Visualizing 19th-Century New York Digital Publication

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John Rogers

Checkers Up at the Farm

1867

Painted plaster

20 × 17 1/4 × 11 1/4 in. (50.8 × 43.8 × 28.6 cm)

The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. Samuel V. Hoffman, 1928.29

John Rogers’s groups were a principal feature of many middle-class parlors in New York as well as the rest of the country. Rogers came to New York in 1860 and began mass-producing and selling his putty-colored plaster figurines from his Brooklyn “factory” and his Broadway showrooms by rejecting neoclassical scenes and the costly medium of marble in favor of everyday nineteenth-century scenes and plaster at an average price of fifteen dollars. One of his most popular groups, Checkers Up at the Farm, sold more than five thousand copies. With his wife and child looking on, the farmer in this group wins a checkers game against an urbane man, suggesting the symbolic triumph of traditional “country” values over modern city ways, a nostalgic sentiment appealing to upwardly mobile urban residents.

Virginia Fister