About Frederick Catherwood
Frederick Catherwood was an English artist, architect and explorer, best remembered for his meticulously detailed drawings of the ruins of the Maya civilization. He explored Mesoamerica in the mid 19th century with writer John Lloyd Stephens. Their books, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, were best sellers and introduced to the Western world the civilization of the ancient Maya. In 1837, Catherwood was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary member. During a six-week period in 1833, Catherwood was probably the first Westerner to make a detailed survey of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Even though Catherwood was not the first Westerner to explore some of the Maya cities, he was the first to accurately illustrate what he saw, unlike his predecessors, such as the Frenchman Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, whose imagination sometimes ran wild.
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