Horatio Greenough

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Horatio Greenough (September 6, 1805 - December 18, 1852) was an American sculptor as was his younger brother Richard Saltonstall Greenough.

At the age of sixteen he entered Harvard, but he devoted his principal attention to art, and in the autumn of 1825 he went to Rome, where he studied under Bertel Thorvaldsen. After a short visit in 1826 to Boston, where he executed busts of John Quincy Adams and other people 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.

In 1832, he received an order from the Congress of the United States for a large statue of George Washington for the Capitol Rotund. When completed, this work caused much controversy: the classical style did not conform with American taste. The statue was displayed in various localities - today it can be seen at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Shortly afterwards he received a second government commission 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 in Somerville near Boston on the 18th of December. Among other works of Greenough may be mentioned a bust of Lafayette, the Medora and the Venus Victrix.

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