Return of the Shrimp Fishers, circa 1881, oil on canvas, Gift of Charles Fleischmann, 1895.6

Verbal Description

Hello, my name is Jordan Rolfes. I am a Gallery Attendant at the museum. I will be reading the verbal description for Return of the Shrimp Fishers, which appears in Henry Mosler Behind the Scenes: In Celebration of the Jewish Cincinnati Bicentennial.

Painted around 1881, Return of the Shrimp Fishers is an oil on canvas. It was a gift of Charles Fleischmann. The accession number is 1895.6

Return of the Shrimp Fishers is landscape-oriented and measures 46 and ¼ inches by 58 and ¼ inches. Two women in the foreground walk to the left and toward the viewer. They are both dressed in indigo blue, long-sleeved, calf-length dresses with triangular scarves at their necks. They both have deep brown or black hair pulled back and tucked under blue caps. They wear tattered aprons around their waists. The woman on the left is barefoot, and the woman on the right wears black lace-up shoes. They both carry fishing nets, the one on the right over her right shoulder and the one on the left tucked under her right arm, the net hovering over the ground in front of her. They both carry large baskets of shrimp slung over their shoulders. The beach on which they walk is a mixture of sand and rocks covered with green algae. In the midground, we see another shrimp fisher outfitted like our central figures and also walking towards the shore. In the background and to the right are five additional figures wading in the ocean to fish. The water is a light blueish-green. The sky, which takes up almost half of the picture, is colored with the purples and pinks of sunset. A low bank of purple clouds hovers just above the horizon line.

Label Text

Hello, my name is Jordan Rolfes. I am a Gallery Attendant at the museum. I will be reading the label for Return of the Shrimp Fishers, which appears in Henry Mosler Behind the Scenes: In Celebration of the Jewish Cincinnati Bicentennial.

Painted around 1881, Return of the Shrimp Fishers is an oil on canvas. It was a gift of Charles Fleischmann. The accession number is 1895.6

In Grandcamp, Calvados, on France’s Normandy coast, two fisherwomen trudge home after a day of back-breaking work. One wears a tattered apron and the other is barefoot. Arranging the figures rhythmically on a diagonal, Mosler makes these tired women seem monumental and heroic. The artist and his colleagues found beauty in traditional labor soon to be eclipsed by mechanization. He painted this subject just around the time of the invention of the otter board, which made it possible to trawl for massive quantities of shrimp.

Mosler painted this large canvas in his Paris studio for the Salon of 1881. Remarkably, he could work indoors yet sensitively evoke the early evening light. Note the patchy sunlight on the water as it penetrates the pink-tinged clouds and the illumination at the right that nearly dissolves the distant workers in an atmospheric haze. A French critic praised "the harmonious gray tonality that envelopes the whole."

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