The Quadroon Girl, 1878, oil on canvas, Gift of Louise F. Tate, 1976.25

Verbal Description

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

The Quadroon Girl from 1878 is an oil painting on canvas. It was a gift of Louise F. Tate. The accession number is 1976.25

Mosler’s painting, The Quadroon Girl, is portrait-oriented and measures 39 and 11/16 inches by 32 and 5/16 inches. In this painting, we see a Black woman with a lighter complexion posed in front of a pale gray background. She is turned slightly to the right and does not face the viewer. The woman has long black wavy hair that is parted in the middle and reaches down her back. Her face tilts to the right and is downturned. She appears to have a sad expression on her face. A dangling gold earring peaks out from her hair. She is wearing a white garment wrapped around her chest; her shoulders are bare. She holds the fabric in place with bent arms and her hands cross over her chest. On her right wrist is a black manacle with a dangling chain. Her left elbow rests on a little-defined russet-colored form.

Label Text

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

The Quadroon Girl from 1878 is an oil painting on canvas. It was a gift of Louise F. Tate. The accession number is 1976.25

At the Paris Salon of 1878, this painting appeared alongside the following stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 abolitionist poem, The Quadroon Girl:

Her eyes were large, and full of light,
Her arms and neck were bare;
No garment she wore save a kirtle bright,
And her own long, raven hair.

A quadroon was a demeaning term for a person of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters white Euro-American. Longfellow’s poem, which tells the story of a Southern plantation owner who sold his own mixed-race daughter into bondage, expresses the cruel inhumanity of enslavement.

Although we may surmise that Mosler opposed slavery, he was not a political artist. Literary themes were in vogue with the juries of the Salon, to whom he successfully presented this painting. To satisfy the taste of a powerful white male elite art establishment, he produced a romanticized and sensual portrait of Longfellow’s tragic heroine.

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