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Snakes Lost Civilizations & anAdventuresome Artist

Catherwood, Frederick. Views of ancient monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. London: Frederick Catherwood, 1844. Folio extra. 25 colored plates.
$50,000.00

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• Before Indiana Jones stirred our imagination about lost civilizations and their treasures, there were Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens, whose explorations of the Maya ruins of Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatan excited the Anglo-American world in the middle of the 19th century and helped spur the rediscovery of the Maya among the non–romance language nations. And it was Catherwood's illustrations that fixed forever what the temples and other buildings looked like to the Victorian-era and later visitors to the area.

Following the great success of Catherwood & Stephens' s two accounts of their travels in Maya land, Catherwood decided to convert his drawings to large-scale luxury prints, the illustrations in the two travel accounts having been in octavo format. In England he enlisted a crew of the best lithographers to transform his camera lucida drawings to grand, eye-filling lithographs, with George B. Moore, William Parrott, Thomas Shotter Boys, and Henry Warren among those putting the images on stone; he had no one less than Owen Jones design and accomplish the title-page, chromolithographed in red, blue, and gold.