Imagining the Ordinary

Abstract

John Rogers developed and satisfied a mass market for sculpture as no previous American sculptor had. He self‐consciously rejected the prevailing neoclassical style, sought popular acclaim from the outset, and molded his art to that end. In his most popular groups, Coming to the Parson (1870) and Checkers Up at the Farm (1875), he imagined an ordinary world of warm, pure sentiment and harmonious social relationships. Rogers’s genre sculptures functioned both as a means of self‐identification with a broadly middle‐class value system and as a way to help reconcile internal contradictions within it.