In 1894, a man living near the famed ruins of Teotihuácan, 50 kilometers from modern Mexico City, discovered a small, pre-Hispanic house whose walls were covered with beautifully colored murals.
The place was called Teopancaxco or “la Casa de Barrios.” The paintings were the first of their kind found at Teotihuácan and visitors considered them spectacular.
Weather and time eventually did their damage to the murals and today we would have little idea of how they once looked if it were not for an extraordinary Englishwoman named Adela Catherine Breton who had fallen in love with Mexico’s ruins and who painstakingly reproduced these murals as watercolors.
Mary Frech, author of “Adela Breton, a Victorian Artist amid Mexico’s Ruins,” says the explorer made “the most comprehensive record of the murals at Teopancaxco. Her re-creation of the colours of the murals is unsurpassed compared with the few colour reproductions available, and thus constitutes an irreplaceable memorial of the now destroyed masterpieces.’”
So what was an unmarried Victorian gentlewoman doing in Mexico before the turn of the century, 5,500 miles from home?
Exploring, painting, sketching, measuring and photographing not only Mexico’s best-known archaeological sites like those at Chichen Itza, but, it seems, even obscure ruins from the extensive Teuchitlán Tradition of western Mexico. These, it is generally believed, were unheard of before the late Phil Weigand gazed upon the Guachimontones in 1969.
Proof of Breton’s keen observations in Jalisco came to light recently when the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in England published her sketches of Teuchitlán’s now famous Circular Pyramids.
“Accurate drawings of the Guachimontones done in 1896?” local archaeologist Rodrigo Esparza exclaimed when I informed him of my discovery. “That’s amazing!”
Even more amazing was the discovery, again thanks to the Bristol Museum, that Breton had taken the first known photographs of the three largest “Guaxi mounds,” as she labeled them.
So did Breton publish anything related to the Guachimontones? The answer is yes, but apparently only a few words. Here is what she says in a paper delivered at the International Congress of Americanists in 1902:
“Teuchitlán is a small town at the foot of a long spur of [Tequila] volcano ... At Teuchitlán, obsidian rejects are thickly strewn over a great extent of ground. In addition to the obsidian, it has a most interesting ancient site on the summit of the hill, and the remarkable mounds and circles called Huaerchi Monton half way up.”
While in Jalisco, Breton’s resourceful guide Pablo Solorio somehow learned that a mound housing an untouched tomb had been discovered near Etzatlán and had recently been opened. She went to the Mound of Guadalupe and gives us what is probably the first description of the unearthing of a burial site in western Mexico. “Unfortunately,” she reported, “there was no skilled supervision, no data were secured, and most of the figures were broken.”
Fortunately, the resourceful Breton was on hand and, according to James Langley, recorded that “the mound was about 40 feet high and held a burial with pots, jewelry, clay ‘portrait’ figures ranging from 12 to 20 inches tall and other artifacts.” Of course, she sketched a number of those broken figures and even photographed the Mound of Guadalupe, of which today little is left to see.
Breton was born in London in 1849. After the death of both her parents, she was “easily convinced” by Alfred Maudslay, a pioneer in archaeological techniques, to travel to Chichén Itzá in Mexico to make sketches and thus allow him to check the accuracy of his own drawings before publishing his Biologia Centrali-Americana. Thus began her curious career as an archaeological artist.
According to Matt Williams of the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution, Breton “developed into a world-renowned archaeological copyist thanks to her drawings of friezes, carved reliefs, painted plasters and other cultural treasures – some of which are now the only records that remain of items long since lost to vandalism and decay.”
Williams says Breton traveled hard and wrote, “I used to live chiefly on air and a few peanuts for the long riding journeys – 30 miles without any breakfast.”
“Adela chose not to marry,” he adds, “as it was the only thing that guaranteed a woman’s independence in those days. She wanted to be free to travel and chart her own destiny.”
According to Kate Devlin, a writer for Trowelblazers.com, Harvard anthropologist Alfred Tozzer once said, “You look at Miss Breton and set her down as a weak, frail and delicate person who goes into convulsions at the sight of the slightest unconventionality in the way of living. But I assure you, her appearance is utterly at variance with her real self.”
Breton died in 1923 at the age 73 in Barbados, leaving most of her work and collection to the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, the best of which is now on display (until May 14, 2017) in an exhibition titled “Adela Breton: Ancient Mexico in Colour.”
“It will be the first time the life-size copies have been displayed for 70 years,” says Senior Curator Sue Giles, “and they probably won’t be displayed again for another 70.”
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