This plaster served as a model for the granite bust now at the entrance to Roosevelt Memorial Library in Hyde Park, New York.

The subject was brought to this country in 1732 as a very small child, arriving in Philadelphia where he ultimately studied law and was admitted to the bar as a sergeant-at-law. He subsequently moved to Mt. Holly, Burlington County, New Jersey, where he served for many years as a judge.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. During the 1870s Rogers produced a variety of genre subjects that explore the limits of sentimentality in the context of his dual goals to offer a democratic art that was widely affordable and relatable, and to produce works of fine art. Through the mid-nineteenth century, sentimental culture emphasized the expression of personal feelings among men and women and encouraged an empathetic response toward others. This culture lingered in the popular mind (if not among intellectuals) into the 1860s and 1870s. The Favored Scholar partook of this tradition by offering a scene that resonated strongly with a broad audience, though perhaps not with artistic elites. Rogers depicted a winsome young woman in simple country dress standing at her teacher's desk. This handsome man looks at her with more than scholarly interest as he answers her question about the lesson, writing on her slate. Her reciprocal attraction is clear from the lilacs she has given him, now perched on his desk. Unbeknownst to the teacher, at the girl's feet is a young prankster who has torn pages from a book and twisted them onto his ears to mimic her curls. More evidence of his mischief can be seen on the front of the teacher's desk, which is full of graffiti, including a heart that alludes to the budding romance. The press and the public enthusiastically embraced The Favored Scholar, and it quickly became one of the artist's best-selling works. Rogers' sales catalogues included explanations of the action in his groups, but they tended to offer minimal detail. He wisely allowed viewers and critics to spin their own narratives around his subjects from the visual clues that he provided. Many writers divined from the rustic desk and the girl's attire that this was a country school, lending a feeling of nostalgia for the country's (supposedly) simpler, rural past. Rogers offered an escape into that past at a moment when the country was experiencing a severe economic downturn. In a most jarring juxtaposition, a brief item in Harper's Weekly on The Favored Scholar dated March 15, 1873, is placed next to a story about an urban woman who had to send her children to school with nothing to eat because her husband had lost his job. Above all, contemporary commentators relished the scene's romantic possibilities. As one writer put it, "safe it is to say that the 'Favorite [sic] Scholar' will, some later day, advance to the mathematics of life, and be called upon to prove that one and one make one, in accordance with the rule of the wedding ring." The winning combination of the beautiful but shy young girl, the handsome and eligible man, the obstacles (difficult but eminently surmountable) inherent in their roles, and, finally, the comic relief in the form of the roguish boy offered a rich narrative that captured the hearts of many Americans. Indeed, its appeal is easy to understand today, since it contains all the elements of a successful romantic comedy. Though it may seem overly sentimental to twenty-first-century eyes, Rogers' masterful blend of romance, nostalgia, and escapism made The Favored Scholar an icon of popular culture. However, in future works he did not exploit this easy formula of playing on amorous fantasies. Rather, he turned to other subjects that touched on family life and American intellectual life, specifically literature, history, and theater.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. The centennial year can be said to mark the pinnacle of Rogers' success. He exhibited twenty-nine of his groups at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and his popularity allowed him to open a new showroom on Broadway and Twenty-third Street. Rogers' crowning success of 1876 was Weighing the Baby, one of his best-loved sculptures. A young mother has taken her newborn to the local general store to have it weighed, and the proprietor leans over the scales, removing his glasses in a gesture of disbelief at the high number that the scales indicate. Unbeknownst to either of them, a roguish boy has grabbed the baby's blanket and is pulling the scale down to make it register the incredible weight. Rogers turned to his own growing family for models for this lighthearted domestic episode, namely, his wife, Hattie, their six-year-old son, Charlie, and their newborn son, David. He placed them on a square base that suggests a stage. Small objects such as cans and brushes serve as props to indicate the store setting. The artist cleverly placed his figures so that the mother and the merchant cannot see the mischievous boy's trickery, but the viewer can, as if he or she is an audience member seeing a bit of comic business downstage left. Critics relished retelling the joke in their descriptions of the sculpture, and the suggested narrative was so irresistible that one writer regretted that Rogers could not continue the action and show the boy being discovered and fleeing. However, these theatrical devices stop short of becoming a caricatured vaudeville skit, because Rogers' sincere and affectionate portrayals of his family soften the humor. Weighing the Baby was an immediate hit. Rogers introduced the sculpture for the 1876 holiday season, and his initial stock sold out before Christmas. Responses to the new group in contemporary periodicals show a shift in how the sculptor's works were perceived. Rogers purposely released new sculptures each year in time for the holiday season, and in 1876 they were discussed as much in terms of their suitability as gifts as for their artistic merits. One writer wished "everybody would consider how much better such an artistic work is for an investment than the multitude of trash sold at holiday time." The present-day scholar Melissa Dabakis called this group, "funny, lighthearted, and optimistic . . . emblematic of the imagery demanded by a reform-weary public in Gilded Age America." Reassuring domestic subjects like this one are often considered typical of Rogers' work. Their very popularity, though a mark of the wide-ranging esteem he enjoyed in his time, ultimately worked against Rogers' posthumous reputation by overshadowing the broad scope of his oeuvre.

