﻿There’s this website, Living-in-the-Past.com.
It’s been run by this guy, Philip Lord, since the 90s.
It's this kind of amazing time capsule of what the internet used to be.
A bunch of html web pages connected with hyperlinks.
Pixelated clip art. The papyrus font.
It’s a chronicle of one man’s passion projects.
Lord’s model building endeavors. Deep dives into his family history.
And someone named Henry Rogers. An artist known for
impressionist-style Paris street scenes. Who Lord became obsessed with tracking down.
Because, when you look closer at Henry Rogers paintings…
things don’t really add up. The signatures, for example.
Sometimes “Henry.” Sometimes the french “Henri.”
And when you try to search for Henry Rogers online, there’s no information
about the painter himself. It’s almost like he only exists
in these paintings of Paris. The more I read Lord’s website, the more I wanted
to know who really made these paintings. It’s a puzzle that led me from the Paris street
art scene, to an an AI art center in Cleveland, and to drop $300 on eBay.
All to try and answer the question:
Henry Rogers paintings are pretty easy to come by online.
And it doesn’t take long to become familiar with the core elements of his paintings.
There’s usually this blue-roofed building next to this reddish one, both with cloth awnings.
And across the street, another blue-roofed building, next to another reddish one.
Sometimes this street leads to a Paris landmark, like the Eiffel Tower.
Sometimes it doesn’t. You’ll always see a tree, or a row of trees.
And along the wet, rainy-looking street, faceless blobs of people, who all seem to
be walking away from the viewer. They’re almost entirely done with a
painting knife rather than a brush. This technique adds texture to paintings,
and can result in little detail. It’s a style that calls back to French
Impressionism. An art movement that
was popular in Europe in the late 1800s, with the most famous artists working in Paris.
At this point, you might be thinking: okay, so this is kind like a Parisian Bob Ross.
Someone who developed a technique to mix and match elements quickly,
like the classic Rogers tree, and managed to produce a large number of similar
looking paintings over their lifetime. That could be true.
But before we throw out any theories, let’s lay out everything we know about Henry Rogers.
And let’s start online. Living-in-the-past.com is still
the only place on the internet that’s devoted any research into these paintings.
Philip Lord told me that the obsession had faded for him,
and he didn’t want to give an interview. But he gave me permission to use his website as
a starting point for my own investigation. Lord’s search for the elusive French artist began
with this painting, which hung on the wall of his childhood home in upstate New York.
But when he tried to find info about the artist who signed it… nothing turned up.
Lord had a bunch of theories for who Rogers might be.
But generally, they fall into three potential buckets.
One: Henry Rogers was a very busy French painter working in Paris sometime in the 70s and 80s
who spelled his name two ways. Two: Henry Rogers was a group of artists,
making these paintings together and using a pseudonym to make them seem more valuable.
And, on the more extreme end, three: Henry Rogers paintings were mass-produced, likely by so-called
“factories” in China, where artists methodically create similar-looking paintings.
To figure out if Rogers was one person,
Lord started meticulously dissecting images of Henry Rogers paintings he found online.
Ones that turned up in San Diego and Toronto. But also in Germany.
And one in South Africa. Several of the frames were stamped
“made in Mexico” on the back. Like three of the ones I bought.
He compared signatures between Henry and Henri.
Searched Google Street View to find where a painter might have stood.
And diagrammed the shifting perspectives of the classic Rogers street.
Determining that its basic layout looks like this.
He also looked into similar artists, like Caroline Burnett.
Another prolific painter with a similar style and similarly murky origins.
When he considered the close resemblance of the knife techniques for Henry and Henri,
and that the paintings very often seemed to depict the same street from various positions,
he landed here. In his opinion, Henry
Rogers was one artist working in the streets of Paris, sometime in the 1970s and 1980s.
Who may have exported his work for sale in foreign markets,
which helps explain the wide distribution, and the Mexican frames.
