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| Visiting Chichen Itza 130 years after Adela Breton's first trip to Mexico! To see it as she would have seen it, imagine this building half buried, half caved in, and covered in trees and vines. |
My kid has a little community of fellow YouTube animators, and when they comment on each other's videos, the most popular comment (other than "uwu," of course), is to tell someone how "underrated" their channel is. It means that even though you as a YouTuber are but small and wee, the value of your work is vast, and if the general public had but access to it they'd tell you the same.
Adela Breton, then, is underrated.
I first learned about Breton back when I was putting together a MesoAmerica unit study for my homeschooled high schoolers, and another Hispanic Heritage study for my Girl Scout troop, in preparation for our troop trip to Mexico. All of those kids in question wearily joke about my penchant for pointing out "strong female role models" to them wherever we go, as in "Oh, look! One of the dolphin trainers is a strong female role model!" and they don't even know that when I book a field trip or class for them I literally tell the organizer that we require a female firefighter or mechanic or glassblower, etc., to lead our tour. ANYWAY, obviously, then, when I was researching Mexico, I zeroed in on any positive female representation that I could find. That's how we ended up studying Frida Kahlo, and that's how I became obsessed with Adela Breton!
Adela Breton was my favorite type of Victorian female: the wealthy spinster intellectual. She was a stay-at-home daughter who cared for her parents until they died of old age, and then found herself released onto the world around the age of fifty, unmarried, child-free, and independently wealthy.
As anyone would do if they found themselves in similar circumstances, Breton began traveling, taking years-long trips and returning to her home in England only sporadically to check in on her brother and his family and drop off her souvenirs.
It was on one of these trips that Breton first visited Mexico, and hired guides to take her to some of the many ancient sites that were then also underrated, undeveloped, and mostly unstudied. It wasn't a big deal back then to steal antiquities and make souvenirs of them, so she did a lot of that, sigh, but she also turned her prodigious art skills towards drawing and painting in watercolors the scenes she encountered, and in particular, the many murals still visible inside the buildings she visited.
These buildings were, again, mostly unimproved, mostly untended, mostly unstudied, open to the weather and time and destruction of tourists. Breton worked off and on for the rest of her life on copying these paintings as exactly as it's possible to copy something with the human hand and eye, living for months in the wilderness with her guide and friend, Pablo.
What Breton essentially did, in a time before cameras could do such work, was make snapshots of these sites and their features that show exactly what they looked like at that time. Not only can you see places like Chichen Itza overgrown and half-buried, but you can see perfect recreations of things that are long gone, most importantly these murals, most of which have since been destroyed, damaged, or just time-worn to the point that they're mere shadows of what they once were.
So here's why Breton is mainly forgotten instead of lauded as a hero for saving these works for posterity: 1) she was female, so while her fellow archaeologists liked her work, they didn't appreciate it, didn't credit it, and didn't study it beyond her lifetime. 2) she was unaffiliated with a university or research organization, so approached all these sites and all professional encounters as an independent outsider. And 3) she lacked a staff or team that could have shared out the work that didn't require her professional touch, as well as keep her organized and purpose-driven. On her own, Breton did what interested her, but then got distracted with the requests of other researchers and archaeologists and wasted a ton of her precious time just copying out crap for them instead of further developing her own research.
None of that really explains or forgives why she isn't posthumously appreciated more for her achievements. Breton left most of her artifacts and all of her art to Bristol Museum, which does not even have it on permanent display. The only record of most of a genre of historical Mexican art, and they don't even display it. Researchers barely use it or reference it. I'm planning a trip to England at some point in 2023, hopefully, and even if I go to this museum where all of her art lives, I can't even see it!
One of the very few books on the subject is Adela Breton: A Victorian Artist Amid Mexico's Ruins, which I read over winter break. It's good, but even the author admits that she couldn't access much of the Breton materials from the Bristol Museum, so imagine all the wonderful research and writing that there is to do!