Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico (review)

Jean-Frédéric Waldeck (1766-1875) is a familiar name to those interested in traveler-artists, the depiction of American antiquities, and things Mexican. One of the earliest artists to observe the Mayan ruins firsthand, he lived and worked on site in Mexico from approximately 1825 to 1835 and published his Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la Province d'Yucatan (Amerique Centrale) pendant les années 1834-1836 in 1838, at the age of 73. These circumstances would presumably bestow authority on his images. Yet, until recently, if his work was discussed at all in the scholarly literature, it was to debate the inaccurate and even visionary nature of his renderings. Lacking a monograph, enthusiasts had to defend him with reference to a few frequently reproduced images or visit the primary repositories of his work at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. All that changed when Claude Bauze's book, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, peintre, le premier explorateur des ruines maya (1993), appeared to out the mysteries of this highly eccentric individual with a carefully researched biography. Building on this work, Esther Pasztory then produced her fine study, closely interrogating Waldeck's pictorial oeuvre, ranging from drawings preparatory for book illustrations to salon paintings. We are now in a much better position to assess Waldeck's unique contribution to the visualization of the Mayan world.

Waldeck's origins remain murky, with his birthplace identified as Prague or Vienna. The year 1822 marks the first documented record of the man and his fixation with the pre-Columbian world. It was then that he was asked to do lithographs of a group of Antonio del Río drawings of Palenque, and the rest, as they say, is history. Within a few years he had sailed for Mexico to see the sites of Xochicalco and Teotihuacan firsthand en route to Palenque, where he set up his household among the ruins, complete with a young, native mistress and a manservant. There he was incredibly prolific, doing about 100 drawings in as many days. His masterpiece was the rendering of the Beau Relief (a cover illustration), which for him "is as beautiful as the works from the time of Augustus" (pp. 30-31). It represents a single figure seated on a double-headed throne, silhouetted against a flat background, for him the height of Mayan art. Pasztory's discussion of this drawing illuminates one of her key themes.

Travelers universally prepare for their journeys by perusing the writings of earlier travelers, frequently taking a volume along to guide their steps. Significantly, Waldeck chose to take with him to Mexico a version of Homer's Odyssey illustrated by John Flaxman, whose classicism informed his idealized renderings of the relief sculptures at Palenque with their elegant linear contours and flattened space. The "incorrectness" of the Beau Relief drawing, as Pasztory convincingly argues, should not be taken as such; rather Waldeck "simply makes it more beautiful to restore it to its original glory," and in so doing "pays homage to the original" (p. 31). Mindful that his European audiences would likely reject these works as curiosities, Waldeck cast the unfamiliar American sculptures in terms of familiar, classicizing form.

Waldeck's other distinction was his conviction that ancient cultures and modern peoples were in communication. When confronted with these magnificent lost cities, many including the artist's patron Lord Kingsborough postulated elaborate theories to account for some the supposedly lost peoples who had constructed them. Waldeck was unusual in his conviction that the natives who inhabited the sites in the nineteenth century were continuous with the original builders. He frequently inserted contemporary residents into his scenes of the ruins to emphasize this continuity. Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, whose work is now accessible in this beautifully illustrated volume, "was the only one in his time to create art, rather than scientific documentation, out of...