This statue of William Pitt was commissioned by the colonists of New York to commemorate the English statesman who had lobbied Parliament successfully on their behalf for the repeal of the Stamp Act. The statue stood at the intersection of Wall and William Streets. After the British took possession of New York City in the fall of 1776, they decapitated the friend of the colonists and broke off his arms. The statue was removed from Wall Street in 1788.

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. This subject was also produced in parian, a type of ceramic that resulted in a version at a slightly smaller scale. The unsigned parian is inscribed on the back "PATENTED AUG. 18, 1868." There is no evidence that Rogers authorized these reproductions, and they were probably produced without his consent, perhaps in England or France, attesting to the great popularity of his work.

In this work, one of Rogers' well-known depictions of camp life during the Civil War, a soldier sits near the fire reading the newspaper to an African American cook who is dressed in ragged clothes, including one shoe and one boot. He leans toward the soldier with an obliging smile. Rogers described the scene in very general terms: "A soldier is reading the newspaper to the cook and trying to make friends with him, so as to warm himself and get some choice bits from the kettle over the fire." The Camp Fire: Making Friends with the Cook seems innocently to address a lighthearted incident of camp life, but its simplicity is deceptive. In it Rogers addressed troubling issues of race relations during the Civil War. Rogers knew that the African American cook would be interpreted as a contraband. The term came into wide circulation in 1862 in reference to Southern slaves escaping to the Union lines. According to the modern scholar Kirk Savage, technically the "confiscated property" of the Union army, contrabands like Rogers' cook were at the same time poised on the threshold of freedom and citizenship. Though much less well known today than it was then, The Camp Fire remains a subtle study in contrast and interconnection. There are the obvious comic contrasts, between the distant gaze of the illiterate cook, musing with pleasure over the story he hears, and the animated focus of the soldier reading aloud, their differences of class and race reinforced by the cook's sturdy posture, bare head, and mismatched shoes. Yet Rogers does not descend into caricature. In a sly move, he reverses the familiar pairing of crouching slave and standing master or savior so familiar from abolitionist imagery and avoids its racialized polarity of passive black victim and active white agent. Rogers would address such issues overtly in a more striking role reversal a few years later by showing an African American rescuing an injured soldier in Wounded Scout: A Friend in the Swamp (1936.655, 1940.844).

Thomas Paine was born in England, the son of a Quaker corsetmaker. He came to the Colonies in 1774 with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, and two years later published his pamphlet "Common Sense," which advocated separation of the Colonies from England.

These bronzes served as the master models for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Rogers' three Rip Van Winkle groups comprise his first formal series. The artist's long-standing interest in storytelling was already well known, and viewers enjoyed decoding the narratives implied in the meticulous detail of his groups. For this serial subject, Rogers expanded his notion of narrative beyond the use of accessories to create a more powerful sense of temporality with multiple groups. He chose a particularly appropriate theme, which centers on the passage of time. Washington Irving wrote "Rip Van Winkle" in 1819, and it quickly became one of his most popular tales. It tells about the years before the American Revolutionary War, when Rip Van Winkle lives in a village at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains. An amiable man whose home and farm suffer from his lazy neglect, he is loved by everyone except his wife. One autumn day he escapes her nagging by wandering into the mountains. There he encounters strangely dressed men, rumored to be the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew, who are playing ninepins. After drinking some of their liquor, he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes and returns to his village, where he finds twenty years have passed. Late-nineteenth-century Americans were intimately familiar with Irving's story and its popularity owed in large part to its huge success as a stage play starring Joseph Jefferson. One of the most acclaimed actors of his time, Jefferson first starred in a production of Rip Van Winkle in 1859. By 1883 he estimated that he had played the part on no fewer than 4,500 occasions. Rogers saw Jefferson play the role in 1869, and he asked Jefferson to sit for the sculptures. The artist's talents as a portraitist served him well; the series enjoyed acclaim and