Greenough, Horatio [key], 1805–52, American sculptor and writer, b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1824, and studied in Italy under Thorvaldsen. A protégé of Washington Allston, he was a man of ideas in advance of his time. His colossal statue of Washington, commissioned for the Capitol, was too heavy for the floor and was set up on the grounds; it was later placed in the Smithsonian Institution. The Rescue is on the east stairway of the Capitol. Greenough is admired now for his writings, in which he heralded the modern concept of functionalism in architecture.
See his Travels, Observations, and Experiences of a Yankee Stonecutter (1852); his letters (ed. by N. Wright, 1972); his collected writings, Form and Function (1958).
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