Drawings Published in Harper’s

Henry Mosler

19th–Early 20th Century

Image

Drawing depicting men building vehicle at a campsite and English caption. — An illustration for the monthly magazine *Harper’s*, *The Thirty-Second Indiana Regiment (Colonel Willich) Building Pontoons in Kentucky* was likely drawn by Henry Mosler during the Civil War. Engravings like these constituted the photojournalism of their day. Before the rise of photography, line drawings were common in magazines and newspapers, providing a source of income for artists.

Credits

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC., 20540. LC-USZ62-124302.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 6.

Return of the Prodigal Son

The Christian parable of the prodigal son, from Luke 15:11–12, was a favorite subject of artists from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A son squanders his inheritance and is reduced to…

View Source

Print of man holding up tablets on mountain before crowd of people on top of page, people around long table in the middle of the page, Hebrew title in center, and people sitting around round table on the bottom of page.

Tikun li-kro’ laylah va-yom (A Tikkun to Read Day and Night)

The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers published in Amsterdam, Tikun li-kro’ laylah va-yom (A Tikkun to Read Day and Night) has a three-tiered illustration. The top level depicts Moses…

View Source

Three dolls in a bathroom with thought bubbles above their heads with images of multiple perspectives of the human buttocks.

Café of the Inner Mind: Men’s Room

Simmons is best known for artworks in which she stages dolls, plastic figurines, and other inanimate objects in tableaus and then photographs them. In 1987, she began to use wooden ventriloquists’…

View Source

Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Henry Mosler

1841–1920

The German-born, American-raised painter and printmaker Henry Mosler worked as an artist and correspondent for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. In his home city of Cincinnati, he painted the Plum Street Temple (ca. 1866), representing the synagogue of the leading Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, as well as portraits of members of the local Jewish community. Mosler subsequently settled in Paris, where he showed his works in the Salon, the annual art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, from 1878 to 1897. His 1879 entry, Return of the Prodigal Son, was awarded an honorable mention and acquired for the Musée du Luxembourg, making it the first painting by an American artist that the French government purchased.