Artwork story
About Cider Making
The artist and artwork
William Sidney Mount painted Cider Making in 1840–41, using oil on canvas to turn a familiar seasonal job into a carefully staged American genre scene. Born and based in Setauket, Long Island, Mount became a leading painter of everyday rural life. His scenes of courtship, work, family, and community reached a widening audience as public exhibitions allowed American artists to move beyond privately commissioned portraits. Here he records the successive steps in producing hard cider while presenting local farm labor as sociable, orderly, and worth sustained attention.
The world around it
The painting appeared during the 1840 presidential contest between Whig candidate William Henry Harrison and the incumbent Martin Van Buren, a Democrat. Harrison's campaign promoted him as a common man associated with a log cabin and hard cider, although he came from a prominent Virginia family. The Met notes that a contemporary newspaper suggested Mount may have intended the people in this cheerful farm scene to represent political candidates. That interpretation remains a possibility, not a confirmed cast list, but it makes cider both the farm's product and a charged symbol within electoral culture.
A detail to notice
The cider process unfolds across the canvas. At left, a white horse walks around a large mill, supplying the power to crush apples. The eye then moves to the thatched press at center and the workers tending containers and barrels. In the foreground, labor pauses around two enormous casks: one man leans over a barrel, another looks outward, and a woman in a red shawl anchors the group. A small dog, livestock, waterfowl, distant fields, and hills extend the farm beyond the central task. Mount dates the barrel 1840 and signs the lower-left edge. Above everything, an immense blue sky gives this ordinary work the breadth of a national story.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 27 x 34 1/8 in. (68.6 x 86.7 cm).
Subject terms include Men, Women, Mountains, and Working. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Purchase, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, by exchange, 1966.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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