Horatio Greenough
Horatio Greenough
1805 - 1852
Sculptor and writer. He was brought up in a wealthy, cultured home and was given a classical education. He drew and modelled from engravings and antique plaster casts in the Boston Athenaeum and studied with the French sculptor J. B. Binon ( fl 1818–20) in Boston. After graduating from Harvard, he was encouraged by Washington Allston, his first mentor and life-long friend, to go to Italy in 1825 to study ancient and Renaissance art. Influenced by the Neo-classical aesthetic of the international art community in Rome and by his studies with Bertel Thorvaldsen, he aspired to create a truly American art. In 1826, illness forced him to return home.
Greenough’s first extant bust, of the Mayor of Boston, Josiah Quincy jr (plaster, 1827; Boston, MA, Hist. Soc.), shows a rigorous application of Neo-classical ideals. The life-size bust of the US President, John Quincy Adams (marble, 1828; Boston, MA, Athenaeum), modelled from life in Washington, DC, achieved a stronger realism suited to the young American Republic. His portrait style was fully developed in the expressive life-size bust of Samuel F. B. Morse (1831; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), an artist who shared his devotion to the cause of a national art.
On his return to Italy in 1828, Greenough had workmen at Carrara carve his busts in marble, initiating the subsequent American practice of using the finest materials and inexpensive, highly skilled labour. He settled in Florence, seeking to learn greater naturalism in the studio of Lorenzo Bartolini, exponent of the theory ‘all nature is beautiful’. With Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford he formed a triumvirate who led the first of two generations of American Neo-classical sculptors, most of whom followed Greenough to live in Italy as expatriates. The two putti in his first important commission (from James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851), Chanting Cherubs (1828; untraced), a theme based on a painting by Raphael in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, created a furore for their nudity when exhibited in Boston as the first sculptural group by an American. Two related compositions, Child and Angel (1833) and Love Prisoner to Wisdom (1834; both Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), were more acceptable. They are particularly American in their use of children in a moralizing context. The new Romantic sensibility, demanding comprehensible themes and literary evocations, inspired Greenough’s choice of the bride from Byron’s poem The Corsair for the dead Medora (1832; Baltimore, MD, Mayor & City Council on loan to Baltimore, MD, Mus. A.). This, his first full-length ideal statue, was commissioned by Robert Gilmor jr. The majestic, striding, under life-size Angel Abdiel (1838; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) was inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Greenough’s life-size homage to his bride, Venus Victrix (1839; Boston, MA, Athenaeum), popularized representations of the female nude in America.
Greenough’s ambitions were fulfilled when he became the first American from whom Congress commissioned a major monumental sculpture: George Washington (marble, 3.37 m, 1832–41; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. Hist.; see [not available online]), intended for the Rotunda of the US Capitol. Convinced that this challenge would affect all future Americans, and that the form should follow the symbolic function, Greenough faced the dilemma of the American artist in reconciling the real and the ideal. Attempting a synthesis, he took the statue’s enthroned, half-draped, god-like image from recent reconstructions of Pheidias’ Olympian Zeus and its realistic, fleshy head from the terracotta bust of Washington that Jean-Antoine Houdon had made from life (1785; Mount Vernon, VA, Ladies’ Assoc. Un.). The work attracted criticism for showing Washington as a semi-nude Classical deity. Before it was unveiled, Greenough was already at work on a second major over life-size government commission for the east portico of the Capitol. The Rescue (marble, 1837; Washington, DC, US Capitol, in storage) is the most complex group attempted by an American at that date and was assembled only after his early demise at the height of his career as the first American sculptor of international renown.
During the last decade of his life, Greenough was chiefly occupied in producing influential theoretical writings. In a series of essays he expounded the dictum that ‘form follows function’, using architecture as his model. He wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Here is my theory of structure: a scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to function and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their gradated importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all make-shift and make-believe.
Greenough was the first to formulate a theory of organic art, and he inspired American Functionalist aesthetics in design and architecture, later developed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. [Ethelyn Adina Gordon. "Greenough." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T034787pg1.]
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