Randolph Rogers was a prominent member of the second generation of American neoclassical sculptors working in Rome. He spent most of his youth in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While working in a dry goods store in New York City he so impressed his employers with his self-taught efforts at portrait sculpture that they enabled him to study sculpture in Italy. In 1848 he began studying at the Academy of Saint Mark in Florence with the leading neoclassical sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850). In 1851 Rogers established a studio in Rome, where he would work for the rest of his life except for business visits to the United States. His ideal bust of Night, c. 1852 (unlocated), was well received when exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1852. The great success of his Ruth Gleaning, modeled in 1853 (example in Newark [N.J.] Museum), led to his receiving the commission for the Columbus Doors for the United States Capitol. On a trip to the United States between 1853 and 1855 he also received the commission for a statue of John Adams for Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (now in Memorial Hall at Harvard University, Cambridge). Immediately after returning to Rome late in 1855, he modeled his most famous sculpture, Nydia: The Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (example in LACMA; q.v.). He was married in Richmond, Virginia, in 1857, when he also was chosen to complete Thomas Crawford’s Washington Monument for that city. During the late 1850s and early 1860s his studio was occupied with these major projects and beginning in 1863 carried out numerous Civil War memorials into the 1870s. Rogers continued to execute portrait busts and ideal sculptures in addition to these and other monumental projects. In 1873 he was chosen professor of sculpture at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, the first American to be elected. In 1884 he was awarded the order of Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia. After 1882 he was unable to work because of paralysis resulting from a stroke.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Michigan Historical Collections, Randolph Rogers Papers § Henry S. Frieze, "Randolph Rogers," Michigan Alumnus 4 (December 1897): 59-63 § Millard F. Rogers, Jr., Randolph Rogers: American Sculptor in Rome (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), with catalogue raisonné, bibliography, chronology § Horst W. Janson, "Daphnis and Chloe in the American Wilderness," in Ars Auro Prior: Studia loanni Bialostocki Sexagenario Dicata (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1981), pp. 683-86 § Vivien Green Fryd, "Randolph Rogers’ Indian Hunter Boy: Allegory of Innocence," in Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Bulletin/ Annual Report (1984-85): 29-35.