STATUE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON
This statue is by Horatio Greenough, who, born in Boston in 1805, was a noted American sculptor of the early days of the Republic. He was the first American deliberately to choose sculpture as a profession and to go abroad for serious study. He became absorbed with art as he saw it in Italy, and those who have seen the massive Roman statuary of the Farnese collection at Naples, in addition to the priceless collections of statuary of classical times at Rome and Florence, can make due allowance for the conception of the ponderous figure of George Washington by Greenough when he was commissioned by Congress in 1832 to execute the statue. He was at work on the statue for eight years, during the period of the classical revival in this country, marked by the construction of the Patent Office, the old Post Office, and the Treasury Department Buildings.
The statue is 12 feet high, and of Carrara marble. It cost $44,000. After many perils by sea and land, it reached this city in 1843. At the Capitol it was found that the doors were not large enough to permit its passage, and they were temporarily widened to admit the statue, where it was given a place in the Rotunda, but its immense weight was too heavy for the floor, and it was transferred to the plaza in front of and facing the Capitol. It remained there for over half a century, and in 1908 was removed to the National Museum.
This statue of Washington in Roman toga, seated in a curule chair, was often ridiculed. One wrote that Washington was supposed to be saying, as he pointed in two directions, “My body is at Mount Vernon, my clothes are in the Patent Office.” Nevertheless, the statue had its friends. In 1841 Edward Everett wrote of it, “I regard Greenough’s Washington as one of the greatest works of sculpture of modern times.” It is an art treasure of the past, and as such is rightly cherished to-day.