This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. 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.

Mary S. Hone was the daughter of the Hon. Philip Hone and Catharine (Dunscomb) Hone of New York. She was married to John Jones Schermerhorn (1806-1876) at Trinity Church on November 28, 1832. Her father had recorded, upon her engagement several months earlier: "Schermerhorn is a young man of most amiable disposition, good morals, agreeable deportment, and a gentleman, of a family with whom I shall consider it an honour to be allied." (The Diary of Philip Hone, 1928-1851, 1910, part 1, p. 60). On November 16, 1840, he wrote: "My heart sinks within me whenever my thoughts are concentrated upon the greatest grief which has ever oppressed it. . . . My dear, beloved Mary left this world of trouble and affliction, and, as I firmly and confidently believe, joined her sister angels in heaven, on Friday morning." (Ibid., part 2, p. 52). There were no children. Thomas Crawford had gone to Rome in 1835, the first American sculptor to take up permanent residence there. It was not until 1839 that he established his reputation as a sculptor with his statue of Orpheus (now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In the meantime, although he had been accepted as a student by the great neo-classicist Bertel Thorwaldsen, he produced portrait busts such as that of Mrs. Schermerhorn to help meet the expenses of his studio. After about 1840 Crawford did relatively few portrait busts, for his time was generally occupied with "ideal pieces" or full-length portrait statues.

The American statesman was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, the son of Ebenezer Webster and Abigail Eastman. After graduating from Dartmouth College he studied law and in 1805 was admitted to the bar. Webster became famous for his astute interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. After turning to politics he was elected to Congress from New Hampshire, serving there from 1813 to 1817. In 1816 he moved to Boston and a few years later was again elected to the House of Representatives, this time from Massachusetts. In 1827 he was sent to the U.S. Senate where he served with distinction for fourteen years before becoming U.S. secretary of state under Presidents William Henry Harrison and Tyler, an office he held from 1841-43. He thereafter returned to the U.S. Senate (1845-50) and was again named secretary of state in the cabinet of Millard Fillmore (1850-52). In 1852 he was the unsuccessful candidate for the Whig nomination for president, and he died that year at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Thomas Ball (1819-1911) was only beginning his career as a sculptor in Boston in 1852 when he first modeled the likeness of Daniel Webster. He recalled in his autobiography: "as [Webster's] procession was to pass through Tremont Street, you may be sure I was at [my studio] door to have a good look at him. . . . It seemed but a few days before the bulletins began to record his rapid decline, and then came the final announcement of his death. My bust was finished but a day or two before. . . ." (My Three Score Years and Ten, 1891). The next year Ball modeled a statuette of Webster, his first full-length figure, using his portrait bust for the likeness of the head. The statuette was the basis for Ball's two heroic size statues of Webster, one in Central Park, New York, the other for Concord, New Hampshire.

This figure stood in Knickerbocker Hall, erected for the Knickerbocker Stage Line at the northwest corner of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue. The building was torn down in 1867.

At the time at which the bust was sculpted there were few sculptors working at this time in NYC that were competent enought to produce a work of this quality. The style of the features is reminiscent of the work of Robert Ball Hughes although there is no documentation to support this attribution.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. In September 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Rogers wrote that he was working on a new group that he expected to be his most popular yet. He had just begun using bronze master models to cast his sculptures, which allowed him to create larger and more complex compositions that approach paintings in their detail and narrative power. Here he depicted a triumphant returning soldier visiting the local blacksmith, whose tools he is using to recount a battle; he has made a fortification on the floor at right, and a horseshoe and nails at left represent the opposing battery. The soldier is every bit the conquering hero, handsome, fervent, and still in full uniform. However, he crouches at the right of the composition, and the blacksmith stands at the apex. His age is indicated by his baldness and glasses, but he is of brawny and classicized proportions; veins bulge in his arms, and he is physically larger than the soldier, particularly when the two men's hands are compared. He easily rests his hammer on his anvil and watches the soldier's tale being played out on the floor of his workshop. At left a little girl shyly raises her apron to her mouth in a childlike gesture while grasping one of the blacksmith's mammoth fingers in her hand. Rogers was known for celebrating the everyday honor and courage of rank-and-file soldiers. But in this sculpture it is unclear exactly who the hero is; Rogers gave equal prominence to the older man who presumably stayed at home plying his trade and caring for his family. Rogers himself did not volunteer to serve and may have had a personal stake in ennobling both the civilian and the soldier (his draft notice arrived in April 1865, just weeks before the war ended). Rogers conceived the group a few months after the New York draft riots. March 1, 1863, marked the passage of the Enrollment Act, instituting the first Union draft. It was meant to encourage volunteering, but it backfired tragically. The law allowed draftees to commute their service by paying a fee of three hundred dollars or by hiring a substitute, and many complained that the dispensation made the conflict "a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight." For four days in July, New York erupted in a rampage of looting and violence in protest, resulting in 105 dead. Perhaps in response, Rogers offered a reassuring example of a vital young man returned safely home after a Union triumph, while also affirming the importance of those who stayed behind. Ultimately, it proved one of his most popular groups and remained in his sales catalogue until 1889, long after he had stopped offering his other Civil War subjects for sale.