Frederick Catherwood, February 27, 1799–September 27, 1854, was an English artist, architect and explorer born in Hoxton, London. He trained with the architect Michael Meredith and attended classes at the Royal Academy, where he encountered the teaching of John Soane. He subsequently studied ancient architecture in Italy, Greece and Egypt and worked with Joseph Bonomi.

Catherwood traveled through Central America and Yucatan with the American writer John Lloyd Stephens in 1839–1840 and 1841–1842. His drawings of Maya architecture and sculpture supplied illustrations for Stephens’s travel books, published in 1841 and 1843. In 1844 he published Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, a folio of 25 lithographs based on his drawings.

In his later years Catherwood worked on railway projects in British Guiana, Panama and California. He died in the sinking of the steamship Arctic off Newfoundland in 1854. His surviving drawings are held by the Brooklyn Museum, Yale Center for British Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art; his published images remain records of Maya monuments before subsequent deterioration and restoration.