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295

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) [Sawtelle, William F.] Hugh Mosher, model for the "Spirit of '76."

295

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) [Sawtelle, William F.] Hugh Mosher, model for the "Spirit of '76."

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) [Sawtelle, William F.] Hugh Mosher, model for the "Spirit of '76." Glass collodion plate 355 x 279 mm, moderate wear with--an early 20th-century silver print from this plate, 346 x 263 mm, pinholes in margins, faint creases and surface soiling. [Wellington, OH, 1875]
  • Notes: Archibald M. Willard's painting "The Spirit of '76" has been probably the most popular American patriotic image since it was created for the 1876 Centennial. The original painting is at Abbott Hall in Marblehead, MA, but Willard also painted dozens of copies and sold hundreds of thousands of prints of this enduring American Revolution image. The three iconic figures in the foreground of the painting--two drummers and a fifer leading their regiment into battle--are instantly recognizable.

    Willard asked his friend Hugh Mosher (1819-1892) to serve as a model for the fifer. Mosher was a successful farmer in Brighton, OH (listed with $14,400 in assets in the 1870 census) who had served for nine months in the 43rd Ohio Infantry during the Civil War, earning a disability discharge. According to one history, he was "the most celebrated and probably the best fifer in northern Ohio." Henry Devereux, one of the other models, recalled that Willard asked a local photographer in Wellington, OH named William F. Sawtelle to take photographs of Mosher while preparing his early sketches for "The Spirit of '76," and also had Mosher pose in his studio to capture some of the nuances of his fife playing. The present image is reproduced in Devereux's book, where it is credited to Sawtelle; another early print is in the collection of the Ohio Historical Society.

    References: Devereux, Henry Kelsey. The Spirit of '76 (Cleveland, 1926), 30-31, 40-44, 73-74; Haverstock, Mary Sayre et al. Artists in Ohio 1787-1900 (Kent, OH, 2000), 754; Ryder, James F. Voigtländer and I (Cleveland: Imperial Press, 1902), 216-221; Upton, Harriet Taylor. History of the Western Reserve (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1910), 1215.
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