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Christian Schussele (born 16 April 1824 – 20 August 1879) was a French-born American visual artist and teacher, and is credited with designing the American Medal of Honor. He was known for his printmaking, drawing, and portrait painting. Schussele taught painting at the Pennsylvania Academy (now Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) in Philadelphia.
Biography
Christian Schussele was born on 16 April 1824 in Guebwiller, Alsace, France.
He studied under Adolphe Yvon and Paul Delaroche from 1842 to 1848 and then came to the United States. Here, for some time, he worked at chromolithography which he had also pursued in France. Later he devoted himself almost entirely to painting.
His Men of Progress (1857) featured a group portrait of nineteen American inventors and innovators. While all those portrayed were still alive, they had never met as a group but were composed from existing individual portraits. It is now housed in Cooper Union, New York City.
Other well-known works include Clear the Track (1851); Franklin before the Lords in Council (1856); Zeisberger preaching to the Indians (1859); The Iron-Worker and King Solomon (1860); Washington at Valley Forge (1862); McClellan at Antietam (1863); and Home on Furlough (1864).
About 1863, he was attacked by palsy in the right hand. In 1865, he went abroad and underwent severe treatment with no apparent benefit. On his return, in 1868, he was elected to fill the chair, then founded, of drawing and painting in the Pennsylvania Academy (now Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) in Philadelphia, which he held until his death in 1879. During this period he produced Queen Esther denouncing Haman, owned by the Academy (1869), and The Alsatian Fair (1870). Most of the paintings that have been named became widely known through large prints by John Sartain and other engravers.
Painter Thomas Eakins covered Schussele's classes when he was too ill to teach. Eakins succeeded Schussele as instructor of painting and drawing at the Academy.
He died of a stroke on 20 August 1879, in Merchantville, New Jersey.
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Men of Progress (1857), Cooper Union, New York City.
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King Solomon and the Iron Worker (1863), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
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Washington Irving and his Literary Friends at Sunnyside (1864), National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
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Ocean Life, circa 1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Notes
- MacLeod, Christine. "Distinguished men of science of Great Britain living in 1807–8". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ "Christian Schussele, Artist, Dying". The Philadelphia Inquirer (Obituary). 21 August 1879. p. 2. Retrieved 20 December 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- "Obituary". The Lancaster Examiner. 27 August 1879. p. 5. Retrieved 20 December 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
References
- Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Schussele, Christian" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
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- 1824 births
- 1879 deaths
- 19th-century American male artists
- 19th-century American painters
- American male painters
- American printmakers
- French emigrants to the United States
- French painters
- French printmakers
- People from Guebwiller
- Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts faculty
- American painter, 19th-century birth stubs