Background
Henry Greenough was born on October 5, 1807 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States. He was the fifth of the eleven children of David and Betsey (Bender) Greenough.
Henry Greenough was born on October 5, 1807 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States. He was the fifth of the eleven children of David and Betsey (Bender) Greenough.
After attending George Barrell Emerson’s school at Lancaster, he entered Harvard College in 1823 but left in his junior year because of his father’s financial losses. He studied painting under Professor Bezzuoli at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, with Thomas Cole, John Cranch, John Gore, and S. F. B. Morse among his fellow students.
During three years Henry helped manage the family properties, drew plans for several buildings, and was a teacher in Mr. Greene’s School at Jamaica Plain. In 1829, through the influence of his friend Washington Allston he received the commission to design the Orthodox Church in Cambridge. His health declining, he sailed that autumn for Marseilles and joined his brother Horatio in Italy. For the next three and a half years he made his headquarters in Florence.
Returning to Boston in 1833, he reassumed the management of the family affairs and redeemed them, after his father’s death in 1836, from an apparently hopeless confusion.
In 1844, upon Allston’s death, he was employed to clean and prepare for exhibition Allston’s huge unfinished picture, “The Feast of Belshazzar. ” At the request of Richard Henry Dana, he wrote for the Boston Post two notable articles on the coloring and composition of the picture. In 1845 he sailed with his wife and child for Italy and spent nearly five years in Southern Europe.
During 1848-49 the Greenoughs saw much of Margaret Fuller, the Brownings, and their friends. They returned to Boston in July 1850, and Greenough was soon engaged in designing the Cambridgeport Athenaeum.
In 1852, working with Italian fresco painters whose temperament and language he thoroughly understood, he superintended the decoration of the Crystal Palace in New York. In The Industry of All Nations: An Illustrated Weekly Record of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, he explained his theories of decoration.
On March 18, 1837, he married Frances Boott, by whom he had two sons.