Art: Rogers Groups

A hand-picked section of the New York art world last week got a tantalizing glimpse of an important exhibition. The exclusive Lotos Club turned over its main room to an exhibition of 35 original bronzes of the late John Rogers, arranged and mounted by Art Dealer Felix Wildenstein of the Club’s art committee. After three days the show was dismantled while newspaper critics clamored for a fuller public exhibition of the same works, hoped that it might tour the country. Fifty years ago a painted brown plaster Rogers Group was a standard fitting in the parlors of U. S. Respectability. With the colored lithographs of Currier & Ives and wax flowers under glass bells, they marked the sunrise of artistic appreciation in the country. The Rogers Group had a ritual position in the U. S. home as un varying as the ikon opposite the door of pre-War Russia. It stood in the bay win dow, between the Nottingham lace curtains, where it could be seen from the street. Most of the 87 groups were modeled by Sculptor Rogers with this in mind, that they might be equally effective from all sides. Subjects were catholic, but each told a story, generally a sentimental one, never satiric: “Fetching the Doctor,” “The Council of War,” “School Days,” “Going for the Cows,” “One More Shot.” Between 50,000 and 100,000 were made and cast between 1860 and 1900. They sold for $15 to $25 each. Gentle John Rogers was born in Salem, Mass, in 1829. He worked in a machine shop, later as a draughtsman and surveyor, but modeling in clay was his deepest interest. His family always insisted that John Rogers was a self-taught sculptor. In 1858 he had saved enough pennies for a trip to Italy — not originally to study but to rest his overstrained eyes on the long sea trip. In Rome, where he arrived with a curly brown beard like a myopic apostle, he took a few lessons from a British sculptor named Spence and learned the newly discovered process for making plaster casts from gelatin molds. John Rogers invented many improvements.

Back in the U. S. he got a job in the Chicago City Surveyor’s Office. The Civil War was brewing. The U. S. Sanitary Commission, ancestor of the Red Cross, held fairs all over the country to raise money. For the Chicago Sanitary Fair Sculptor Rogers donated his first group, “Checkers,” two figures bending over a draughts board, one laughing, one glum. It was the hit of the fair. In New York he showed his next piece, an Abolitionist number entitled “The Slave Auction.” No dealer would handle it because of the amount of Southern sentiment in the city, so Yankee Rogers found a colored boy with a wagon and hawked copies of his piece from door to door at $10 the copy. He did a land office business. From then on he never sold through dealers or art galleries. The Rogers Group man was the Fuller Brush man’s grandfather.

About five years ago, at the height of the Currier & Ives craze, knowing dealers began buying up Rogers groups wherever they could find them. What the Lotos Club had to show last week were not the flyspecked, chocolate colored plaster casts of the average collection but the heavy bronze originals from which these casts were made, property of Miss Katherine Rogers, the sculptor’s daughter.