James Edward Rogers

James Edward Rogers (1838 – 18 February 1896) was an Irish artist, architect, and book-illustrator whose early career was in Dublin. In 1876 he moved to London, where he is believed to have worked only as an artist.

Early life Born in Dublin, Rogers was the son of James Rogers, a barrister and Queen's Counsel. His early education was there, then he attended the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, before joining Trinity College Dublin, where he matriculated on 2 July 1855, aged seventeen. He was taken as a pupil by Benjamin Woodward, a notable Irish architect who was suffering from tuberculosis. Woodward was in the process of designing the Oxford Museum and the debating hall of the Oxford Union, both of which Rogers visited.

Rogers struck up friendships with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, while they were painting Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union, and according to William Tuckwell the three men went "hunting in the parish churches on Sunday evenings to find a Guinevere". They found Jane Burden, whom Morris later married.

Rogers graduated BA from Trinity College in 1861 and in 1865 proceeded to MA. Most of his work was for the Church of Ireland. He designed and altered churches in the Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough and the western counties of Ireland and was formally the Diocese of Meath architect until 1869, when the Church of Ireland was disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869. Many of his landscapes are of scenes in Germany and the Netherlands. .

The National Gallery of Ireland has one painting by Rogers, a street scene in Limburg, a small town in Hesse.

Gallery

Books J. E. Rogers, Ridicula Rediviva (London: Macmillan, 1869) Dinah Craik, The Fairy Book (1870, illustrated J. E. Rogers) J. E. Rogers, Mores Ridiculi (London: Macmillan, 1871) J. E. Rogers, Present Pastimes of Merrie England (Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, 1873)