After the end of the Civil War, Rogers explored several possibilities for new subjects, among them pressing social issues, as seen in The Foundling of late 1870. In this work a young girl stands outside a vine-covered gate, listening carefully to the scene playing out behind it. Her tattered clothes signal her poverty, and her slight stature and her hair, still in pigtails, indicate her youth. She has left her child in a basket at the gate, and an older man has picked up the infant. He wears a dressing gown and holds a lantern, suggesting that the scene takes place under cover of darkness. He gazes at the baby with a benevolent and bemused look as it grasps his chin in an innocent, trusting gesture. Rogers made a bold choice to confront the issue of illegitimacy directly; though perennial, it would have seldom been a topic of discussion in polite society. Unlike his Civil War groups, it did not address an experience shared by all but, rather, advocated charity and sensitivity toward the less fortunate in difficult circumstances. Critics echoed Rogers' call: the New York Evening Post considered it a fitting segue from Rogers' Civil War groups, declaring him "ingenious and effective in making plastic art the hand-maid of charity, and in thus celebrating the victories of peace." The Boston Daily Evening Transcript observed that Rogers had taken as his new subject "life among the lowly." The writer quoted the subtitle of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been a galvanizing force in the abolitionist movement, suggesting that Rogers' sculpture could represent a similar call to action. Another critic reiterated this sentiment, calling it "the story of real life in some of its dark phases," and pointing out that its message could not be disregarded "if we would seek to relieve the poor and rescue the unfortunate." Rogers, himself sensitive and sentimental, was no doubt bolstered by his recent success and moved by compassion to attempt a theme similar to his earlier work The Slave Auction (1928.28) of 1859, which represented not merely a perceptive reflection of contemporary life but also a call for change. Though The Slave Auction had sold poorly because of its controversial subject, a decade later Rogers' established popularity gave him the opportunity to try again. It appears that The Foundling was not among his most commercially successful works, since there are relatively few extant copies today. In spite of its slower sales, Rogers must have considered the sculpture an important part of his oeuvre and his message to the public; though he often dropped less popular works from his sales catalogue if they were poor sellers, this one remained for nearly twenty years. However, Rogers did not continue to pursue such themes. Instead, he turned to the very private and the very public, in the form of domestic life and theatrical scenes.

Late in Rogers' career his views of everyday America evolved from generalized sentimental scenes of life passages such as courtship, marriage, or the birth of a child to more specific and increasingly nuanced subjects that investigated movements of popular culture, such as home theatricals, having one's photograph taken, and, here, the "science" of phrenology. In 1796 the German scientist Franz Joseph Gall developed the theory that a person's personality could be discerned from the shape of his or her skull. The theory gained great currency in America during the nineteenth century, inspired by the visit of advocate Dr. J. G. Spurzheim in 1832 and spurred by the brothers Lorenzo Niles Fowler and Orson Squires Fowler, who established the phrenological business and publishing house Fowler and Wells in New York City. Though phrenology gained many adherents through the mid-nineteenth century, by this period it was increasingly viewed with skepticism. Rogers was no exception to the movement's early popularity. He wrote of being examined at a phrenology lecture in Cochituate, Massachusetts, in 1848, when he was nineteen. More than twenty years later, the American Phrenological Journal published a profile and analysis of the artist: The mental and motive temperaments are well marked . . . and contribute to that activity, energy, and vivacity for which he is distinguished. The head is well built up in the crown, indicating much strength of character in the way of ambition and persistence. We would not call him a forward or pretentious man, but rather mild and forbearing. . . . The artistic and mechanical faculties are evidently large, while the rather heavy and depressed brows show those organs large which deal with the properties of matter. He is a superior judge of proportion and weight, and methodical in his arrangements, while, at the same time, his reasoning faculties appear to be large enough to give him a disposition to reflect on the origin and nature of subjects. He is probably more the thinker than the talker, and finds in his art, the most effective medium for expressing his sentiments. Rogers responded elliptically that they "made a pretty good guess" at his personal traits. His characteristic reserve and dry humor make it difficult to tell whether he