I said perhaps he would like to go alone—She seem’d very much to approve of the account I gave of him—of his abilities and of his family—and said she would take any one of my recommending because I understood her views—Last night I had to make another visit to her—and thought it best to make a Duetta with Mr C—The proposition was made to him by Lady Westmorland & he was much pleased with the idea—I have persuaded him not (to) for these reasons—that it will be infinitely better to remain in Rome and study Architecture such as he has prepared for—on the other hand he thinks this a most favorable opportunity and perhaps the only one of going to Egypt. . . .
But the next day the countess showed up at Severn’s studio to say she had postponed the trip until the following season for a “lack of servants” and that both men must accompany her then. Severn agreed. In his letter to Maria, he added:
Mr Catherwood begs you to show my letter at Charles Square—and prays them to excuse him writing this Post—his head is so full of Rome and Sleep and he is so tired—that he humbly hopes to be permitted to go to bed—He desires me to present his love and remembrance to all that is dear to him—his Home—He says he can never stay here more than a year without seeing them.
Three months later Severn reported that Catherwood was living with Lady Westmorland in her “palace.”
The countess was the second wife of John Fane, the tenth earl of Westmorland, who had been a member of King George’s Privy Council and was an immensely wealthy and powerful man. She had borne the earl three children, but by the time she was living in Rome, she and Fane had separated. When Catherwood arrived she was forty-one, imperious, witty, an engaging conversationalist, and nearly twenty years his senior. One account of this episode in Catherwood’s life claimed the countess had taken the young, impressionable Catherwood—who in going from Charles Square to Villa Negroni must have been in a state of shock—as her lover.10 But that is not at all clear from Severn’s account. In fact, as he explained to his sister:
She is a little fearful of her servants and wanted me to take up my residence there to keep these Italians in order. I was to live with her on my own terms—but I did not like it—I am so deeply fixed in my Studies that I think of nothing else—Nor will I—So I asked Catherwood—he liked it much—and I proposed him with success—so now he has packed up his all and is Lord and Master.
How long Catherwood spent as “lord and master” of Villa Negroni is not clear. He and Severn never went to Egypt with Lady Westmorland. In February 1822 Catherwood and architect John Davies won permission from Italian authorities to erect scaffolding to more closely study four temples in recently excavated areas of Rome.11 And while the date of his departure from the countess’s household is not known, he spent considerable time during the next two years traveling through Italy and Sicily in pursuit of his architectural studies.12
Some of the mystery surrounding Catherwood derives from the extremely thin record left of his early travels as well as his time in England before he landed in New York more than a decade later. Little of his correspondence has been found, but a few pieces of his art from this period have survived, including a painting he made in Sicily in the early 1820s of Greek ruins near the town of Taormina—with snowcapped Mount Etna looming in the background.13
He may have traveled next to Athens, where a propensity for landing in the middle of revolutions, inadvertent or otherwise, first began to show itself. The Greeks were embroiled in a war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, and Catherwood found himself trapped in the city. He described the situation later to Stephens. As Stephens recounted it: “Mr. Catherwood, who had been shut up in Athens during the Greek Revolution, when it was besieged by the Turks, and in pursuing his artistical studies, had perforce made castings [of monuments] with his own hands. . . .” There is no record, however, of exactly when he visited Greece. The Greek revolution started in 1821 and went on for seven years, which means Catherwood could have visited Athens before or after he traveled to Egypt.
Catherwood needed no prompting from Lady Westmorland to make the trip across the Mediterranean to Egypt. In the 1820s a kind of Egyptomania had seized England, in part inspired by the publication of Description de l’Égypte, the massive work put together by the French scholars who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in 1798. And in May 1821, while Catherwood was still in London preparing to go to Rome, a major exhibition of Egyptian artifacts opened in Piccadilly. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a onetime circus strongman turned treasure hunter, mounted the exhibit in the Egyptian Hall shortly after publication of his popular book about his adventures on the Nile. More than nineteen hundred people crowded into the hall the first day of the showing.14
As important, Egypt had achieved a degree of political stability under the rule of Pasha Muhammad Ali, an Albanian put in power by the Ottoman Turks in 1809. Ali was a ruthless but sophisticated leader who was intent on modernizing Egypt and welcomed any Europeans and Westerners he thought might help. British technicians arrived, followed by aristocrats and artists, many of whom wanted to sail up the Nile to see for themselves the temples and pyramids they had heard so much about.
Catherwood reached Egypt in late autumn of 1823. It was to be a major turning point in his life. Until his arrival at Alexandria, the twenty-four-year-old had focused on Roman, Greek, and Italian architecture, intent on using what he absorbed to begin an architectural practice when he returned to England. Egypt instead opened in him a new path, a parallel life, as if he had tripped into a dimension where history, much more than what he had learned in school, was wider, deeper, and extended much further into the past. And it was as though he had landed on another planet: bone-dry, trackless deserts as far as the eye could see, nothing like the cool green of England. Monuments, pyramids, temples on an unimaginable scale. Art and architecture utterly new and exotic. Built by whom, for what reason, and how many thousands of years ago? Along with other Englishmen drawn to the country, he immersed himself in the Greek and Roman historians who had pieced together ancient Egypt’s 2,500-year history—the “Old Kingdom,” “Middle Kingdom,” and Ptolemaic Dynasty left by Alexander the Great. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that would take Catherwood in the end to Copán and Palenque.
