Henry Mosler was an American illustrator, wood engraver, sketch artist and painter of portraits and genre scenes.
Background
Henry Mosler was born on June 6, 1841, in Tropplowitz, Silesia (now in Poland, on the Czech border), the son of Gustav Mosler and Sophie Wiener, Germans living in New York City. His father was a lithographer.
The family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1851; thence to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1854, but after a year there returned to Cincinnati in 1855.
Education
Young Mosler was precocious; he acquired some knowledge of wood-engraving and painting without much assistance, and while still a youth made drawings for the Omnibus, a humorous weekly published in Cincinnati.
His first serious instruction came from James H. Beard, who was his teacher from 1859 to 1861. In 1862 - 1863 he was attached to the staff of Gen. R. W. Johnson as special war artist for Harper's Weekly with the Army of the West.
Then, at the instance of Buchanan Read, the poet, he went to Düsseldorf, in the spring of 1863, entered the Royal Academy, and studied drawing and painting under H. K. A. Mücke and A. Kindler for some two years and a half.
Career
From Düsseldorf he proceeded to Paris in 1865, and for a half-year worked in the atelier of A. A. E. Hébert. In 1866 Mosler returned to Cincinnati, and remained in Cincinnati until 1874, when he went to Munich and passed three years there, studying under Ferdinand Wagner and Karl von Piloty.
In 1877 he moved to Paris, where he lived for seventeen years, with two or three trips to America and many summer vacations in Brittany. He began to send his works to the Salon in 1878 and continued to exhibit there fairly regularly until he left Paris in 1894. Mosler's first painting to gain notable recognition was "Le Retour, " 1879, which was bought by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum, being the first picture by an American thus honored.
On his return to America in 1894 he established his studio in New York. His "Wedding Feast in Brittany, " 1892, a large composition with nearly a score of figures, quite typical, was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Standing behind a long table set with the marriage feast, surrounded by his family and friends, the bridegroom is proposing a toast, while brimming glasses are raised in response.
In 1896 an important exhibition of his paintings was held at Avery's Galleries in New York. Among his works in public collections, besides those in Paris and New York, may be mentioned his "Saying Grace" in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington; "The Rainy Day" in the Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia; "Return of the Shrimp Fishers" and "Head of a Monk" in the Cincinnati Museum; "The Biskarin Minstrel" in the Toledo Museum; "The Village Tinker" in the Springfield (Massachusetts) Museum; and other examples in the museums of Sydney, New South Wales, Grenoble, France, and Louisville, Kentucky. The artist's death occurred on April 21, 1920, in New York in his seventy-ninth year.
Achievements
Connections
In 1869, Henry Mosler married Sarah Cahn, by whom he had several children.