admired the accuracy of the report or whether he did indeed consider it merely a "guess." However, it is likely that with this sculpture, given the lighthearted setting of a costume party and the artist's own description of the sculpture, Rogers was not endorsing the theory but, rather, gently mocking a passing fad. According to his sales catalogue, the man wearing a phrenological cap mapping the regions of the skull "is examining the bumps of his friend . . . and making fun of his supposed discoveries." The "phrenologist," dressed in a courtly costume, examines his subject's head and leans forward on tiptoe, jokingly shielding his mouth with his hand to tell his fellow partygoers (and the viewer) his conclusions in confidence. His examinee is dressed as the character Poo Bah from the popular Gilbert and Sullivan musical The Mikado, which had debuted in London the previous year and enjoyed great success in the United States, including a long and wildly successful run in New York that extended into 1886, the year that Rogers released this sculpture. The sleeve of the man's robe bears the image of the three little maids central to the plot. In referencing a humorous and farcical play, Rogers intimated that the action between the two partygoers is similarly comical. The man thusly dressed leans away, flourishing his fan and smiling warily, leaving the viewer to wonder whether he hears the phrenologist's findings and, if so, whether he finds them accurate. Phrenology at the Fancy Ball attests to Rogers' ongoing interest in theatrical amusements, not only in the form of his scenes from popular plays but also in subjects that depict amateurs, such as The Mock Trial and Private Theatricals. His fascination with everyday Americans taking on new identities and playing out their own dramas resonates strongly with his own narrative bent, and perhaps also with a wish to transcend the reserve that the Phrenological Journal hinted at, a characteristic that Rogers sometimes regretted. Identifying popular culture movements at the height of their fame is a delicate task, and Rogers may have overestimated phrenology's continued appeal, even as a comic subject. Though his sales records have not been found, it appears that Phrenology at the Fancy Ball was not popular. By 1892 Rogers had reduced the price to a mere five dollars, when most of his other works sold for ten to fifteen dollars, suggesting that it would not sell as the usual price. As a result, few were produced, making it among his rarer groups today.

Starting in the late 1860s, Rogers turned to theatrical scenes and domestic subjects. This group represents a combination of both: an incident set at home that might easily be read as a scene from a light comedy. A fashionably dressed young man has just made a proposal of marriage to his amour, but a tap on the window has interrupted their interview before she can answer. Startled, she has jumped up and upset her chair. Both look intently out the window, the young man with surprise and alarm, the lady with coquettish curiosity; Rogers explained that she sees someone at the window who is more to her liking. She is trying to withdraw her hand from the young man's grasp, but he holds it tightly, unwilling to surrender her to his unseen rival. At his feet two cats circle each other around his hat in a humorous imitation of the two men vying for the young woman. Rogers had taken courtship as a subject four years earlier with Parting Promise (1940.203, 1929.82), which depicts a man putting a ring on the finger of his intended before going on a journey. In contrast to the unabashed sentiment of that earlier work, The Tap on the Window is a comic image that plays on the old theme of rival suitors. Rogers was an avid theatergoer, and this sculpture can be seen as a bridge between his domestic and theater subjects. Rather than presenting each character clearly in the vignette, Rogers concealed the mysterious person disturbing the scene. He is offstage, so to speak, and both the young man and the reluctant object of his affections seem to be waiting for him to enter and oust the less-desired suitor. As a satire on domestic genre, and perhaps even a satire on Rogers' own earlier, more sentimental work, this group is closely linked to his subjects taken directly from popular plays of his time, and also to his later rendering of theatrical amusements at home, including Private Theatricals: Last Moments behind the Scenes (1929.91) and The Mock Trial: Argument for the Prosecution (1929.114, 1926.35). Humor had played a supporting role in Rogers' work since the beginning of his career, but in groups such as this it began to take center stage. Rogers issued the work in time for holiday shopping. One commentator assured readers that it would make a tasteful gift. The writer emphasized that the sculptor's artistic credentials made it permissible for him to venture into the realm of humor, pointing out Rogers' other works that incorporated key figures in the country's recent history: "the long line of statesmen, patriots, poets and preachers who have been so faithfully delineated and embodied in the works of Rogers, the artist."

