11 Facts About Frederick Catherwood

Frederick Catherwood explored Mesoamerica in the mid 19th century with writer John Lloyd Stephens.

In 1837, Catherwood was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary member.

Frederick Catherwood, having made many trips to the Mediterranean between 1824 and 1832 to draw the monuments made by the Egyptians, Carthaginians, and Phoenicians, stated that the monuments in the Americas bear no architectural similarity to those in the Old World.

Frederick Catherwood made visits to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine and with Joseph Bonomi the Younger made drawings and watercolors of the ancient remains there.

Frederick Catherwood perfected a drawing technique which used the camera lucida and supplied the drawings for the panoramas of Jerusalem and Thebes shown by Robert Burford in Leicester Square.

Stephens and Frederick Catherwood returned to Yucatan to make further explorations, resulting in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan in 1843.

In 1854, Frederick Catherwood was a passenger aboard the steamship Arctic, making a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Liverpool to New York.

Mysteriously Frederick Catherwood's name was left off the official casualty lists for weeks until a concerted effort by his friends and colleagues resulted in a belated inclusion of a single line in the New York Herald Tribune, under the listing of "The Saved and the Lost: Mr Frederick Catherwood Also is Missing".

Traditionally, it is thought that the only portrait of Frederick Catherwood is in the famous Table XXIV of Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, with a view of the temple of Tulum.

Frederick Catherwood, in fact, was a pragmatic man, used to documenting the reality with his pencil.

Frederick Catherwood presumably had no interest in representing himself, indeed he never painted his self-portrait.