But Philip Lord never really had a smoking gun, and he gave up trying to
find more about Henry Rogers in 2011. So when I picked up the case in 2022,
I wanted to start with a fresh source. One that Philip hadn’t tried:
A Paris street painter. COLEMAN SKYPE: Let me show
you some paintings really quick. JEROME FEUGUEUR: Yeah, they're good, but
it looks like they’ve never been in Paris. Jerome is an artist who works in the part of
Paris Henry Rogers would have been working: in the historic Montmartre district.
Street artists have been painting in Montmartre for hundreds of years.
Many of them sell their work, often scenes of Paris or portraits, to tourists.
Jerome works nightly in the most famous hub in Montmartre for painters.
It’s a square called Place du Tertre. He told me it’s not uncommon for people to sell
or exhibit paintings in Paris that they claim were made in Place du Tertre… but weren’t.
He said they’ll even often be signed with a fake, French name.
JEROME: Like Dupont, Durand. And there's no du Pont and du Rhone in Place
du Terte, but it looks like exotic. When I asked him about the streets themselves,
and the angles Philip Lord had painstakingly diagrammed…
COLEMAN SKYPE: Okay, look, this is the same street.
JEROME: Aha voila. Never in Paris you can see this kind of angle. But they put the Eiffel Tower to
do, like, a nice background. It’s like a fantasy.
Jerome thinks the “made in Mexico” stamp on the frames, the imagined perspectives,
and the varying signatures point to Henry Rogers being a
Mexican artist, or group of artists, selling these paintings as cheap decor items.
Made to look like a souvenir from Place du Tertre.
JEROME: It looks like the taste of Paris. Like the authentic way. The romantic way.
At this point, I felt like there had to be something Philip and I were both missing.
And that Jerome couldn’t see over Skype. Some clue too tiny to notice by just looking
at the paintings alone, or that needed to be seen up close by an expert.
That’s when I reached out to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
A group of scientists and art history experts there
are using artificial intelligence to help tell artists apart.
Based on microscopic differences in brushstroke style.
They invited me to their lab in Cleveland to see if they could tell
me anything about my Rogers paintings. INA MARTIN: So we’re looking for things that
are common across the paintings. And we’re trying to control as
many variables as possible. Ina Martin runs Case Western’s MORE Center.
That’s the
INA: So what I'm going to do is measure out pieces of the painting.
I'm going to do pieces of the sky, and then the trees.
She’s scanning common elements of each painting using this machine: an optical profilometer.
This tool could help us figure out if certain elements of these paintings were done by different hands.
Basically, it shoots this little dot of light onto the surface of the painting,
and measures the distance the light traveled when it bounces back.
Charting out microscopic changes in height of paint.
A single data point spans just 11 microns.
Which is apparently very, very, very small.
INA: So it's the fraction of a width of a human hair.
They called me two weeks later with the results.
MICHAEL HINCZEWSKI: So we prepared a couple of slides.
These were the scans that Ina took.
For their experiment, the team scanned a bunch of 5 mm patches from three of my paintings.
And created a detailed height map.
They used this data to assign each painting a profile: 1, 2, and 3.
Then, they fed different, unknown 5 mm sections of all three paintings through the machine.
To see if it could identify which painting the sections came from.
Basically if it could connect a patch like this to an entire painting.
MICHAEL: And if it can do that, that's a clue that perhaps there are different hands involved.
If it's the same person, and we tested this in the past,
the machine basically fails at that task because it can't distinguish the patches.
And, roughly 90% of the time, the computer got it right.
There were enough differences in technique, at a microscopic height level,
to accurately identify which painting was which.
The fact that these paintings each have their own unique fingerprint
is a strong case for “Henry Rogers” being the name of a workshop.
Some group of artists who were trained to imitate each other almost perfectly,
with nearly invisible differences between the paintings.
I let the team at Case Western keep my Henry Rogers paintings for further study.
MICHAEL: This has also helped us in thinking about how we're going to approach other paintings, etc.
So this has actually been a very useful kind of exercise.
Hopefully it’ll help get the machine closer to identifying invisible fingerprints in other, more famous paintings.
And now, like Philip Lord before me, I’m closing up the case.
But with a lot of new information,
and having gotten just a bit closer to finding out who Henry Rogers was.
And Henry, if you’re out there, I love the work
Email me if you see this.