John Ward Dunsmore was one of America's leading painters of murals and historical subjects in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Society owns about thirty of his works.

The donor claimed that this set of plaques had been in his family for many years, and that "many people of intellectual tastes owned similar sets."

May be related to plaster taken by famous phrenologist George Combe in Edinburgh with crisper lines, reproduced in Chalmers.

Presented at time of donation with oak pedestal, with ornamental carving decorated in gold, and having two claw feet.

Rogers first developed this subject in clay in 1860 and exhibited it at the National Academy of Design that year. The artist was disappointed by its reception, complaining that it went unnoticed, and the clay model, priced at $50, remained unsold. Perhaps cautious because of the lack of response, Rogers did not cast it in plaster until September 1861, after the success of his Civil War group The Picket Guard (1929.112) convinced him that his small plasters were salable. He admitted another consideration as well; he had found the group too complicated to cast until he had developed the necessary skill. Rogers took his subject from the poem "The Deserted Village" by the popular eighteenth-century British writer Oliver Goldsmith. On the base of the sculpture below the title is a line from the poem, "For e'en though vanquished he could argue still." The artist used a pyramidal composition to render three men in animated conversation. On the left is the parson, whom Goldsmith described as humble but wise, a compassionate soul. Across from him sits the schoolmaster, "A man severe he was and stern to view," but so learned that he could read and write, evidenced by the paper in his hand. Goldsmith wryly described how the parson admired the schoolmaster's skills in debate, since the man continued to argue even after he had been proven wrong by the less-educated but wiser cleric. Between them stands an amused townsman enjoying the schoolmaster's consternation. The group presages Rogers' later subjects taken from poetry, literature, and the theater. Rogers chose a subject strongly identified with the virtues of country living and nostalgia for an endangered way of life. Goldsmith's 1770 poem lamented the emptying out of rural farm communities owing to labor shortages, poverty, and the influx of rich landowners. Rogers enjoyed country life and had seriously considered farming as a profession. He, along with his contemporaries, was no doubt concerned about the growing movement of populations from the countryside to the city in the United States. He also challenged the value of "book learning" and vindicated his insecurity about his own lack of education in showing the moment when the literate teacher is bested by the unlearned pastor. Though The Village Schoolmaster did not attract critical attention at the National Academy of Design, after Rogers cast the subject in plaster it earned the praise of the New York Leader as humorous and "well grouped," and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript's writer called it "skillfully handled and almost beyond criticism."

As Rogers grew older, he no doubt became aware of the generational distinctions between himself, his aging parents, and his growing children, and some of his later works depict intergenerational dynamics. Here, a venerable woman is at the center of a spirited young people's game in A Frolic at the Old Homestead. Rogers' sales catalogue describes how "The Young Folks are having a game of Blind-Man's-Buff around the old Grandmother's chair." Though the group was released in the spring of 1887, it received a great deal of attention as a Christmas gift later that year. One writer declared, "The scene is eminently suggestive of the good cheer which ought to prevail in every well-regulated home about this holiday time." The scene could easily be interpreted as a family group that has reunited for the holidays. Three young people, informally dressed, are engaged in a boisterous game that circles around the presumed matriarch, who looks over her spectacles with a bemused expression. Not only did Rogers make her the center of the composition, he depicted her safely ensconced in a comfortable chair, warmly wrapped in a shawl and cap, with her feet up on a stool and surrounded by her loving grandchildren. Rogers' career had spanned more than a quarter century, and his audience was growing older as well; one might imagine the grandmother as one of the artist's loyal customers, and he could not have created a more appealing subject than an idealized vision of the members of an extended family coming home, with her as the center of fun-loving attention. Paradoxically, this gentle and innocuous depiction of private life is also an example of a daring turn in the artist's style. His later compositions became more complex and incorporated more figures. Here, a total of four figures are present, and the young people at their game form a complex ballet of poses and gestures around the venerable lady. The young man in the blindfold reaches across her to try and catch the girl on the other side of the chair. She is pulled just out of his reach by another young man who is about to distract the "blind man" with a wave of his handkerchief. The composition shows Rogers at the peak of his technical powers, but this was his last truly popular group.