It began routinely. He disembarked in Alexandria with two friends he had known from Rome and possibly as far back as London—architects Henry Parke and Joseph John Scoles. The three architects, as they had done in Italy, began their survey of Egypt with a series of sketches, starting with the catacombs of Alexandria. Some of their drawings were later published in the Dictionary of Architecture.15 Then they made their way to Cairo and sailed up the Nile “delineating every object worthy of attention from the delta to the second cataract.”16 They arrived finally in Nubia in southern Egypt, at the temple of Abu Simbel, in mid-January 1824. Several of Catherwood’s drawings of the temples from this period have survived.
Then they fell victim to bad timing. As in Greece and later in Central America and Mexico, for Catherwood—and other adventurers of his era—humans offered as much an obstacle to exploration as the dangers of deserts, jungles, and disease. Behind them as they sailed up the Nile, local farmers and peasants had staged a rebellion against the harsh rule of the pasha. The travelers were trapped on the upper Nile. For more than a month bloody fighting raged along the shores of the river between fellahin insurgents and the pasha’s soldiers. Villages around ancient Thebes and Luxor were burned to the ground and thousands were killed.17 The battles posed a mortal threat to anyone on the river and rumors soon spread that a group of Englishmen—Catherwood and his companions—had been slaughtered in the uprising. They had managed, however, to stay just beyond the conflict zone. By mid-April, they finally risked sailing back down the Nile, its banks piled with the dead, and sought refuge at the town of Ghenny, today known as Qena. Another Englishman, John Madox, also caught up in the revolt, arrived on April 26 at Qena, where he found Catherwood.18 “We were all delighted at meeting,” he wrote, “and congratulated eac
h other at our fortunate escape.”19
The Nile River and pyramids. (Catherwood)
The pasha’s soldiers—1,500 Turkish cavalry from the south and four thousand “troops of the line” from the north led by French mercenary officers—moved in and crushed the rebellion. The travelers finally came under the protection of the pasha’s men. A short time later, they were free to continue down the Nile to Cairo. Then a major outbreak of plague delayed their journey for another several weeks. They took the opportunity to explore the ruins around Qena, including nearby tombs filled with mummies, and by midsummer were grateful to be in Cairo again despite mounting deaths in the city from the plague.20 They quickly set to work exploring and drawing the nearby pyramids of Giza.
Months later Catherwood arrived at the tiny island of Malta, in the middle of the Mediterranean off the coast of Sicily. There in early October he met a wealthy Scotsman named Robert Hay.21 The same age as Catherwood, at twenty-five, Hay was a former naval officer and the heir to an immense estate in Scotland following the death of his two older brothers—one of them killed at Waterloo. He was on his way to Egypt. Catherwood’s extensive portfolio of paintings and sketches of the ruins along the Nile impressed Hay, who was himself an accomplished draftsman and artist.22 The young aristocrat would eventually hire Catherwood, and they would reunite later in Egypt. But for the moment Catherwood was winding his way back to England. There is no record of the next year of his life and he may have traveled to Greece, if he had not already done so. The following year, however, he was apparently once again in Rome. In a December 1825 letter to his sister in London, Joseph Severn asked: “Mr. Catherwood arrived? He will tell you all the particulars about me, that you can want.”23
Then, for the next six years, Catherwood all but disappeared. As his biographer Victor Wolfgang von Hagen wrote: “It was as if some spiteful poltergeist had followed in Catherwood’s wake, destroying every page of his life’s testimony.”24 The difficulty in tracing him during these years is due certainly to a lack of correspondence or other written documents. Stephens, who at the time was hard at work at the law in New York (with a similarly barren paper trail), clearly leaves the impression of Catherwood as a man of few words. Perhaps he chose art as his prime means of expression, though he left scant evidence of that behind as well. Regardless of the reason, records of his life between 1825 and 1831 have all but vanished. Presumably he moved back into the family home at 21 Charles Square, where he would continue to live on and off for the rest of his life. His aunt Elizabeth, who lived next door, died in 1827, and two years later, in what must have been a greater blow, his father died at the age of seventy-seven.