By the late 1880s Rogers had enjoyed more than twenty-five years of popular and critical success and had issued over sixty small plaster groups. However, as his sales slowed, the artist began to sense that tastes were changing. He commented, "I begin to think that the public is tiring of this style of art. Accordingly I have turned my attention to more important work." Rogers branched out into large-scale sculpture, including the life-size equestrian bronze of General John Fulton Reynolds of 1884 that still stands outside Philadelphia's City Hall. Experimenting with yet another format, Rogers created this sculpture at one-third life size, inhabiting the middle ground between the domesticated humor and pathos of his plaster groups and the stern gravitas of the public statue of Fulton. Rogers intended the sculpture for public spaces either indoors or outdoors, such as lobbies, libraries, or parks. He chose a subject that had proven successful in the past, an episode from Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Nearly twenty years earlier he had produced Courtship in Sleepy Hollow (1947.146, 1926.33, 1950.79), a comic scene of the awkward Ichabod Crane wooing a bemused Katrina Van Tassel. Working in a much larger scale inspired Rogers to take on a more ambitious subject, the moment when Crane encounters the Headless Horseman, whose frightening tale he has heard from his rival suitor Brom Bones. The scene gave Rogers the opportunity to showcase his famous mastery of equine anatomy; in the previous decades he had included horses in several of his subjects, to much acclaim. Here the two horses pass close by one another; their flying manes and tails give a sense of their speed, and bring to life the flashing terror of Crane's sudden encounter with the ghost. The shaggy texture of Crane's horse shows it to be a nag, reminding the viewer of his poverty, whereas the other horse has a smooth, well-cared-for coat. Crane is almost unseated by his fright, and his hat has fallen to the ground. The fingers of his left hand dig into the horse's neck, and the veins of his hand [?] stand out, showing his strain as he leans back, his eyes bulging. The other rider sits confidently upright in the saddle and menaces Crane with the surrogate for his lost head, a pumpkin carved into a grim expression and wearing a hat. Rogers' work rewards careful observation, and a close look at the Headless Horseman reveals a man's face peering from beneath his cloak. Though Irving only hinted that Brom Bones posed as the Headless Horseman to frighten Crane away and win Katrina Van Tassel, Rogers left no doubt. The sculpture represents several departures in Rogers' oeuvre: a large-scale work, a bronze, a limited-edition subject that was intended for public display, and a work meant for display in the round in a sizable space. Though his plasters usually include details that allow for profitable viewing from the back and sides, in this work the viewer must circumnavigate the piece to see the two men's faces and to fully understand the story. In this way, Rogers created a sense of monumentality that is somewhat at odds with its comic, illustrational subject. The sculpture earned critical praise that was all the more satisfying for an aging artist whose work was being superseded by new artistic trends. When it was displayed at the National Academy of Design in the fall of 1887, the New York Herald thought it excellent. However, when it was exhibited in Boston, the Daily Evening Transcript pointed out the disjunction between its size and medium and its lighthearted subject, noting, "Although such a topic is ungrateful for sculptural treatment, a good deal of ingenuity has been displayed in the composition." Though it is a remarkably accomplished and imaginative work, Rogers may have uncharacteristically misjudged public taste. He was unable to move from the broad market for his plasters for private homes into the different arena for public sculptures. He priced the work at $1,500, not an unreasonable cost, but literally a hundred times that of his small plasters. There are no records of any orders for the bronze, making it a rare thing in his oeuvre: a one-of-a-kind group now little known and rarely seen.

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 the final group of the series, Rip has awakened from his twenty-year slumber and returned to his old homestead, now dilapidated and decayed. Rogers quoted Irving's words in his sales catalogue as he encounters what he thought was his dog, Wolf: "Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth and passed on. . . . 'My very dog,' sighed poor Rip, 'has forgotten me.'" Rogers depicted Rip standing before a few ramshackle relics of his former abode, his clothing in tatters. Rogers once again employed a composition that makes full use of the sculptural medium: the dog climbing away from Rip curves behind him, urging the viewer around the group and up to Rip's arm, his hand pressing his temple in disbelief.