Frederick Catherwood
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Frederick Catherwood (February 27, 1799 – September 20, 1854) was an English artist and architect, best remembered for his explorations of ruins of the Maya civilization. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is attributing the Maya ruins to the native people of the area. The majority of visitors, scholars, and artists to the ruins of the great civilizations of the Americas could not believe that the "savages" now inhabiting these areas could ever have been civilized enough to produce these monuments. These explorers said that the monuments in the Americas had been created by the Egyptians, Carthaginians, or the Phoenecians. Catherwood, having made many trips to the Mediterranean to draw the monuments made by the Egyptians, Carthaginians, and Phoenecians, stated that the monuments in the Americas bear no architectural similarity to those in the Old World. Thus, they must have been made by the native people of the area.
Catherwood made visits to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine and with Joseph Bonomi the Younger made drawings and watercolors of the ancient remains there. He developed a sizeable reputation as a topgraphical artist, and perfected a drawing technique which used the camera lucida.
In 1836 he met travel writer John Lloyd Stephens in London. They read the account of the ruins of Copán published by Juan Galindo, and decided to try to visit Central America themselves and produce a more detailed and better illustrated account. The expedition came together in 1839 and continued through the following year, visiting and documenting dozens of ruins, many for the first time. Stephens and Catherwood are credited for the "rediscovery" of the Maya civilization, and through their publications brought the Maya back into the minds of the Western World.
The expedition resulted in the book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, published in 1841, with text by Stephens and engravings based on the drawings of Catherwood.
Stephens and Catherwood returned to Yucatan to make further explorations, resulting in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan in 1843.
The following year Catherwood published Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, with 25 color lithographs from watercolors he made at various ruins.
A large number of his original drawings and paintings were destroyed when the building where he was exhibiting them in New York City caught fire, but a number survive in museums and private collections, often showing more detail than the published engravings.
With the California Gold Rush Catherwood moved to San Francisco, California to open up a store to supply miners and prospectors, which he considered a more likely way to make money than chasing after the gold himself.
In 1854, Frederick Catherwood was a passenger aboard the steamship Arctic, making a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from London to New York. On September 20, in conditions of poor visibility, the Arctic collided with another vessel, and sank with much loss of life, including Catherwood. He was 55 years old.
