This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Board games are a recurring theme in Rogers' work, particularly the game of checkers. In 1855 he modeled a small clay group after the painting The Card Players by the English genre painter Sir David Wilkie. He reprised the theme a few years later, in 1859-60. He returned to the subject once again in 1875, and instead of creating a simple variation on a well-known English theme, he developed a much more sophisticated composition that addresses uniquely American class issues and demonstrates how much he had matured as an artist, both technically and intellectually, in the intervening years. Rogers' 1859-60 Checker Players (1949.276, 1936.717) offers a simple vignette of two rural men, one old and one young, with the younger crowing over his anticipated victory. In this later version, the opponents are pointedly differentiated by class. Rogers' sales catalogue described the two men as "a gentleman who has gone up to the farm with his wife and baby" and "the farmer, who has forced his opponent's pieces into positions where they cannot be moved without being taken." The older player is a well-to-do city dweller, as can be seen by his suit, spats, and fashionable muttonchops. He stoops over the game board and holds a fan at his side, a feminine accessory that slightly compromises his masculinity. The young farmer across from him sits bolt upright, full of energy. He is clean-shaven and simply dressed in shirtsleeves and sturdy boots. He points out his winning position to the gentleman with a hearty laugh. Checkers Up at the Farm struck a chord with Americans; it was Rogers' most popular group next to Coming to the Parson, selling about five thousand plasters. Rogers included it in his contribution to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition; ever the canny marketer, he was no doubt aware that a subject embracing rural America would prove highly popular with the many millions who descended on Philadelphia's Fairmount Park from all parts of the country. Written responses to the group reflect its appeal to the general public. Critics relished telling the tale of the simple farmer besting the sophisticated urbanite with native unspoiled intelligence, describing the men's garb and behavior in detail. During this period class differences grew ever more marked, and populations were increasingly concentrated in cities. In addition, concerns were building about the effects of cloistered, sedentary, office life on the modern man's masculinity. Rogers' vignette offered an affirmation of native Yankee intelligence and the virtues of country life in the person of the clever, virile farmer. Rogers' new 1875 composition is considerably more complex than the one he presented fifteen years before. The mastery of texture and detail, human anatomy and expression that he developed in the intervening years is remarkable. He also added two figures in the form of the city gentleman's wife and baby. The artist's wife, Hattie, posed as the attractive, well-dressed woman who watches the game with interest and holds their baby, who plays at trying to kick the checkers off the game board. At first glance they seem superfluous, but Rogers explained in his sales catalogue that they were on a family visit. Perhaps his intention was to soften his critique of class differences by making the urban man more sympathetic through his fatherly role. Though press notices rarely pointed it out, the city gentleman takes his defeat with an expression of good humor. His easy and benevolent acknowledgment of his country opponent's virtues allowed both urban and rural Americans to share the joke.

Rogers produced several groups after Shakespearean subjects in the late 1870s and 1880s, but he had declared his high ambitions for them decades earlier. In 1861 he wrote that he wanted to produce a series in uniform size "so that they will mate well" and continued, "Taking my designs from Shakespeare will give them a dignity that everyday subjects don't have." By the time Rogers turned to these themes in earnest, he had developed the skill and capability to produce a tour de force like The Wrestlers. Taken from act 1, scene 2 of As You Like It, Rogers' scene depicts the young Orlando about to throw Charles, the professional wrestler favored to win the match, as Celia, Rosalind, and the jester Touchstone look on. Rogers' elaborate composition compresses the action into a small, round area, in contrast to the squared-off stagelike space of his other Shakespearean groups. The circular base of the sculpture highlights a spiraling composition that draws the eye from the concerned faces of Celia and Rosalind down to the jester's amusement, continuing to the underdog Orlando bodily lifting Charles. Rogers presented the men in a remarkably precarious position that showcases his hard-won ability to create complex poses and reliably reproduce them en masse in plaster. The sculpture is striking for the astounding detail of the women's and the jester's costumes and the elaborate (if abbreviated) balcony on which they stand. Also notable is Rogers' mastery of the human figure, demonstrated in Charles' musculature, entirely convincing even in his contorted pose. Rogers' description for The Wrestlers goes beyond the well-known text of the play. Whereas the script merely indicates that the two men wrestle, Rogers offers a more detailed scenario, explaining that "Charles is thrown, for, by a trick well known to professional wrestlers, as they stand facing each other, Orlando suddenly seizes Charles by one arm and whirls him around, which enables him to clasp him from behind and lift him from the ground so as to throw him on his shoulders. Charles tries to break Orlando's hold by twisting open his hands." Rogers was an avid theatergoer and, though not a sports enthusiast, attended a professional fight while developing this group to study the positions of the athletes. The sculptor's other Shakespearean groups were titled with a line from the play being depicted, and he often chose scenes that established principal characters' relation to one another or that began the trajectory of the action, as in "Madam, Your Mother Craves a Word with You" or "Ha! I Like Not That!" In this case, Rogers chose not a dialogue, but an exciting and dynamic action, as the untutored naïf Orlando triumphs over the trained professional Charles, who has just severely injured his previous three opponents and has been charged by Orlando's brother to beat the young man soundly. Orlando's victory demonstrates his natural virtues and marks the occasion when he falls in love with Rosalind, whom he will meet later in her disguise as Ganymede. Contemporary responses to the sculpture show the public's familiarity with the play, which was presented in New York almost every year in the 1870s and early 1880s. Rogers' genre scenes and Civil War subjects told their own self-contained stories that could be deciphered by the careful observer. In this case, however, Rogers depicted a moment taken from a much larger narrative. Late-nineteenth-century Americans were far more familiar with the works of Shakespeare than we are today, and though Rogers' catalogues always provided elaborate explanations so viewers could situate the scene in the context of the play, he assumed their familiarity with the larger story line.

