The Democratization of American Art: Horatio Greenough's George Washington and the Era of the Common Man

Abstract

Considering that Greenough’s Washington represents the first federal commission granted to an American sculptor, art historical literature on this sculpture is surprisingly limited. The leading scholar on Greenough and his life remains Nathalia Wright (1913-2004), who published an extensive biography on Greenough, as well as a series of his letters and essays. In her book Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor, Wright devotes an entire chapter to Washington sculpture, analyzing its reception in Europe and the United States, but does not acknowledge the greater cultural and societal shifts in Jacksonian America that conditioned the American response to the neoclassical sculpture. . . . Unfortunately, scholars and writers glance over Greenough’s Washington with ridicule, explaining that its failure with the public rested solely on Greenough’s choice to portray Washington bare-chested. No scholarly work has singularly devoted itself to Greenough’s Washington or analyzed its reception through the lens of the times in which it was produced. Truly, through an analysis of the shift in artistic tastes that occurred rapidly in Jacksonian America, one can more fully understand why it was received so poorly in the United States and hopefully reconsider the sculpture’s significance. Based on all scholarly work that has covered Greenough’s Washington until this point, this present analysis will be the most extensive analysis of the sculpture and its place within the greater Jacksonian American cultural movement to-date. [From Introduction]