Why I’m obsessed with these cheap paintings of Paris

Did this French painter ever exist? Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔 so you don’t miss any videos: Henry Rogers’ French impressionist paintings of Paris street scenes seem to only exist 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 it’s spelled “Henry” and sometimes the French “Henri.” For years, the only place anyone could learn more about Rogers was on a blog called — a site where one man documented his curiosities and passion projects, dating back to the ’90s. The author of this site, Philip Lord, became obsessed with gathering information about Rogers but found nothing in his early online searches. So he started researching himself by analyzing dozens of Rogers’ paintings, many of them seeming to show the same street in Paris from varying perspectives. He wanted to figure out if “Henry Rogers” was a lone street painter in Paris, or in fact a workshop of painters trained to create similar-looking paintings and sign them under a pseudonym. Lord gave up the search in 2011. In 2022, we picked up the puzzle and tried a few new avenues of inquiry. An actual Paris street painter told us that Rogers’ “impression” of Paris was imaginary. We visited a lab in Cleveland, Ohio, that uses artificial intelligence and detailed scans of paintings to distinguish the fingerprints of individual artists. They suggested that Henry Rogers is in fact multiple artists creating similar paintings. Further reading: Philip Lord’s original investigation into Henry Rogers paintings: Case Western Reserve University’s MORE Center: Different strokes: Using artificial intelligence to tell art apart: Jerome Feuguer’s art: Make sure you never miss behind-the-scenes content in the Vox Video newsletter, sign up here: is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving the events in the headlines. Check out Support Vox’s reporting with a one-time or recurring contribution: Shop the Vox merch store: Watch our full video catalog: Follow Vox on Facebook: Follow Vox on Twitter: Follow Vox on TikTok: @voxdotcom