James M. Sommerville and Christian Schussele

Ocean Life, 19th century. James M. Sommerville and Christian Schussele. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and gum arabic on off-white wove paper. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf, in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 1977.
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.