Clip of the Day 12/15/2021

A story about Professor Maxwell Somerville and his collection of antiquities which he contributed to the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Published in the New York Tribune, 1903:

"Professor Maxwell Sommerville, who fills the chair of glyptology at the University of Pennsylvania, and has just sailed for distant points in search of curios "for the Buddhist temple at the university museum, left at the gates of the famous Oriental place of worship two figures that arrived from the East just as he was about to start on the trip."

"The figures are two stucco lifesize representations of fruit sellers, and were secured by professor Sommerville when in Hyderabad. "The figures are the work of native Hindoo artists, who have reproduced their models with fidelity and almost microscopic accuracy."

"The two fruit sellers, Professor Sommerville declares, embody and illustrate the hopeless poverty, ever present famine, race degradation and servile subjection of the Hindoo race, who follow after idols and are strangers to Buddha. In describing them Professor Sommerville said: 'They are race types of the perverse people from whom Gautama, the son of Subhodana, who afterward became Buddha, turned away in his quest for loftier religious ideals.'"