. It is plate 35 from the second German edition published in 1603.