Who is the artist Henry Rogers? His French Impressionist paintings of Parisian street scenes seem to exist only in online auctions and yard sales. The mystery of his identity deepens when you take a closer look at his art and notice that his signature changes from painting to painting – sometimes spelled ‘Henry’ and sometimes the French ‘Henri’.
For years, the only place anyone could learn more about Rogers was on a blog called life-in-the-past.com — a site where a man documented his curiosity and passion projects, dating back to the 1990s.
The author of this site, Philip Lord, became obsessed with collecting information about Rogers, but found nothing in his early online searches. So he started researching by analyzing dozens of Rogers’ paintings, many of which appeared to show the same street in Paris from different perspectives. He wanted to find out whether “Henry Rogers” was a lone street painter in Paris, or in fact a workshop of painters trained to create similar paintings and sign them under a pseudonym.
Lord gave up the search in 2011. In 2022, we picked up the puzzle and tried some new avenues of inquiry. A true Parisian street painter, Jerome Feugueur, told us that Roger’s “impressions” of Paris were imaginary. Then we visited a lab in Cleveland, Ohiothat is artificial intelligence and detailed scans of paintings to distinguish individual artist’s fingerprint. They suggested that Henry Rogers is in fact several artists who create similar paintings.
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