One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers, and Friends Book

"Perhaps the finest printmaker at work today, Mr. Moser has over the past 40 years captured countless famous countenances. 'One Hundred Portraits' collects the best, mainly literary: from a delicately rendered Lewis Carroll lost in reverie to an appropriately dismal Theodore Dreiser and an owlish Flannery O'Connor. In his more recent works, the bravura use of visual effects has given way to a sparer style, with a strong use of shadow that adds a sense of mortality. The most fascinating textures tend to be the folds of flesh itself, as in the magnificently rumpled face of W.H. Auden. But then there are the eyes sparking the portraits to life: How magnificent is the stare of his chin-raised Fanny Burney."
' The Editors, The Wall Street Journal

"Long interested in the character of creators, be they writers, artists, or composers, Moser once told an interviewer, 'The human face is almost as individual as a fingerprint. It fascinates me to no end.' . . . Moser's new book One Hundred Portraits (Godine) gathers a cast of characters through the ages, with an emphasis on British and American notables. Moser, who lives in Western Massachusetts, works with darkness, light, and lines to achieve faces that carry a sense of life's burdens and beauties as his subjects lived them. Ann Patchett writes in the foreword that she welcomes Moser's portraits of novelists as an opportunity to learn more about the souls that animate their works."
' Jan Gardner, The Boston Globe

"The portrait is, in my way of thinking, akin to a crystal goblet. I merely shape it and offer it to you. You fill it with what you know of that person, or of that person's work." Renowned for having illustrated over 200 books for children and adults, Moser, a member of the National Academy of Design, created a number of new engravings for this collection of portraits. Represented are poets (Keats, Wordsworth, Plath), authors (Mann, Twain, Carroll, Chekhov), composers (Handel, Wagner, Sibelius), activists (Douglass, Truth, King), and artists (Carle, Homer, van Rijn), as well as Moser's immediate family. In the brief afterword, he discusses the sources for his portraits, including subjects of whom no accurate depictions exist, like Chaucer. In those cases Moser utilized death masks , ancient photographs, and even busts. Printed on heavy matte paper, with spare titles including name, dates of birth and death, and occupation, One Hundred Portraits is a pleasure to study. The heavily detailed engravings result in portraits of very expressive faces, and giving readers, according to Ann Patchett, "the chance to visit the people we were sure of and learn something more."
' Publishers Weekly