The New Canaan Museum & Historical Society this week will reopen the 1878 Rogers Studio after more than two years of work. (It opens Saturday to the public.)
We put some questions to NCM&HS Executive Director Nancy Geary ahead of the Reimagined building’s unveiling. Here’s our exchange. ***
New Canaanite: Who was John Rogers? Nancy Geary: Known as the “People’s Sculptor,” John Rogers (1829-1904) was the most popular sculptor in United States history. Between 1860 and 1893, Americans purchased approximately 80,000 of his putty-colored plaster “Rogers Groups” at an average price of $14.00. These realistic works, which celebrated military, theater and domestic scenes, were fixtures in every Victorian parlor. Why? As David Wallace writes in his seminal biography, John Rogers, The People’s Sculptor, (Wesleyan University 1967) “No other American sculptor has ever been so completely at one with his contemporaries in taste, in spirit, and in human sympathies, and none has made his works so generally available to the general public.”
John Rogers was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1829, the son of John Rogers, a merchant in Boston, and Sarah Ellen Derby, whose grandfather Elias H. “King” Derby, had built a successful shipping empire. By the time of John’s birth, however, the fortune in his mother’s family had dissipated. His father had a series of disastrous forays into business. During John’s childhood, the family moved from Massachusetts to Ohio to New Hampshire, before finally settling in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841. In Roxbury, John attended English High School where he studied mathematics, mechanics and surveying. He left school a year early and chose to become an engineer, later holding jobs as a dry goods clerk, a master mechanic and a city surveyor. This practical education and work shaped his artistic vision as a Realist in portraying the American scene.