popularity, remaining in Rogers' catalogue until the end of his career. Praises for the series connected it closely with Jefferson and his fame as Rip, making the groups as much icons of popular culture as of literary culture. One critic of Rogers' sculptures spent nearly as much ink on Jefferson as on the works themselves, claiming, "Jefferson has made the story of Rip more truly his own than it even is Washington Irving's." In taking on a beloved American story that had been turned into a wildly successful play, Rogers translated Irving's story from book to stage to plaster, and he carefully negotiated the layers of meaning that accumulated with each of these transitions. He made judicious choices about which aspects he would retain and which he would eliminate, taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of his medium. Contemporary critics were well aware of these fine distinctions, and more than one noted that the settings Rogers chose were taken not from the play, but from Irving's story. The New York Evening Post writer commented that in spite of Rip's "'Jeffersonian' cast," the surroundings closely followed Irving's text. A Chicago critic pointed out that "although [Rogers] faithfully portrays the great actor in the person of Rip, he does not copy any situation occurring in the drama." At the same time, Rip was "attired in a dress literally copied from what Jefferson wears in the early scenes of the play, every fold and wrinkle and tatter of which is familiar to us all." Rogers' union of literature, theater, and sculpture was considered particularly nuanced and successful: one writer noted, "If there is less of the plain A.B.C. in these groups than Mr. Rogers has usually given to the world, there is a delicate, half-hidden subtlety of expressions and touch that are nonetheless readily comprehended by those who can read character by facial expression." Rogers introduced each composition in his sales catalogues with a quote from Irving's tale explaining the action, and Jefferson's character and likeness are naturally the focus of attention. However, the space Rogers created was not a theatrical box with one frontal vantage point (as in his later Shakespearean groups). Rather, Rogers exploited the sculptural medium to show each incident in the round, from all sides. His spiraling compositions create a vertiginous sense of disorientation that is perfectly in keeping with the mood of Irving's tale. In this second group, after having been driven from his home by his wife, Rip travels up the mountain, where he hears someone calling his name. Rogers' catalogue quoted Irving, describing how Rip and his dog Wolf met a "short, square-built old fellow, with thick bushy hair and a grizzled beard. His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion. . . . He bore on his shoulder a stout keg, that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approach and help him with the load." Rogers' composition leads the viewer from the gnome looking up at Rip with twinkling eyes to Rip's dog, Wolf, who twists around his master and looks warily at the mysterious stranger. Rip's hand on Wolf's collar continues the line of action to his puzzled and suspicious expression (both figures carry guns, lending a note of menace). Rogers created a richly textured narrative that invites the viewer to follow the spiral around all sides of the piece.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Going for the Cows can be seen as a pendant to Rogers' We Boys (1929.96, 1936.661, 1936.711) of the previous year. These small, similarly scaled groups represent nostalgic country idylls centered on a horse. The sculptor's long-standing interest in animals was evident more than a decade before when he wrote to his mother, "I want to make studies of animals and horses particularly." He took detailed measurements of a variety of horses, and two years after releasing this sculpture he displayed studies of equine anatomy at the National Academy of Design. He also studied Eadweard Muybrudge's pioneering photographs of horses in motion. Rogers produced a number of other sculptures in which horses figure prominently, most notably a life-size equestrian monument to the Civil War general John F. Reynolds. In this rural scene, a boy has ridden to pasture and has lowered the bars of the fence to gain entry, but he and his dog have been diverted from their errand by their investigation of a woodchuck's hole. The boy's face glows with fascinated pleasure; it was said that a member of the Silliman family, one of Rogers' New Canaan, Connecticut, neighbors, was the model. The dog represents another meticulous and affectionate animal study; Rogers' sketchbook (1955.275) includes a drawing of the dog, called Dash. Though only the torso and hind legs of Dash can be seen, the tensed muscles and wagging tail convey its enthusiasm. The composition is framed by the masterfully rendered horse contentedly munching grass. Its body curves protectively around the boy and dog, forming a proscenium for their small drama. Like