The subject of this portrait was the donor of N-YHS carriage collection. Founder is Bisceglia.

Born in Cincinnati and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Ochs became owner and publisher of the Chattanooga "Times" at the age of twenty. In 1896 he acquired controlling interest in the "New York Times" and was its publisher from that date until his death.

In 1908 Gutzon Borglum's mammoth six-ton marble head of Lincoln was accepted by a joint committee of Congress and may be seen today in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol; it was that monumental head that led Borglum to the idea of carving colossal images of southern heroes on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia, and ultimately to the Mount Rushmore group in South Dakota, in which the face of Lincoln joins those of Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. The Society's bronze statuette may have been made as a competition model for the statue of Lincoln for Cincinnati's Lytle Park; the commission was ultimately awarded to George Grey Barnard.

The subject was born at Central Bridge, N.Y., the son of George and Emeline (Vedder) Westinghouse. In 1868 he designed the first air brake for use on passenger trains and the next year he organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Co. to produce it; this device greatly improved the safety of the railroads, and when it was adopted by nearly every railroad in the U.S., the foundation for the Westinghouse industrial fortune was laid.

Foremost among America's early writers, Irving is best remembered as the author of "Diedrich Knickerbocker's" A History of New York (which was dedicated to The New-York Historical Society), The Sketch Book, and the tales "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He was born in New York, the son of William Irving, a merchant, and Sarah (Sanders) Irving. After studying law as a young man he was admitted to the bar, but his love of English literature soon led him to his first efforts as an author. His satirical History of New York (1809), written as if old Diedrich Knickerbocker were telling the story, established his reputation. Following the War of 1812, Irving went to England for several years where he became the friend of the leading literary figures of the day - among them Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. The Sketch Book by "Geoffrey Crayon" (1819-20) made him famous overnight. In 1826 he was appointed attache to the American embassy in Madrid, where he continued to write. From 1829 to 1832 he was secretary of legation in London. He then returned to America, where his literary contributions continued through the 1850s. About 1835 he purchased the old Dutch house he called Sunnyside in Tarrytown, New York, which became famous as his residence and as a gathering place for the artists and writers of the time. His last years were devoted to his Life of George Washington. The original of this bust is at the Washington Irving Memorial, Irvington-on-Hudson, and dates from 1928. In the late 1920s French made a series of excellent portrait busts of famous authors, consulting other portraits or photographs to obtain his likenesses since the subjects were dead.

Poet, essayist, and statesman, Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Lowell, a Unitarian minister, and Harriet Brackett (Spence) Lowell. After graduating from Harvard in 1838 he studied law, but before he had established a practice his interests turned to literary matters. He knew Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau in nearby Concord, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was teaching at Harvard when he was a student there; in fact, in 1855 Lowell was to succeed Longfellow as professor of modern languages at Harvard. His first book of poetry, Poems, appeared in 1844, followed by a second volume in 1848. Also dating from the latter year are The Vision of Sir Launfal, A Fable for Critics, and the first series of The Biglow Papers; with these publications Lowell became recognized as one of the leaders of the American literary world. He was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1857-62) and was an editor of the North American Review (1863-72). In 1877 he was appointed American minister to Spain and from 1880 to 1885 he was the minister to England. The original of this bust, dated 1904, is at Harvard University. The Society's replica was produced in 1905, the year the subject was elected to the Hall of Fame. James Russell Lowell was one of the distinguished men present at Concord on that April day in 1874 when young Daniel Chester French's bronze statue The Minuteman was unveiled, thereby launching his brilliant career.