John Rogers (1829-1904) is arguably the most popular American sculptor ever, selling over 80,000 small plasters, known as "Rogers Groups" over the course of a career that spanned the late nineteenth century. Rogers himself said, "I want each group to tell a story," and these narrative sculptures carried on a deeply rooted popular American genre tradition that was established in the antebellum period by painters such as William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham. The book, generously illustrated and containing eleven essays on different aspects of his work (including its Neoclassical elements influences and the mass market it found), aims to bring Rogers's work to life for a new generation of admirers. Rogers’s works became commonplace in the homes of middle-and upper-class Americans in the later nineteenth century, an era when most Americans had little access to works of art. More than any other artist of his era, Rogers reached Americans en masse, addressing issues that shaped their lives and that defined the American experience. Today it takes a certain effort to comprehend what made his sculptures so popular, but the whole story of his career, as related by this book is fascinating. "Almost always the people represented are attractive. Young men are handsome and strong, young women beautiful and demure. The elderly are wise, and the children are charming. Rogers had a keen eye for fashions in dress and furnishing, so his works had a contemporary immediacy. And they were drenched in the sort of sentimental idealism that people of the Victorian age evidently found irresistible." New York Times.