We know from a brief profile of Catherwood written by one of his Egyptian traveling partners, Joseph J. Scoles, that he was a practicing architect in London during this time, though apparently without much distinction or success. “Designed a glass house building near Westminster Bridge and some house at Pentonville” was all that Scoles could recall, writing years after Catherwood’s death.25 In fact, in 1826 Catherwood had sent a note of caution to Scoles, who was then passing through Rome on his way back to England. Dated May 2, it is his earliest surviving letter, and it indicates the difficult time he must have had practicing architecture in England. For along with many contemporaries such as Scoles, Catherwood had apparently miscalculated by pursuing classical studies in Rome and Athens. “Poynter is building a St. Catherine’s hospital in Regent’s Park,” he wrote, referring to a mutual friend. “It is in the Gothic style, which is indeed the prevailing taste of the time. Our Grecian and Egyptian lore is worse than useless and Gothic must be studied malgre soi [in spite of oneself]. The very best advice I can give you, and I do it seriously and sincerely, is to devote the rest of the time you have to remain abroad to the study of Gothic architecture. Had I known what I know now my time would have been differently spent, and I should advise you by all means to return through Germany.”26
Meanwhile, Catherwood never gave up on his art. He exhibited once again at the Royal Academy in 1828 and 1831, this time from his Egyptian portfolio.27 And after his working experience in England, the practice of architecture would never be more than an interruption in his life, a way to make money before leaving on the next adventure. This interlude in England would be his longest. He was unable to shake his fascination with antiquity, and in late 1831 he left England, landing several months later in Tunisia. There he sought out the remains of ancient Carthage, which had been founded between 800 and 700 B.C. by the Phoenicians on a site close to the modern-day city of Tunis.
In May 1832, traveling two days southwest of Tunis he discovered an extraordinary edifice in a place called Dugga.28 For him it was an important enough discovery that he wrote an article about it a decade later for the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society.29 “It presents a type of architecture totally different from all the others in the country,” he explained, “and is of much greater simplicity and elegance of form.” He described it in detail. “That which most forcibly struck me as an architect was the beauty and harmony of proportion . . . and the singular architectural anomaly, namely a blending of Greek and Egyptian art.” He included drawings, a floor plan, and a copy of two inscriptions carved onto the façade.30 It is clear from his article that, like Stephens, who would make his journey to Petra three years later, Catherwood in Dugga felt an intoxicating rush of discovery, the addictive sensation both men would come to know repeatedly in Central America and Mexico.31
He surfaced next in Egypt—probably his destination all along—where he joined up with Robert Hay. Since their meeting in Malta in 1824, Hay had continued on to Egypt, where he launched an ambitious project to map and record all of the major temples and monuments up and down the Nile. He intended to pick up where Napoleon’s savants had left off, and since the departure of the French, further discoveries had been made and more ruins excavated. Over the next seven years, with only a break in 1828 to manage his affairs in Scotland, Hay expended a good part of his fortune funding a team of artists and experts on the project. Arriving in Cairo, Catherwood lost little time fitting in. Hay put him to work mapping the pyramids of Giza, then the west bank of Thebes, Tell el-Amarna, and other sites. He was employed also in creating 360-degree panoramic views of Cairo and Thebes, and drawings of the so-called colossi of Memmon at Thebes, several of which are among the few Catherwood Egyptian drawings to have survived.32 Then when Hay proposed a risky journey from the Nile River valley out to the great oases in Egypt’s western desert, Catherwood did not hesitate.
Only Hay, Catherwood, and a third artist-traveler, George Alexander Hoskins, were to make the long trek. Hay, whose wife now lived with him in Egypt, made his home and headquarters within a large tomb at Thebes, and on Thursday nights he routinely invited Catherwood, Hoskins, and other artists and foreign travelers who might be in the neighborhood to join him in food, drink, and conversation. Hoskins caught the mood of this band of Egyptian travelers:
Never was the habitation of death witness to gayer scenes. Though we wore the costume, we did not always preserve the gravity of Turks; and the saloon, although formerly a sepulchre, threw no gloom over our mirth. The still remaining beautiful fragments of the painted roof were illuminated by the blaze of wax-lights; and the odour of the mummies had long before been dispelled by the more congenial perfume of savoury viands. Notwithstanding the great civilisation of the ancient Egyptians, I question whether their divans were more comfortable, their tobacco (or their substitute for it, for of tobacco they could have had none) better, or their fare more relished, than that of my friend Mr. Hay. We were all fond of the arts, and had proved our devotion to antiquarian pursuits by sacrificing for a time Europe and its enjoyments, to prosecute our researches in this distant land. Our conversation therefore never flagged; and assuredly I reckon, not among the least happy hours of my life, the evenings I spent in the tomb at Thebes.33
Temple of Thebes. (Catherwood)
They left Thebes on October 13,
1832, riding camels, and heavily armed. There were eighteen in the expedition, including a guide, a dragoman or translator, servants, and an escort of armed camel drivers. Hoskins carried pistols and a saber. Catherwood had already achieved some celebrity because of a seven-barrel pistol he carried. It was, Hoskins wrote, “considered by the Arabs that saw it, as a most formidable weapon; and the fame of it was widely spread in the Valley of the Nile.” They traveled west for days through a vast expanse of desert that Hoskins described as “waterless, barren, trackless, dreary, waste.” As the caravan passed over immense drifts of sand they found innumerable bleached bones of dead camels that seemed the only mark of a trail. Under a burning sun, water supplies began to run dangerously low, then finally on the fourth day they crossed a ridge and saw the date palms of the Great Oasis in the distance.
Every countenance was animated with joy, in which even our camels seemed to participate, by quickening their pace. We were all glad that our present fatigues were over; but the delight of the camel-men and of our servants was especially great, as they had been on short allowance of bad water for nearly five days.
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