Though his early work The Slave Auction is better known, the subject for The Checker Players marked Rogers' public debut. For many years he had modeled small sculpture groups in clay for family and friends. In 1859, while Rogers was working in Chicago for the city surveyor's office, he was asked to contribute a sculpture to a charity bazaar, and he created a clay model similar to this one, based on an engraving after The Card Players, a painting by the English artist David Wilkie. It was a rousing success, raising $75 and earning Rogers favorable notice in a Chicago newspaper. The Chicagoan Robert Collyer wrote to the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown noting Rogers' success with The Checker Players, praising his "wonderful talent for sculpture." Rogers was encouraged by his success to move to New York later that year, when he produced this more accomplished version of The Checker Players. He exhibited it in 1860 at the National Academy of Design and placed the group for sale at the fancy goods purveyor Williams & Stevens. Rogers wrote optimistically to his aunt, Mrs. Ephraim Peabody, "judging from those who have seen it I think it is going to take." The Checker Players was often mentioned in later years as his first work, and as a humorous scene of domestic life enacted by carefully articulated characters, it is one of his most characteristic. His sales catalogue described the game in progress between young and old players: "It is the old man's turn to move, but he cannot do so without being taken. His antagonist is laughing at his perplexity." Both figures appear to be rural workingmen. The younger has put a smock commonly worn by farmers over his vest and tie; he points out his victorious position on the game board to his bemused older competitor, who appears in work attire without a jacket. In this vignette, the younger man has overtaken the elder with wit and skill, and Rogers may well have identified with the subject in his hopes for triumphing in the New York art world, over his father's objections. Rogers is said to have been an inveterate checkers player, and he returned to the subject in later years with Checkers Up at the Farm of 1875 (1936.629). In the later version, he refined the players' roles and made a more pointed reference to the virtues of rural life. The younger man defeats his older opponent once again, and, while he is still portrayed as a farmer, balancing a hoe in one hand, the older man he defeats is a fashionably dressed urbanite.

Charlotte Cushman was recognized in the mid-1800s as the leading tragic and melodramatic actress of the American stage.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Rogers' sales catalogue describes this group as follows: "A Puritan Elder is riding home from Sabbath meeting. He has dropped the reins on the horse's neck and has been absorbed in studying his Bible. His daughter rides behind him on a pillion, while a young man walks by her side and offers her an apple from amongst the hatful he has gathered. This is considered a desecration of the Sabbath by the stern father, who looks at the young man reprovingly." At the apex of the composition is the Elder, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle. He glowers forbiddingly as he turns his head toward the young man handing an apple to his daughter. Their curving postures contrast with his stiff bearing. Their hands touch fleetingly, and their shared gaze parallels the older man's glare, which the young lovers barely notice. Rogers rendered the figures in simple Puritan dress. The two men wear high, wide-brimmed hats, though the Elder's is firmly placed on his head, enhancing his intimidating height, while the younger has taken his off to use as an apple basket-in perhaps another breach of decorum. Rogers was acclaimed for his mastery of equine anatomy, and the horse bearing the Elder and his daughter has a part in the story as well, pawing the ground as if impatient to be on its way. In this work the artist returned to the tried-and-true subject of courtship that he had used to great effect in Parting Promise (1929.82, 1940.203) and The Tap on the Window (1929.86), among other groups. However, this time he also satirized the nation's Pilgrim roots. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the country's origins, inspired by the 1876 centennial celebrations and by nativist fears that massive immigration might dilute American culture. Some artists responded by heroizing the early settlers, as in the case of John Quincy Adams Ward's life-size bronze The Pilgrim, commissioned in 1885 by the New England Society in the City of New York and installed in Central Park. Rogers took the opposite approach, skewering notions of the country's mythologized Puritan roots by gently mocking their strict codes of conduct. The Elder is a caricature of righteous indignation over a minor infraction of the code of Sabbath rest, and his consternation can only be exacerbated by the deleterious influence the supposedly wayward young man might have on his daughter. One writer chuckled, "one almost hears the uncorking of Puritanical vials of wrath." When Rogers created this sculpture, he was probably aware of contentious debates over another question of Sabbath rest, not least, whether cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art should open on Sundays to allow working people to attend. Here Rogers seems to have registered his opinion that such restrictions need not be taken to extremes. Newspapers often connected The Elder's Daughter with "Why Don't You Speak for Yourself, John?" (1936.660, 1926.36, 1958.14a) from the previous year, another scene of flirtation from the nation's early history, taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. The New Orleans Daily Picayune announced, "John Rogers Sculpturing Puritans Again," and other newspapers paired the two groups by illustrating them side by side. In the 1885 group Rogers took his inspiration from an already existing story, but in The Elder's Daughter his original conception suggests not only the wellspring of humor from which his subjects flowed but also a hint of mischievous irreverence rarely seen in his work.

