Henry Mosler (1841 - 1920)

Henry Mosler was born in Eastern Europe and arrived in New York with his parents at the age of 8. Two years later, the family moved to Cincinnati into a large German Jewish community. Henry, still a teenager, apprenticed with a wood engraver, Horace C. Grosvenor, and also learned the rudiments of painting from an amateur landscape painter, George Kerr. From 1859 to 1861, he studied with James Henry Beard and from 1862 to 1863, during the Civil War, he served as a war correspondent for Harper's weekly newspaper. In 1863, Henry Mosler went to Dusseldorf, where for nearly three years he studied at the Royal Academy, receiving instruction from Heinrich Mücke and Albert Kindler, and then went to Paris, where he studied for six months with Ernest Hébert. He returned to Cincinnati in 1866, where he received numerous portrait commissions. After marrying Sara Cahn in 1869 in Cincinnati, Henry Mosler returned to France in 1874, then studied in Munich for three years under Carl Theodor Von Piloty, winning a medal at the Royal Academy. In 1877, he returned to France where he passed through Pont-Aven. He received a silver medal at the Paris Salon of 1889, and a gold medal in Paris in 1888 and in Vienna in 1893. He stayed in France until 1894. Henry Mosler travelled around the Pont-Aven region between 1879 and 1884 where he painted rural scenes of sometimes exaggerated realism. Mosler was part of the artistic movement at the end of the 19th century that praised rural life. In 1894, he moved with his family to New York. He became an associate of the American Academy of Design, and continued to paint throughout the early years of the 20th century. He died of a heart attack at the age of 78. He is present in many American museums.