Horatio Greenough – 1805-1852

Greenough contributed two things to American art and culture. The first was his monumental neoclassical sculpture of George Washington—the first work of art commissioned by the federal government (1832)—which is now at the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. The second was his groundbreaking writing on aesthetic theory, in which he set out the relationship between architecture and decoration, proposing that “form follows function.” Although articulated before the mid 19th century, this became the basis of Functionalism, the ideal on which so much modern architecture and industrial design is based.