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Louis Henry Charles Moeller American, 1855-1930 Sign Here Signed Louis Moeller, N.A. (lr) Oil on canvas 30 x 40 3/8 inches Provenance: Private collection Exhibited: (probably) New York, Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Catalogue of American Paintings and Water Colors First Annual Summer Exhibition of the Art House, Summer 1893, no. 131 (as Signing) University Park, Pennsylvania, Palmer Museum of Art, State University, Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, Sept. 28-Dec. 19, 2010; California, Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, Jan. 29-May 30, 2011, no. 23 (p. 14, illus., 15-16) Literature: Leo Mazow, "Taxing Visions and the 'Decent Distance,'" in Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, exhi. cat. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2010), p. 14, illus., 15-16 (no. 23) In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Louis Moeller was America's best known and most popular genre painter. He was born in New York and derived his aesthetic from his study in Munich in the 1870s, where he followed his teachers' example in creating scenes of intimate interiors that carried on the tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch Little Masters. On his return to America, Moeller transitioned from small, cabinet-sized conversation pieces of individual figures to larger multi-figured canvases. He frequently portrayed groups of older, middle-class American men engaged in heated discussions within heavily-furnished interiors. His art encapsulated the "Victorian Man's World" of the era, as was conveyed in the title for a 1984 exhibition catalogue of Moeller's work, authored by Dr. William H. Gerdts. Among Moeller's larger paintings, and unusual in its inclusion of three female subjects, "Sign Here" depicts a dressmaker being pressured into a contract, suggesting the financial pressures of a commercialized society. The varied reactions of the figures suggest the different sides of the story. Moeller's image may have had a personal resonance, as he was himself in a lopsided business arrangement with his patron, the noted collector Thomas B. Clarke (whose holdings by Moeller were only exceeded by those of Homer and Inness). Moeller would provide Clarke with unframed, unfinished works that Clarke could then commission him to complete, thereby exerting control over the artist's output. Portrayed with the precise draftsmanship and stage-like space that typifies Moeller's art, the painting presents many intriguing encoded messages about the culture of the era. Aptly the painting was included in the 2010-11 exhibition, Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University. C The Spanierman Gallery, LLC Collection of American Art