Portrait Of A Fouesnantaise By Henry Mosler - Brittany

Oil on panel. Signed on the back and cartel on the frame. The artist enlarged the right side of the panel by one centimeter. Dimension without frame: 35 cm x 26.5 cm, with frame 60 cm x 53 cm

Henry Mosler (1841-1920) 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 in a large German Jewish community. Henry, still a teenager, apprenticed with a wood engraver, Horace C. Grosvenor, and also learned the basics of painting thanks to 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 war correspondent for Harper's Weekly. 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, then he went to Paris, where he studied for six months with Ernest Hébert. He returned to Cincinnati in 1866, where he received many 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 remained in France until 1894. Henry Mosler criss-crossed the Pont-Aven region between 1879 and 1884 where he painted rural scenes with sometimes exacerbated realism. Mosler is part of the artistic movement of the end of the 19th century praising rural life. In 1894, he moved with his family to New York. He became associated with the American Academy of Design, and continued to paint during the early years of the 20th century. He died of a heart attack at the age of 78. It is present in many American museums.