Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4
Who was Catherwood? The name is uncommon enough, yet anyone who has been interested in the history of those strange and haunting Mayas who reared stone cities in the jungles and plains south of Mexico will recognize it instantly: Frederick Catherwood, companion of John Lloyd Stephens and illustrator of his books, the first revelation of the Mayan wonders to the modern world. But Catherwood was much else besides: a pioneer in the archaeology of the Middle East; the friend of Keats and Shelley; an architect who raised many mansions and monuments in London, New York, and San Francisco; a surveyor who built the first South American railway. Author, traveler, artist, engineer—he was many things, and all in vain.
None of his well-placed friends ever wrote a description of him, none of his artist-companions sketched him, and though he was the first to use the daguerreotype to photograph Maya ruins, lie never sat for his own sell-portrait. He remains a shadowy and unrealized figure. When he finally gave up his unequal struggle with destiny—lost in a disaster at sea—he sank not only out of his contemporaries’ sight but almost out of human memory. Until recently the libraries of the world merely wrote his name, in their catalogues, as: “F. Catherwood (?),” as though his very excistence had been doubtful. He appeared, it hardly need be said, in no biographical dictionary. To unearth the most rudimentary facts about Catherwood has been itself a problem in archaeology—of “restoring” him from the broken and scattered potsherds of his life.
Catherwood began well enough. His eyes opened in London’s Hoxion Parish, during that late Georgian period of candlelight, powdered periwigs, and rhymed couplets. The Catherwood family was neither wellplaced nor misplaced; they were gentry, with a touch of (he literary and certainly some wealth, since the house where Frederick Catherwood was born on February ay, 1799, that still stands in Charles Square, Hoxton, is a graceful building, with architectural echoes of affluence and good taste.
Hoxton was not then, as it was later to become, the “queen of un loveliness.” It still had an air about it. Shakespeare had acted there at the theater called The Curtain; lien Jonson fought his duel with Gabriel Spender there; Keats lived close by; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin lived on Essex Street, and she was known to Catherwood even before she joined Shelley on the Continent. As he made his daily way to the local grammar school, he walked past the Balmes House (hence “balmy”) where Mary Lamb had been confined alter she had killed her mother with a carving knife.
Catherwood grew up with Joseph Severn, who was later to be Keats’ good friend, and he and Severn studied together at the Royal Academy. Catherwood learned architecture under Sir John Soane; in 1820 he exhibited at the Royal Academy, and the next year —on September 15—he went to Italy, in response to a pleading letter