Ocean Life

James M. Sommerville

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Schussele, the first professor in drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was chiefly a genre, history painter and portrait painter, yet his subject matter occasionally reflected Philadelphia’s scientific tradition, as in this watercolor. One of the earliest American submarine illustrations, this picture was executed expressly for lithographic reproduction in a pamphlet of the same title published in Philadelphia in 1859. James M. Sommerville (1825 - 1899), a physician, amateur naturalist, member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, as well as an artist and a trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy, was probably the designer of the watercolor. He collected the specimens, wrote the text of the pamphlet and lithographed the image.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art