ROGERS, Randolph

(b. 1825 Waterloo, N.Y., d. 1892 Roma)

American sculptor, known for his Victorian, often sentimental works. He was born in Waterloo, New York, grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was a dry goods clerk. He moved to New York City c. 1847, studied sculpture in Rome in 1848, and settled there. He opened a studio in Rome, and resided in that city until his death in 1892.

Roger’s best known work, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii was based on an episode from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s best seller, The Last Days of Pompeii. His works include the Columbus Doors of the United States Capitol in Washington D.C., the Soldiers Monument at Gettysburg National Cemetery, and the Michigan Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Detroit, Michigan.

Nydia

In the United States, as in France, Neoclassicism benefited from the political situation: it helped to bolster the regime by suggesting kinship between it and the Roman Republic of antiquity. Two generations of sculptors took up residence in Italy, first in Florence, to which they were attracted by Lorenzo Bartolini, and subsequently, after Bartolini’s death, in Rome. They included, among others, Chauncey Bradley Ives, Hiram Powers, and Randolph Rogers, all for either Philadelphia or Boston, the two cities that vied with each other for the title of the “Athens of America.”

The most sought after work among those produced by these artists was the Nydia by Rogers. Executed in Rome, the piece was inspired by Bulwer Lytton’s novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. The sentimental unfailingly evoked in viewers by this blind girl shown fleeing the volcano made the work so successful that Rogers was obliged to set up almost a replica industry.

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Ruth Gleaning

This statue is the artist’s first large-scale biblical subject, depicts the moment in the Old Testament book of Ruth (2:1-13) when the Moabite woman kneels to glean grain in the field of her future husband, Boaz.

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