Horatio Greenough

Horatio Greenough, portrayed by Rembrandt Peale , 1829 ( National Portrait Gallery , Washington)

Greenough's grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery

Horatio Greenough (born September 6, 1805 in Boston , Massachusetts , † December 18, 1852 in Somerville , Massachusetts) was an American sculptor .

life and work

Horatio Greenough was born the son of real estate speculators David Greenough (1774-1836) and Elizabeth Bender (1776-1866). He studied from 1821 to 1825 at Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts) , was then won over by Washington Allston and Richard Henry Dana for art and devoted himself to it in his hometown under Bisson's direction. From 1825 to 1827 Greenough lived in Italy to study the art of the Renaissance and Antiquity. In Rome he met the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and his master student Pietro Tenerani . In May 1827 Greenough took a boat trip back to Boston. In 1828 he was elected professor of sculpture at the National Academy of Design in New York and an honorary member ( Honorary NA ). In October 1837 Greenough married the Boston merchant daughter Louisa Gore (1812-1891). With her he had two daughters and the son Horatio S. Greenough .

Above all, the collection of essays Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture , which was created in the middle of the 19th century, documents Greenough's theoretical work, with which he provides important impulses for the discussion about the relationship between form and function (see Louis Sullivan ) could. With his early theses on art, architecture and design, Greenough is considered a pioneer of functionalism (design) .

In 1843 Greenough was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . After three long stays in Florence , he returned to the United States in 1851 to set up a group for the Capitol, The Rescue , a family of colonists and an Indian, made for the American Congress .

On December 4, 1852, he was admitted to the McLean Mental Hospital in Somerville, Massachusetts , and died there of nerve fever on December 18, 1852. On December 21, 1852, he was taken to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge , a suburb of his hometown Boston, buried.

Greenough is considered the "first American sculptor". Among other things, he created an equestrian statue of Washington (1843, now in the United States Capitol ).

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  Thomas Jefferson , 1823

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  George Washington , 1832-1840

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  The Rescue, 1837-1850

literature

Fonts

• The Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stonecutter . GP Putnam & Co., New York 1852. Reprint (facsimile): Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Gainesville FL 1958.
• Letters from Horatio Greenough to His Brother, Henry Greenough . Edited by Frances Boott Greenough. Ticknor & Co., Boston 1887.
• Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture . Edited by Harold A. Small. University of California Press, Berkeley 1947.
• Letters of Horatio Greenough, American Sculptor . Edited by Nathalia Wright. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1972.
• The Miscellaneous Writings of Horatio Greenough . Edited by Nathalia Wright. Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Delmar NY 1975.

Secondary literature

• A Memorial of Horatio Greenough . Edited by Henry T. Tuckerman . GP Putnam & Co., New York 1853.
• Sylvia E. Crane: White Silence: Greenough, Powers, and Crawford, American Sculptors in Nineteenth-Century Italy . University of Miami Press, Coral Gables FL 1972.
• Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Wynne : Horatio Greenough: Herald of Functionalism . In: Magazine of Art 32, 1938. pp. 12-15.
• Alessandra Ponente: Horatio Greenough: le origini del funzionalismo architettonico in America e il rapporto con l'Italia . In: Ricerche di storia dell'arte 47, 1992. pp. 89-94.
• Richard H. Saunders: Horatio Greenough: An American Sculptor's Drawings . Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT 1999. ISBN 1-928825-00-1
• Nathalia Wright : The Chanting Cherubs: Horatio Greenough's Marble Group for James Fenimore Cooper . In: New York History 38: 2, 1957. pp. 177-197.
• Nathalia Wright: Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1963.

Web links

Commons : Horatio Greenough  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Works by the artist in the Smithsonian Institution's SIRIS catalog

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arne Winkelmann (Ed.): Horatio Greenough, Form und Funktion; Frankfurt a. M .: Antaeus Verlag 2012, p. 129.
2. ↑ Arne Winkelmann (Ed.): Horatio Greenough, Form und Funktion; Frankfurt a. M .: Antaeus Verlag 2012, p. 130.
3. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "G" / Greenough, Horatio Honorary 1828 ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed June 24, 2015) 
4. ↑ Arne Winkelmann (Ed.): Horatio Greenough, Form und Funktion; Frankfurt a. M .: Antaeus Verlag 2012, p. 7.
5. ^ Peter Blake: Three master architects; Munich: Piper Verlag 1962, p. 31.
6. ↑ Natalia Wright: Horatio Greenough. The First American Sculptor, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1963.