Henry Mosler

Henry Mosler (June 6, 1841 – April 21, 1920) was a German-born painter who documented American life, including colonial themes, Civil War illustrations, and portraits of men and women of society.

Early life He was born in Tropplowitz, Silesia, Prussia (present-day Opawica, Poland), and moved with his family to New York in 1849, when he was 8 years old. His father, Gustavus Mosler, had worked as a lithographer in Europe, but in New York he found work as a cigar maker and tobacconist. In 1851, the family relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, the site of a substantial German-Jewish community. Henry was apprenticed to a wood engraver, Horace C. Grosvenor, while still in his early teens, and also was taught the basics of painting by an amateur landscape painter, George Kerr.

Career

After studying drawing by himself, Mosler became a draughtsman for a comic paper, the Omnibus (Cincinnati), in 1855. From 1859 to 1861 he studied under James Henry Beard, and in 1862–63, during the American Civil War, served as an art correspondent of Harper's Weekly. As with most Jews in the North, Mosler was a strong Union supporter, and Harper's Weekly served as an important voice for the Union forces. He was an aide-de-camp with the Army of the Ohio from 1861 to 1863, and published 34 drawings in Harper's, 18 of them depicting the Kentucky and Ohio Campaign in 1862. He also did portraits of several generals.

In 1863 Mosler went to Düsseldorf, where for almost three years he was at the Royal Academy, and studied under Heinrich Mücke and Albert Kindler; he subsequently went to Paris, where he studied for six months under Ernest Hébert.

In 1874, Mosler returned to France, having married Sara Cahn of Cincinnati in 1869. His granddaughter, Audrey Skirball-Kenis (née Marx), was a philanthropist in Los Angeles and founder of the Skirball Cultural Center. His great-grandson, John F. McCrindle, was an art collector and patron of artists and writers, founding the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation to award grants to arts, music and social justice organizations. His students included Isabelle Davis Seymour, a listed miniature portrait artist of Evanston Illinois, and Wilder M. Darling, an artist and teacher based in Toledo.

Examples of his work are in currently in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, the Wichita Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, the Sydney Art Museum, NSW, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Richmond Art Museum, the art museums of Springfield, Massachusetts, and various museums in New York.