The Artist Carried in a Sillero over the Chiapas from Palenque to Ocosingo, Mexico,

ca. 1833

Waldeck was one of the first independent European adventurers to explore Mexico and the art and culture of the Maya peoples and their descendants. In the 1830s he traveled to Chiapas to make paintings and record information about archaeological sites such as Palenque, providing early records of the ruins. This extraordinarily long-lived artist, historian, and ethnographer—who claimed to be 109 at the time of his death—painted himself being transported over steep mountains by a herculean Indian carrying him on his back in a sillero. Used in the Andes Mountains by Spanish colonial travelers, this light chair spared Europeans the rigors of travel and exploited the physical stamina of the indigenous people. Waldeck’s paintings and drawings of Maya sculpture and monuments were published in 1838 as printed illustrations in a book on his travels. Despite his errors of interpretation, they provided information about important sites and people in a remote area, and they remain informative about the state of the region as he found it.