Meet John Jennings, bestselling author and illustrator whose graphic novella "Protocol and Response"—featured in The Met's latest Bulletin, dedicated to "Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room"—animates the objects on display in the installation.

Eakins was in the vanguard of young painters who would shift the focus of American art from landscape to the figural subjects favored by the European academies.

For Eakins, the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical drawing, a tool the modern artist should use to train the eye to see what was truly before it.

The author and illustrator John Jennings discusses Seneca Village, Afrofuturism, and writing The Met's first graphic novella.

Little appreciated in his lifetime, Thomas Eakins is today recognized as one of America's finest painters, a respected sculptor and photographer, and an influential art teacher. This Bulletin accompanies an exhibition of his oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings owned by the Museum and a selection of our holdings of photographs associated with him and his circle. Like the exhibition, this Bulletin honors the sesquicentennial of Eakins's birth in Philadelphia in 1844 and the Museum's early and continuing interest in his work. Eakins's The Chess Players, of 1876, presented by the artist to the Metropolitan in March 1881, was only the second painting by him to enter a museum's collection. Two months before Eakins's death in 1916, the Metropolitan's curator of paintings, Bryson Burroughs, bought his Pushing for Rail, of 1874, for the Museum and the following year organized a memorial exhibition with the help of his widow. This one-month display, which maintained the Museum's pattern of commemorating American painters, opened in November 1917. It provided the first overview of Eakins's achievements as a painter and the model for the ensuing memorial exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an institution with which he had a more extensive connection. Burroughs also arranged for the Metropolitan to buy two canvases from the memorial exhibition, furthering the growth of one of the most important collections of Eakins's paintings. Our oils by Eakins, exhaustively documented by Natalie Spassky in American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume II (1985), articulate his development and include several that are considered among his most significant. Perspicacious purchases and generous gifts have also made the Metropolitan a leading repository of Eakins's watercolors; we possess seven of his twenty-eight known works in the medium. Photographs, which the Museum began to acquire in 1941, enrich Eakins's representation at the Metropolitan.

The city of Raqqa, situated on the Euphrates River in present-day Syria, had its first Islamic flowering in the late eighteenth century, when it was the residence of the legendary Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. It experienced a resurgence during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but was destroyed in 1265. Little is mentioned about Raqqa in Muslim sources after its medieval renaissance, but interest in the city was kindled in the West at the end of the nineteenth century, when curiosity about the Islamic world was inspired by travel to the Middle East and by the vast travel literature that it spawned. Interest was also fueled by the translation into French and English of the Arabic literary classic The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun al-Rashid was a central character. As this collection of stories was becoming a best seller in the West, ceramic objects were being brought out from Raqqa that dealers and auction houses were connecting to this very caliph, and a buying spree for the ware ensued. Among the wealthy collectors who developed a passion for these objects were two important donors to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louisine and Horace Havemeyer, and eventually a large number of ceramic objects from their collection were given to the Museum, helping to make the Metropolitan's holdings of this ware the world's most important. What follows in these pages is the often mesmerizing chronicle of ceramic objects unearthed in Raqqa in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Curator Emerita of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum, describes the dramatic journey of these ceramics from their discovery in the medieval city to the emporiums of Paris and New York, the drawing rooms of the great collectors, and the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Using art-historical detective work, archival documents, and scientific data, the author convincingly establishes provenance and dating, placing these objects—some of the most exquisite ever produced by Islamic potters—in a secure historical context for the first time.