This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

Mary Bosworth was the daughter of Chief Justice Joseph Sollace Bosworth of the New York Superior Court. She married John Theodore Saxe (1843-81), a lumber merchant, on January 18, 1876. They had only one child, John Godfrey Saxe (1877-1953), who married Mary Sands, the donor, in 1909.

This head is the second casting in bronze from the original stone master head (in stone) by the sculptress, the casting was supervised by the sculptress and was cast and mounted at the Modern Art Foundry, 1840, Queens, NY. The original Stone master head (ca. 1950's) was sent in 1973 by the sculptress to Audubon's home at "Mill Grove", Pennsylvania.

Rogers' late oeuvre includes a number of scenes from popular plays of his day, among them several works of Shakespeare and Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle." In these two groups, the artist took his subject from an opera. The French composer Charles Gounod's Faust, loosely based on the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was a huge success in Paris in the 1860s, and it quickly became part of the standard international repertoire throughout the late nineteenth century. This particularly lavish production called for elaborate sets and costumes, a large chorus, and a ballet. It was such a favorite in New York that it opened the opera season every year for decades; Edith Wharton referred to the tradition in her novel The Age of Innocence. Rogers chose three moments in the early acts of the play that show the budding romance between Faust and Marguerite. Faust, an aging and disillusioned scholar, bargains with the devil Mephistopheles for the opportunity to experience all things in exchange for his soul. Transformed into a handsome young man, he pursues the lovely Marguerite. The opening group of the series depicts the end of act 2. Titled Their First Meeting, it shows Faust offering his arm to Marguerite, who shrinks back modestly. The prayer beads hanging from her waist attest to her piety. In his sales catalogue Rogers reproduced their dialogue from Bayard Taylor's 1870 translation of the opera. The newly young suitor greets her, saying, "Fair lady, may I thus make free / To offer you my arm and company?" She responds austerely, "I am no lady, am not fair / Can without escort home repair." As Rogers did with the Rip Van Winkle series, here he created a simple composition for each group, intending that the three together would form a unified and more complex whole. In the second group of the series, Marguerite and Martha: Trying on the Jewels, Faust, with Mephistopheles' help, has left a casket of jewels at Marguerite's door. She tries them on in the company of her old guardian Martha, admiring their effect on her appearance in a hand mirror. In the opera, the young woman expresses her rapture over the beauty of these ornaments with a famous aria known as "The Jewel Song." For whatever reason, Rogers neither advertised this group nor included it in his sales catalogues, though it is referred to in at least one contemporary newspaper. It is difficult to understand why the artist downplayed the middle group of his series, particularly one that referenced a well-known and beloved moment in a vastly popular opera. Whatever his reasons, very few versions were sold, and it is now one of his rarest groups (in fact, the N-YHS does not own a copy of it). The final group shows Faust triumphant at the end of act 3. He has come to Marguerite's garden, and, after she plays a flirtatious game of "I love thee, I love thee not" with her flowers, she confesses her affection and allows Faust to kiss her. They part, but it is clear that Faust's seduction will succeed. In Rogers' composition both engage equally in high coquetry: Faust kisses her hand with a longing look, and she accepts his advances with a feigned shyness that is belied by her outstretched hand and tilted head. As Rogers did with groups taken from the stage, he included an architectural element that suggests a set piece. Marguerite processes up a partial staircase with richly scrolling ironwork; leaves and foliage below hint at the garden where their tryst takes place. Rogers ended his series on this romantic note, but his audience would have been well aware of the grimmer scenes that followed. Faust impregnates Marguerite and abandons her. She then kills her child and as a result is to be hanged. In a rather thin version of a happy ending, Marguerite rejects Mephistopheles' offer of rescue from execution. As she mounts the scaffold, a chorus of angels announces that she is saved and will find the reward for her virtue in heaven. The series was created at a time when Rogers' sales were declining and he was developing a tremor in his hand that would soon end his career. They are among his final works.

This likeness of the sculptor's son was modeled when the boy was five years old. Because the sculptor was dissatisfied with the work, he had no copies left. The sole surviving copy was presented to The New-York Historical Society by the subject's sister.

From his earliest days as a sculptor, Rogers expressed an interest in literary and theatrical themes; his letters from the 1850s mention such subjects as Robinson Crusoe, Friar Tuck, and Pocahontas (though none is extant). Rogers also discussed such popular authors as John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens. Though he did not specifically mention Washington Irving, this revered American writer was to play an important role in Rogers' oeuvre. Courtship in Sleepy Hollow is his first surviving literary subject and marks his professional debut as a sculptor of such themes. Rogers chose a scene from Irving's 1820 story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Irving's narrative, adapted from a German folktale, is a gothic mixture of humor and horror set in 1790 in Sleepy Hollow, a glen of the Dutch settlement of Tarrytown along the Hudson River. The superstitious Connecticut schoolteacher Ichabod Crane competes with the local man Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head was shot off by a stray cannonball during the American Revolutionary War, who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head." Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones. Rogers had considered the subject in 1862, but since the artist F. O. C. Darley had already illustrated the story to great acclaim in 1849, he wrote, "I am afraid I can make nothing very original out of it." However, six years and numerous successes later, he had gained the confidence to attempt his own interpretation. He chose a comic moment when the awkward Crane attempts to woo Katrina Van Tassel. He depicted Crane's tall, lanky frame folded onto a Dutch settle (a period detail that Rogers pointed out in his description of the group). In contrast to Darley's depiction of the couple outdoors, with Ichabod leaning wistfully on a tree branch slightly behind Katrina, Rogers moved the scene indoors and placed the two side by side, with Ichabod engaging her directly. Contemporary newspapers enjoyed matching Roger's faithful rendering of Crane to Irving's description: "tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves. . . . His head was small, and flat at the top, with large ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew." Crane leans toward the plump and petite Katrina, who exudes what a contemporary writer described as "a mixture of coquettish shrewdness and real good nature." Rogers released Courtship in Sleepy Hollow for Christmas 1868, along with his monument to the Civil War leaders Ulysses S. Grant, Edwin M. Stanton, and Abraham Lincoln, titled The Council of War. As early as 1862 Rogers had anticipated the need for a new artistic direction after the war, and this pairing marked a transition from his final Civil War subjects toward literary and theatrical themes (as well as domestic genre scenes). In the 1870s and 1880s he developed other subjects from Irving, as well as from Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The public embraced Rogers' foray into the city's mythologized Knickerbocker past; it seems that the sculptor and his audience were only too glad to contemplate bygone times that, though full of strange terrors, offered an escape from the trauma of the Civil War and the trials of Reconstruction.