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I am a painter. www.StephenCefalo.com, http://twitter.com/#!/CefaloStudio

Friday, December 2, 2011

Henry Mosler

Two of my favorite paintings at the Cincinnati Art Museum are by Henry Mosler.  I devoured as many paintings as possible as often as possible on my lunch breaks while teaching at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, which at the time was next door, knowing this privilege would not last. The academy has unfortunately, but fittingly moved downtown and separated from the museum as an entity.  

Henry Mosler (June 6, 1841 - April 21, 1920), United States artist, was born in Tropplowitz, Silesia (now in Poland, on the Czech border) and moved with his family to New York when he was 8. The family relocated to Cincinnati, the site of a substantial German-Jewish community, when Henry was about ten years old.
Studying drawing by himself, he became a draughtsman for a comic paper, the Omnibus (Cincinnati), in 1855; in 1859-1861 he studied underJames Henry Beard, and in 1862-63, during the Civil War, was an art correspondent of Harper's Weekly. In 1863 he went to Düsseldorf, where for almost three years he was at the Royal Academy schools; he subsequently went to Paris, where he studied for a short time under Ernest Hébert.
His "Le Retour," from the Paris Salon of 1879, was the first American picture ever bought for the Luxembourg. He received a silver medal in Paris 1889, and gold medals at Paris, 1888, and Vienna, 1893. Examples of his work are in the Witchita Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington Library in California, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Sydney Art Museum, NSW, theCincinnati Art MuseumRichmond Art Museum and the art museums of Springfield, Mass., and various museums in New York.
His son, Gustave Henry Mosler was also an artist. His granddaughter, Audrey Skirball-Kenis (née Marks) was a philanthropist in Los Angeles, and founder of the Skirball Cultural Center.

The Quadroon Girl below is home of my favorite arm of all time.  The hands are lovely too as are the shackles.
366-Henry Mosler - The Quadroon Girl Image.jpg (JPEG Image, 385x480 pixels)
The Quadroon Girl

The Chimney Corner
There is also an amazing little oil sketch for the Chimney Corner in the same room, almost an abstract, but I can't find a reproduction of it online.  If you have one I'd love to post it.