Horatio Greenough (1805 -1852) – The Yankee Stonecutter
Horatio Greenough was born in Boston the son of an early real estate developer. Despite an early penchant for sculpting, his father sent him to Harvard to receive a traditional education. While there, Greenough continued in his artistic pursuits, including winning a competition to design the Bunker Hill Monument. Though Greenough’s design was chosen, it was modified and the construction was overseen by competing artist Solomon Willard without any credit being given to Greenough. With the sting of this slight still fresh, and before the ink on his diploma was dry, he left for Europe, settling in Rome.
During what would be the first year of his life in Italy, Greenough befriended fellow American artist Robert W. Weir (1803-1889). The pair shared an apartment near the Academy at Villa Medici and near the apartment of famed sculptor Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen. Greenough’s career was beginning to look very promising; during a trip to America in 1827-1828, Greenough befriended a number of well-known American artists, such as Thomas Cole, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Sully, and Charles Bird King. He also began receiving regular commissions. He sculpted busts of Josiah Quincy, John Quincy Adams, and John Marshall.
Upon his return to Italy, Greenough relocated to Florence, a city with a vibrant art community, and a city very close to the marble quarry at Carrara. There he studied with Bartolini at the Royal Academy, and there he met Rembrandt Peale and James Fenimore Cooper. In 1831, Cooper helped Greenough obtain a commission to sculpt a bust of Lafayette in Paris, and he received two commissions for likenesses of Washington.
It was in 1832, however, that Greenough received his first major commission, a statue of George Washington to be displayed in the Capitol Rotunda. He based his design on the colossal statue of Zeus at Mount Olympus sculpted by Phidias (Greek, ca 500-ca 432 BCE). Despite warnings that the design would not be well-received in America, Greenough held firm. He spent the next eight years on the Washington statue, during which time he married Louisa Gore, the daughter of a prominent Boston family, and received his second Federal commission, this time for a monument to the American Indian (The Rescue).
The abysmal response to the unveiling of George Washington in 1841 disheartened Greenough, but he maintained that his artistic talent would, at some point, be given the respect it deserved. Besides, between his pay for the statue and his marriage to the wealthy Louisa, Greenough’s longtime financial difficulties were, at least temporarily, behind him. He also had his second federal commission, which he was certain would more than make up for the lackluster reception of Washington.
Greenough worked diligently on The Rescue throughout the 1840s. Also during that decade, and after a series of miscarriages, Louisa gave birth to the couple’s first son, Henry (1845), and their daughters, Mary Louise (1848) and Charlotte (1850). By 1851, Greenough had completed his final opus and had returned, with his family, to America. Once again on his native soil, Greenough hoped to oversee personally the installation of The Rescue, which was en route from his studio in Florence. Unfortunately, he would not live to see his work mounted on the Capitol steps. In early December of 1852, Greenough was hospitalized because of violent fits (he had battled depression and mania all life). He died on December 18.
The Discouraged Artist
A few months before his death, Horatio Greenough published a series of essays under the title The Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stonecutter. In the essays, he lambasted American artistic taste and attempted to argue that his work, despite its lack of popular praise, was true and good art. Much of the resentment expressed in these essays resulted from the exceptionally unfavorable response to Washington, which still haunted him. While many of his fellow artists praised the statue, the general public was not impressed. One newspaper writer referred to the statue as “Georgy Porgy” and Senator William Preston described it as “the most horrid phantasmagoria I have ever beheld.” House member Henry Wise, who had previously referred to Greenough as the world’s best sculptor, now suggested that they keep the head, and throw the rest of the statue into the Potomac.
The artist put on a brave face, writing “I have done my utmost and I believe that there is more Art in my statue of Washington than in all else that I have done a thousand fold.” However, such insults and ridiculing clearly wounded him; almost as soon as Washington was installed, he began writing essays in defense of it.
To Greenough, the disregard paid to his classical vision of Washington was typical of a nation that chose to ignore its artistic roots, i.e., Europe. In his essay “Aesthetics at Washington” he wrote, “To the uninitiated, [a] departure from these shores is an accusation of the fatherland – to live for years among Italians, Frenchmen, and Germans, for the sake of breathing the air of high art, ancient and modern, this is shrewdly thought by many to show a lack of genius.”
His frustration with the American art scene is almost palpable, but Greenough’s sentiment certainly had a kernel of truth, the American public did not appreciate his work. Despite the accolades of his fellow artists and commissions from the federal government and numerous famous and wealthy Americans, Greenough never felt, and really never was, truly successful. Indeed, long after his death, it was widely thought that his greatest contributions were his words and ideas (his essays would have a profound impact on the relationship between art and architecture). Greenough’s contemporaries seemed to have agreed. Art critic James Jackson Jarves wrote, “We cannot point out any masterpiece, as showing an entirely satisfactory fulfillment of his own desires, but his whole career was an example in the right direction.” More to the point, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that he was “far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve.”
Greenough’s drawings, however, offer another perspective on this misunderstood artist. From a personal standpoint, as Richard Saunders points out, the scattered and frantic arrangement of some of the drawings hints at Greenough’s lifelong fight with mental illness. More importantly, they show an artist proficient in multiple media, and the drawings, particularly the preliminary studies for sculptural works, also portray an artist committed to the creative process and the artistic method, one can see the work evolve on the page, and then into stone. Thus, while Horatio Greenough may still be best-regarded for his contributions to art theory and criticism, his surviving drawings provide a lens through which we can see a clearer picture of the artist, his work, and his truly significant contribution to art history.
Information courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions Inc. October 2007