The German-born artist (Peter Bernhard) Wilhelm Heine trained at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden, continuing his artistic studies in Paris. Following his involvement in a political uprising in Dresden in May 1849, he fled to the United States, fearing arrest and imprisonment at home. He established a successful practice in New York and travelled to Central America, collecting and recording local flora and fauna, which he later published in 1853.
The opportunity for further travel arose when he was selected as the official artist on Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853–54. He returned to the country in the early 1860s as part of a wide-ranging Prussian expedition to Asia. He joined the Union army in the American Civil War before returning to Dresden in the 1870s, where he continued to write about Asia, and Japan in particular.
Wilhelm Heine sketched this scene between 25 and 29 March 1853 when the USS ‘Mississippi’ called at Singapore during Parry’s expedition to Japan. He published the lithograph in New York in 1855 as part of a larger series of prints, ‘Graphic scenes of the Japan expedition’.