Rogers' We Boys of the previous year, Going for the Cows was perceived as an appeal to a simple rural past. One writer declared that everyone must sympathize with the boy shirking his work, "for everyone has been a boy or girl . . . and knows from experience or feeling how necessary it is for that boy to watch that dog and, if possible, find that woodchuck." The group continued to be popular through the 1870s and into the 1880s. Later comments included "What busy business man, exiled from the farm, does not stop with a longing homesick feeling, to look once more at 'Going for the Cows?'" The sculpture could be seen as an escape from the cares and complexities of modern urban life to the pleasures of childhood; indeed, Rogers remembered his own youthful years in the country with great fondness. Rogers wrote that the subject "was intended to be so plain that the most careless observer will not fail to see the joke!" This work and We Boys both tell simple and pleasing stories that lack the scale and narrative ambition of some of his works from the preceding years. The early 1870s were a period of experimentation for Rogers as he cast about for new subjects after the success of his Civil War groups. His situation was similar to that of Winslow Homer, the other American artist known for his war subjects. In the early 1870s Homer, too, created seemingly uncomplicated scenes of children enjoying country settings, such as Snap the Whip of 1872 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In addition to rural genre, Rogers assayed subjects from literature and theater, sentimental romantic narratives, portraits, and even large figures for outdoors. His pace slowed during this period, perhaps owing to indecision about which path to follow. By the late 1870s he had returned to complex, richly detailed theater subjects, and his genre themes also became larger, more detailed, and more closely connected with contemporary life.

This portrait bust represents the sculptor's daughter at the age of six. At the time, he was using the child as a model for the little girl in the group, "Hide and Seek," which became one of the favorites at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Rogers made numerous replicas, but it was the one he kept as his own that came to the Society many years later as a gift of the subject herself.

Rogers earned his early fame from his Civil War subjects, and after the war ended he produced a few more sculptures that memorialized the Northern leaders of the conflict. As a monument to three key figures in the war, General Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and the slain president Abraham Lincoln, The Council of War became one of Rogers' most resonant works. The idea for the group came from Stanton. Rogers asked for his advice through his wife's cousin, John H. Clifford of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Stanton wrote to Clifford describing one of the president's key councils of war in March 1864, immediately after Grant was given charge of all the Union armies. "Lieutenant General Grant[,] after returning from his first visit to the Army of the Potomac, laid before the President the plan of operations he proposed to adopt. This was at the War Department, and the group would embrace the three figures of the President, Secretary of War and General Grant. It would require no accessories but a roll or map in the hands of the General." Rogers' composition is very close to Stanton's suggestion except for the map, which, in the hands of the president rather than the secretary of war, makes Lincoln the central figure. The artist also added a scrolled paper, perhaps another map, curving behind Lincoln's feet, and he draped Lincoln's chair, perhaps to eliminate the distraction of its detailed surfaces. Rogers took great care in preparing to model the three likenesses, visiting Grant and Stanton and using photographs for reference. For the assassinated president he relied entirely on photographs. Rogers' oeuvre shows a mastery of portraiture that often goes unacknowledged, but here his talents were on full display and universally praised. Critical responses to the sculpture often noted with wonderment Rogers' great success in capturing likenesses of these three men, whose faces were as well known to the public as any man's was at the time. Some accounts noted the particular difficulty of rendering Lincoln, whose lanky, ungainly figure was a challenge for artists to realize in the heroic fashion appropriate to the man considered a martyr for the republic. Rogers was congratulated for not sacrificing accuracy for "elegance of form"; he was credited with giving the figure dignity but also an accurate sense of the man's physical presence through the awkward placement of his legs. The president's son Tad later wrote that his family considered The Council of War the most lifelike rendering of his father in sculpture. Stanton, too, congratulated the artist for surpassing any other likeness he had ever seen. In the years immediately following