Jean Frédéric Maximilien Count de Waldeck (even if his noble origins have never been verified) was born in 1766 and died in 1875, at the incredible age of 109. During his picaresque existence he traveled from Egypt to Guatemala, from South Africa to Mexico. He claimed to have studied art in Paris under the famous painter Jacques Louis David. His first contact with the ancient Maya occurred in 1822, when he was hired by Lord Kingsborough to make lithographic copies of Captain Antonio del Rio’s illustrations of Palenque.
A talented artist and enthusiastic explorer of the ruins of Mexico, Waldeck is best known for creating depictions of Maya ruins with touches of European neo-classic style and “orientalism” to make them fit better with Kingborough's idea that the ancient Maya were one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Waldeck in Mexico
In 1825, thrilled by the idea of visiting ancient Mesoamerican ruins, Waldeck was hired by an English mining company in Mexico, and it was then that he had the opportunity to see many Aztec and Toltec ruins.
With permission and a grant from the President of Mexico, Anastasio Bustamante, and a pension from the French government, in 1832 Waldeck left for Palenque, curious to see with his own eyes the places depicted by Antonio del Rio. He was by then convinced that the Palenque architecture and stone carvings were Egyptian and he spent several years studying the ruins of Palenque and making drawings of the buildings and reliefs. Waldeck created images of the reliefs, enhancing them with a European neo-classic flavor. In one case he added an improbable elephant head, which made Alfred P. Maudslay indignant several decades after.
1n 1834 Waldeck moved to Yucatan and visited the Maya site of Uxmal. He was convinced that here he would find more evidence of the Egyptian origins of the Maya culture. He made several illustration of the site, especially of the Pyramid of the Magician, which he made look like an Egyptian pyramid.
In 1838 Waldeck published his first book Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la province d'Yucatan pendant les années 1834 et 1836, a volume collecting his images of many Maya ruins in the Yucatan province, including Uxmal. This book was supposed to provide further evidence on the connections of the ancient Maya and the ancient Egyptians.
In 1866 Waldeck's drawings of Palenque were published as elegant lithographs in the volume Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilisation du Mexique) composed by the Abbot Brasseur de Bourbourg. These drawings recall a classic style, typical of contemporary illustrations of Greek and Roman ruins, and included the famous elephant head that he had added as an embellishment to a panel from the Temple of the Inscriptions.
Although Waldeck's drawings of Maya art are unreliable as a first-hand, objective image of how the ancient ruins of Palenque and Uxmal looked like at that time, his artistic reconstructions have been revalued as glimpses into the 18th and 19th European imagining of pre-columbian world and, most of all, as one of the first attempts to deal with a completely “other” and different past.
One of the most famous temples of Palenque, the Temple of the Count, is named after him.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to Archaeologist Biographies , and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Brunhouse, Robert L., 1973: In Search of the Maya: The First Archaeologists. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque
Griffin, Gillet G., 1974, Early Travelers to Palenque, in Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque. Part I. A Conference on the Art, Iconography and Dynastic History of Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, pp. 9-34.
Pasztory, Esther, 2011, Jean Frédéeric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico, University of New Mexico Press