William Earl Dodge, Sr., was a director of the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad, and the Delaware and Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company; he was also a philanthropist and an organizer of the Young Men's Christian Association. Ward was commissioned by the New York Chamber of Commerce to make a statue of Dodge, its president; this was cast in bronze and erected in New York in 1885. Ward carved a second version of the subject in marble three years later.

Rogers is best known for his multi-figure narrative groups, and this plaster is a rare example of a single figure composition. The sculptor was inspired by the upcoming celebration of the 1876 United States Centennial to take the country's founding father as his subject. He turned to plans he had made a few years before for an ambitious group called Camp Fires of the Revolution that was to include Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The group was never realized, but Rogers made use of his preparatory work for the figure of Washington. He had examined portraits and busts of the first President. His sketchbook at the New-York Historical Society includes notes on those depictions, as well as detailed sketches of his uniform. Rogers wrote apologetically of the sculpture to his mother, "I do not think you will consider it very interesting, for it tells no story and is simply George standing alone." However, even in the context of a single figure the artist constructed a subtle narrative that makes the sculpture more than a mere commemorative image. He depicted Washington as if arrested in a moment of action during the Revolutionary War. He is in uniform, complete with fringed epaulettes and cockaded hat. His riding boots, the gloves in his hand, and the cloak draped casually on the pillar behind him indicate that he has just dismounted from his horse. He stands not on a marble base that would indicate a monument, but on solid ground with grass beneath his feet, and he leans casually. Rogers modeled Washington's face after the ca. 1786 bust by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Rogers did merely copy the bust though. Rather, he gave Washington a thoughtful, alert expression as he looks into the distance. Washington was part of Rogers' substantial contribution to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. His display included twenty-nine sculptures, representing virtually all of his groups to date. Potter's American Monthly singled out Washington for illustration and the writer enthused, "his quick genius [has] caught the real soul of our hero, while most artists, before and since, have simply produced more or less vapid pictures of the mere face of the man." In spite of this praise the sculpture apparently did not sell well, perhaps because it was not a typical example of Rogers' work. It was withdrawn from his sales catalogue in 1888, and surviving examples are relatively rare.

Before settling on a final version of Franklin's portrait, Nini experimented with variants that excluded the fur cap or added a liberty cap. This rare plaster medallion is an experimental effort showing Franklin wearing spectacles, a difficult feature to render in a bas-relief. Nini sculpted the bar of the spectacles so it would pass below the eye, in order not to obscure it.

This cameo was cut by T. Saulini in 1840 when Asher B. Durand was in Europe with his friends Casilear, Kensett and Rossiter, passing the winter in Rome. James Draper, Kravis Curator of European Decorative Arts, said this cameo is by Tommaso Saulini, father of L. Saulini. Works by Tommaso are much rarer. The signature had been previously misread. The Saulinis were the leading cameo carvers for upper-class tourists in Rome and were associated with the Thorwaldsen studio [ this information should be further reconfirmed with James Draper, we expect him to follow up on this.]

Jefferson sat for a portrait by Houdon in 1789, and the plaster that resulted was exhibited at the Paris Salon that summer. A marble bust based on this plaster is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The New-York Historical Society's plaster cast is said to be "unquestionably from the hand of Houdon himself" and made directly from the mold of the original portrait (Bush, "Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson," 1962, p. 23, no. 10).

Departing for Europe nearly a year after graduation from Harvard in 1800, Allston had already determined to become a painter. After studying with Benjamin West in London he traveled about on the Continent, and became especially enamored of the epic-scale paintings and noble themes of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Mingled with this was a romantic delight in the mysterious and the bizarre - a characteristic he shared with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the early years of the new century Allston, along with John Vanderlyn, attempted to elevate American art from the limiting confines of portraiture and give it a monumental form which would equal the great artistic epochs of the past. Allston brought to America such exciting and grandiose subjects as Belshazzar's Feast, Elijah in the Desert, and Diana in the Chase. The public in general, however, did not take to him, preferring an indigenous art to his imported, strongly Italianate style. Allston returned to America in 1818 and spent the remainder of his life near Boston in the circle of artistic and philosophical enlightenment which centered there, but the total production of that last quarter century was devoted as much to philosophical writings and poetry as to painting. This bust of Allston was formerly attributed to Edward Brackett, who did in fact make a very similar portrait of the subject, marble versions of which are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Worcester Art Museum. The Society's bust, however, is virtually identical with one in the Boston Athenaeum and another in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, both of which were signed by Clevenger. A plaster version is in the National Academy of Design. Clevenger was anxious to follow Hiram Powers to Italy, but his wealthy Cincinnati patron, Nicholas Longworth, had insisted he prepare himself for the trip by modeling likenesses in the leading cities of the East Coast. Thus from late 1837 to the fall of 1840 (when he sailed for Europe), Clevenger worked in Washington, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where he soon became the leading sculptor of portrait busts. The trustees of the Boston Athenaeum persuaded the reticent Allston to sit for the bust in 1839, and the next year Clevenger took the plaster cast of it with him to Italy, where the marble versions were carved. The bust was modeled in Allston's studio in Cambridge, and during the same sittings George W. Flagg painted his portrait of the aging artist. Allston was quite impressed with Clevenger both as an artist and as a man. On December 5, 1839, he wrote to a friend, John Cogdell, in South Carolina that the sculptor had "every quality to make a great artist," and he described him as "modest, amiable, and single-hearted, loving his art for its own sake." Several years later, on June 29, 1843, Allston again wrote to Cogdell: "Clevenger's marble bust of me, which he made for the Athenaeum, so far surpasses the cast that . . . you would hardly know it to have been done from it; it is an exquisite work."