Rogers contemplated the plays of Shakespeare as a potential subject from the earliest years of his professional career. In 1861 he wrote of his plans for a series, and he assayed a handful of such themes into 1862, including one titled The Merchant of Venice, which he showed at the National Academy of Design (to his dismay, it went unnoticed). No examples of these early groups survive. Nearly twenty years passed before the Bard resurfaced in the artist's work. Rogers created an acclaimed series of groups that includes "Is It So Nominated in the Bond?" (1936.659, 1926.37) from The Merchant of Venice; The Wrestlers (1936.645, 1926.37) from As You Like It; "Ha! I Like Not That" (1936.658, 1929.108) from Othello; and this work, "You Are a Spirit, I Know: When Did You Die?" (1936.646, 1932.99, 1948.413) from King Lear. The play was suppressed in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the portrayal of a mad monarch was considered inflammatory during the rule of George III, who suffered from mental illness. Later, it appeared regularly on the New York stage in the late 1870s and early 1880s. However, it was not performed as frequently as the perennial favorites As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. Rogers made an unusual choice in selecting a scene from one of Shakespeare's less popular plays and, in particular, one of his most searing tragedies. In a rectangular stagelike space, Lear reclines on a couch wearing a fur-trimmed robe that echoes the remarkable bearskin draped over the headboard. Its sightless eyes goggle at the viewer from the side in what might be an eerie allusion to Lear's deranged mental state. In act 4, scene 7, after being stripped of his wealth and power through the betrayal of his scheming daughters Goneril and Regan, the king has wandered over the stormy heath, near the edge of insanity. He has been led to shelter under the protection of the Earl of Kent, who is disguised as a servant, and now he awakes to see the loving daughter Cordelia, whom he himself betrayed. Lear seems uncertain of his sanity or even whether he is alive, saying, "You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave." He props himself up on his couch with one arm behind him and other hovering in midair as he reaches out to touch her in disbelief. His unkingly pose suggests his fragile state as the words leave his lips. He rightly expects Cordelia to be angry with him, but she leans forward to reassure him both that she lives and that she forgives him. Their shared gazes meet at the center of the composition. They are framed by the figures of the Earl of Kent, still disguised as a servant, and the doctor, who leans back skeptically stroking his beard, trying to assess Lear's mental state. Rogers showed restraint in realistically conveying the intensity of the moment without an overdependence on melodrama. When compared with his humorous burlesques such as the sly humor and coquetry of The Mock Trial: Argument for the Prosecution (1950.222, 1929.114), expressions here show genuine feeling with a modern sense of understatement in an intimate moment. The artist chose a moment of reunion and redemption, but, as most of his viewers knew, shortly after this, both characters die, making this one of the few Rogers Groups without a happy ending. "You Are a Spirit, I Know" was released the same year as "Why Don't You Speak for Yourself, John?" (1936.660, 1926.36, 1958.14a) from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popular Pilgrim romance The Courtship of Miles Standish. That lighthearted subject proved a best seller and a more attractive alternative to the somber scene from King Lear, a departure that his audience was not prepared to embrace. Rogers continued this trajectory later into his career, producing historical subjects and attempting to secure commissions for monuments with mixed success.

Coming to the Parson was Rogers' most popular group by far, selling more than eight thousand copies, approximately one-tenth of his total output. In a decisive break from his earlier focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rogers offered a reassuring image of hope, a new beginning, and, literally, of union, for which Americans hungered after a traumatic decade of war and its aftermath. Rogers depicted a rustic couple interrupting a minister to ask him to perform an impromptu ceremony. The young man with a flower in his buttonhole clutches his hat awkwardly, and his intended peeks shyly around him. She has dressed in her best, and she bites her makeshift veil in a childish gesture that points out her tender age. The parson, still in his dressing gown, looks up in surprise at the impatient couple. He is reading a newspaper that Rogers, adding a note of humor, entitled The Union. Rogers wryly hinted that the couple's future might hold less than harmonious moments by including a dog and cat that crouch at their feet, poised for a fight. Rogers struck a resonant chord with his new subject, which combined nostalgia for lost innocence and intimations of a brighter future. His figures were understood to be country folk, signaling a rural American past that was lamented as a purer, simpler era, now lost. However, the marriage offered hope for a new "Union," perhaps not only for the young lovers but also between the North and South. Contemporary writers relished telling the story of Rogers' sculpture, with its gently humorous nuances and flourishes, linking it to an earnest optimism about home and family. The New York Evening Mail assured its readers that "This is no runaway match-not a bit of it. There is honest, manly purpose in every inch of that young fellow and that she has her mother's blessing who can doubt that looks into her radiant face?" Another writer concurred, "One laughs first at the gaucherie of the lovers, but after a little study discovers that it is not a laughing matter at all. These young people are not on a frolic; the business that has brought them here is the most serious business they have ever undertaken." The public embraced Rogers' subject with delight. Importantly for its popularity, the year that Rogers released this group he began to offer free delivery to any express station in the United States, expanding his sales far beyond the East Coast, so that Coming to the Parson achieved tremendous nationwide popularity as a wedding gift. The subject became an icon of American culture; nearly eighty years later Norman Rockwell referenced the group in his "April Fool" cover for the Saturday Evening Post dated April 3, 1948. Titled Curiosity Shop, it illustrates an encounter between the elderly owner and a very young patron. Among the quirky items meant to test the viewer's alertness is a Rogers Group that conflates the solider from one of his Civil War groups with the young woman about to be married, in an unintended reminder of the links between this group and his Civil War subjects. Clearly, Coming to the Parson was still familiar enough to the public that Rockwell could expect his audience to understand the joke.