Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Horatio Greenough

GREENOUGH, Horatio (1805-1852), an American sculptor, son of a Boston merchant, was born at Boston, September 6, 1805. At the age of sixteen he entered Harvard College ; but while there he devoted his principal attention to art, and in the autumn of 1825 he went to Rome, where he enjoyed the advantage of instruction from Thorwaldsen. After a short visit in 1826 to Boston, where he executed busts of John Quincy Adams and other persons of distinction, he returned to Italy and took up his residence at Florence. Here one of his first commissions was from James Fenimore Cooper for a group of Chanting Cherubs; and the success of this work, joined to the strong recom mendation of Cooper, Dana, Everett, and others, led to his being chosen by the Government to execute the colossal statue of Washington for the national capital. It was unveiled in 1843 ; and as an accurate likeness, conceived in a lofty and truly poetical spirit, it is entitled to high rank among modern works of a similar kind. Shortly afterwards he received a second commission from Government for a colossal group, the " Rescue," intended to represent the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and Indian races. In 1851 he returned to Washington to superintend its erection, and in the autumn of 1852 he was attacked by brain fever, of which he died, 18th December. Among other works of Greenough may be mentioned a bust of Lafayette, the Medora, and the Venus Victrix in the gallery of the Boston Athenaeum. Grsenoughwas a man of wide culture, and his occasional productions in prose and verse gave evidence of a capacity to attain the same eminence in literature as in art. See Memoir of Horatio Greenovgh, by H. T. Tuckermnnn, 1853.