We Boys is the first of several groups that demonstrate the artist's long-standing interest in horses; Rogers had written to his mother twelve years before, in 1860, "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. He went on to produce 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. Rogers' mastery served him in good stead with We Boys, in which the animal is as important to the action as the humans are. Rogers' catalogue describes how "The boys have brought the horse to the brook. While he has been drinking, the boy who drove him lost the reins, and is trying to regain them with his stick, but is alarmed at the threatening action of the horse, which is turning his head to bite, as he is irritated by the other boy, who is trying to climb on his back, and is pulling himself up by the horse-blanket." Rogers took as his models two neighbor boys near his New Canaan, Connecticut, home, James E. and Joseph M. Silliman. Although the boys are charming in their childlike poses, they are less detailed than Rogers' other figures from this period. Instead, the artist lavished extra care on the horse: its musculature is carefully developed, and the ridges around his nostrils indicate that he is snorting, giving him a vivid sense of action and even personality. Many commentators, familiar with equine behavior, noted that the horse's ears are laid back, indicating its disapproval of the shifting burdens on its back. The horse serves as an authority figure preparing to check the boys' mischief, suggesting the complex relationships that could develop between people and horses who were in daily contact, as was common on the farm and even in the city before the advent of the automobile. Some contemporary writers enjoyed We Boys as a simple scene of country life, but others understood it in nostalgic terms. It was called "a pleasant reminder of the childhood of many a man." One writer spoke directly to his readers: "it is more to you than pretty because you have been there yourself and know all about it." A Mrs. Mary E. Nealy was moved to write a poem based on the sculpture about important men looking back on their humble beginnings, opening with "O happy time of youthful joys! / When you and I were just 'we boys,' / When manhood's sober dignity / Dimmed not life's silver with alloys." The sculpture could be seen as an escape from the cares and complexities of modern life to the simple pleasures of childhood; indeed, Rogers remembered his own youthful years in the country with great fondness. Rogers created two versions of the sculpture. In the more commonly found version the horse's head is down, whereas in the rarer version its head is up and turned back in a more threatening aspect. The Boston Daily Evening Transcript pointed out "the ominous look his [the horse's] eyes have as he rolls them back," even in the more frequently encountered type. Perhaps this gesture of equine annoyance seemed amusing when its head was down, but moving the horse's head back toward the boys may have presented enough of a danger to break the spell of nostalgia. Few copies of the second type survive, suggesting that it sold poorly.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. We Boys is the first of several groups that demonstrate the artist's long-standing interest in horses; Rogers had written to his mother twelve years before, in 1860, "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. He went on to produce 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. Rogers' mastery served him in good stead with We Boys, in which the animal is as important to the action as the humans are. Rogers' catalogue describes how "The boys have brought the horse to the brook. While he has been drinking, the boy who drove him lost the reins, and is trying to regain them with his stick, but is alarmed at the threatening action of the horse, which is turning his head to bite, as he is irritated by the other boy, who is trying to climb on his back, and is pulling himself up by the horse-blanket." Rogers took as his models two neighbor boys near his New Canaan, Connecticut, home, James E. and Joseph M. Silliman. Although the boys are charming in their childlike poses, they are less detailed than Rogers' other figures from this period. Instead, the artist lavished extra care on the horse: its musculature is carefully developed, and the ridges around his nostrils indicate that he is snorting, giving him a vivid sense of action and even personality. Many commentators, familiar with equine behavior, noted that the horse's ears are laid back, indicating its disapproval of the shifting burdens on its back. The horse serves as an authority figure preparing to check the boys' mischief, suggesting the complex relationships that could develop between people and horses who were in daily contact, as was common on the farm and even in the city before the advent of the automobile. Some contemporary writers enjoyed We Boys as a simple scene of country life, but others understood it in nostalgic terms. It was called "a pleasant reminder of the childhood of many a man." One writer spoke directly to his readers: "it is more to you than pretty because you have been there yourself and know all about it." A Mrs. Mary E. Nealy was moved to write a poem based on the sculpture about important men looking back on their humble beginnings, opening with "O happy time of youthful joys! / When you and I were just 'we boys,' / When manhood's sober dignity / Dimmed not life's silver with alloys." The sculpture could be seen as an escape from the cares and complexities of modern life to the simple pleasures of childhood; indeed, Rogers remembered his own youthful years in the country with great fondness. Rogers created two versions of the sculpture. In the more commonly found version the horse's head is down, whereas in the rarer version its head is up and turned back in a more threatening aspect. The Boston Daily Evening Transcript pointed out "the ominous look his [the horse's] eyes have as he rolls them back," even in the more frequently encountered type. Perhaps this gesture of equine annoyance seemed amusing when its head was down, but moving the horse's head back toward the boys may have presented enough of a danger to break the spell of nostalgia. Few copies of the second type survive, suggesting that it sold poorly.

According to Gustavus Eisen, G. Rouse and other fictitious names appeared on a number of wax profiles of Washington in military dress during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They sometimes bear fictitious dates although the reliefs are modern. (See "Portraits of Washington," 3, 1932, pp. 881-82.)