Harvest Festival (sometimes called Harvest Dance), 1884, oil on canvas, Collection of the City School District of the City of Cincinnati; made available to the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Cincinnati Art Museum

Verbal Description

Hello, my name is Eric Le Roy. I am the Associate Director of Docent Learning at the museum. I will be reading the verbal description for Harvest Festival, which appears in Henry Mosler Behind the Scenes: In Celebration of the Jewish Cincinnati Bicentennial.

Harvest Festival, sometimes called Harvest Dance, is an oil on canvas painted in 1884. It is in the collection of the City School District of the City of Cincinnati. It has been made available to the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Mosler’s Harvest Festival is landscape-oriented and measures 39 inches by 52 and 5/8 inches. This picture is heavily populated with figures; all dressed in the traditional dress of late-19^th-century Brittany, France. The women each wear a version of an ankle-length, solid colored skirt, with an apron, in dark red, gray, or blue. The bodices of their dresses are dark in color, and they wear wide white collars and white bonnets that wing out on the back of their heads. The men, of which there are only a few in the picture, wear light tan pants, dark coats over white shirts, and broad-brimmed brown hats.

The action of the picture is that of a harvest dance in a field surrounded by green trees. In the foreground, four women lean against a waist-high wooden fence gate, their backs to the viewer. To the left in the midground, we find three additional women sitting on a low wall, one of whom is knitting. In the center and to the right of midground, facing the viewer, are several sets of dancing couples. In the background, we see a large structure like a house or barn. In front of that and to the right is a group of men playing instruments. In the far background and to the left is another large grouping of women.

Label Text

Hello, my name is Eric Le Roy. I am the Associate Director of Docent Learning at the museum. I will be reading the label for Harvest Festival, which appears in Henry Mosler Behind the Scenes: In Celebration of the Jewish Cincinnati Bicentennial.

Harvest Festival, sometimes called Harvest Dance, is an oil on canvas that was painted in 1884. It is in the collection of the City School District of the City of Cincinnati. It has been made available to the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

As Mosler’s viewpoint suggests, he was an outsider and a spectator at this community gathering in Brittany. This painting is unusually complex for Mosler, given the large number of figures he included in the crowd and the brilliance of the autumn sunlight. He complicated the composition on multiple fronts. Villagers stand with their backs to us in the foreground and face us or appear in profile on the opposite side of the fence. Mosler was captivated by traditional Breton costumes. He expended great effort on the sunlight reflecting on and through the white headdresses and collars of the women and the simplified shapes formed by their skirts. Notice the intricate shadows in the foreground and other patterns of light and color.

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