the Civil War, Americans struggled with the difficult psychological work of understanding the cataclysmic changes that had been wrought on the country and their own lives. Monument building was an important part of the public task of dealing with the conflict. Individuals could attempt the private work with the aid of more personal monuments. The Council of War functioned as a monument in miniature that could be placed in one's home. Even before the group was released to the public, the New York Evening Post was quick to distinguish it as a "higher flight" than Rogers' earlier Civil War subjects. Eight years later it was still considered "worthy of reproduction in marble as a historical subject." Viewers eagerly embraced these faithful portrayals as personal memorials that could take on their intense, private feelings about the war and the men depicted. These individual responses are reflected in the wide variation of critical interpretations of the three men's expressions. In the years after the group was released, writers called Lincoln's face by turns sad and anxious, lit up with hope, and cheerfully approving of Grant's plan. Comments on Stanton's expression ranged from "thoughtful attention," to reflective, to irritable. Even though Rogers marketed the group at the relatively high price of $25, it was one of his most popular works. He produced three versions that show slight variations in the position of Stanton's hands and the position of his head.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. One of Rogers' largest and most accomplished groups, The Balcony showcases the mature sculptor's skills. Every surface is embellished with remarkable detail and texture, including hair, fabrics, and an elaborate iron railing resting on an ivy-covered stone base. It stands as a landmark of the size and high quality of sculpture that could be reproduced in plaster for large-scale distribution in the late nineteenth century. It was also Rogers' tallest plaster to date, in keeping with the growing technical ambition that marked his late career. Rogers depicted a well-to-do matron who has emerged from her home. She holds her son as he leans down to bestow a few coins on two young street musicians below. The woman's flowing headdress gives her the appearance of a benevolent Madonna. Both she and her boy are dressed in fine clothes that connote their status, as does the richly decorated railing. On the street level, the children have finished their song and await their reward. The girl bids her dog to sit still on his hind legs with a piece of meat balanced on his nose; even he must perform to earn his keep. As Rogers often did, he turned to his children for models; in this case he used his daughter Katherine and his son Charles. [names correct as interpolated?] Rogers sometimes included famous actors and political figures in his sculptures, and here the dog is something of a celebrity: contemporary newspapers noted that Quiz, who sat for the sculpture, was a Scotch terrier from Queen Victoria's royal kennels who belonged to a visiting cousin of the artist's wife. The dog was noted for his ability to perform the trick that Rogers depicted of sitting patiently on his hind legs with a tempting morsel on his nose. The piece alluded to the virtue of charity, a subject that artists traditionally presented in an idealized or historical guise. Rogers addressed the subject explicitly in his 1866 The Charity Patient (1936.648, 1929.99), which shows a private transaction between a doctor and an anxious mother. In The Balcony, however, the message may have hit uncomfortably close to home, since Rogers made painfully clear the gulf separating rich and poor. Indeed, contemporary periodicals commented that this scene was played out every day on the streets of New York. The mother presides over the scene at a remarkable height. She and her son are quite literally on a pedestal above the less fortunates below; their clothes may be ragged, but they appear well fed and picturesquely happy with their vagabond life. Rogers presented them as innocents deserving of compassion, but he downplayed the difficulties of their lives. He was not alone in taking a sentimental view of the poor. Many late-nineteenth-century artists did not embrace social issues during this period or, if they did, only very obliquely. For instance, Rogers' friend J. G. Brown was well known for painting sympathetic ragamuffin bootblacks and newsboys. Rogers' sculpture was both praised and criticized, not for the realism of its subject, but for its execution, as writers discussed the astounding detail with which the figures were rendered. The artist considered this one of his major works; The Balcony inaugurated the opening of his new showroom at 23 Union Square, and he displayed it at the National Academy of Design's 1880 annual. However, by that time he was a mature sculptor whose style did not follow the new trend toward a more suggestive and less explicitly detailed form of realism, and his work attracted little critical attention.