Richard Saltonstall Greenough was born on April 27, 1819 in Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of the eleven children of David and Betsey (Bender) Greenough. His father carried on a large business in real estate and until just before his death in 1836 was prosperous enough to give his family every opportunity for culture.
At one time four of his sons were in Harvard College. Richard very early showed an artistic bent, especially toward music, and sang ballads before he could speak plainly. As a child in Jamaica Plain, he went to the school kept by Mr. Charles W. Greene, and on the removal of the Greenoughs to Boston, he entered the Boston Latin School, remaining there until he was about seventeen.
Though fully prepared for college, he declined a college training, perhaps because of his father’s financial reverses, and entered the counting-room of two elder brothers, commission merchants in Boston. Here for a short time he worked faithfully, meanwhile giving his leisure to drawing and modeling. His admiration for his brother Horatio, fourteen years his senior, and his own tastes determined his career.
In 1837 the brothers in the counting-room, recognizing Richard’s ambition, sent him to Florence to study under Horatio’s guidance. Because of ill health, he returned in 1838 to Boston, where he regained his vigor and continued his studies.
Richard's first work to gain attention was a bust of William Hickling Prescott, presented by William Prescott to the Boston Athenaeum in 1844. Ideal heads and statuettes followed. With his wife he went abroad in 1848 and after a few months in Florence established themselves in Rome, where for some years the sculptor successfully busied himself with portrait-busts and several ideal works, notably the “Shepherd Boy and Eagle. ”
On being exhibited in the Boston Athenaeum, this group won increasingly favorable notice, until finally several persons contributed altogether $2, 000 for its purchase and presentation to the Athenaeum. As seen to-day, it appears a straightforward, rather commonplace composition, less than life-size, of a boy crouching under the attack of an eagle whose nest he has robbed. Warmly praised by the critics of the day, it led to a commission for a bronze statue of Franklin, heroic in size, standing on a four-square pedestal of green marble, adorned with bronze bas-reliefs, two of which are by Thomas Ball. Henry Greenough was the architect. The placing of this monument in front of the Boston City Hall was made the occasion of a veritable jubilee on a scale remarkable in the city’s annals. Greenough thereby reached the summit of his fame. The statue is simple and dignified, and in its surroundings holds its own.
The sculptor was less successful in his two statues of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts; in these he showed a grave weakness in his failure to recognize the head as the culminating detail in a portrait statue. The seated marble figure of Winthrop, dated Paris, 1856, is in the rotunda of the chapel at Mount Auburn; a bronze copy of the standing figure of the same subject is in Boston on the grounds of the First Church, and a marble replica, dated 1876, in Statuary Hall at the Capitol, Washington. This second statue is well composed and in most respects well modeled, the treatment of the hands being particularly good.
Greenough’s small model of an equestrian statue of Washington was not carried out in full size but was cast in bronze. Most of his much-admired portrait-busts have passed into private ownership.
Among his later sitters were Bishop Potter and W. W. Astor. His “Carthaginian Maiden, ” in marble, is owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; a bronze copy was bequeathed to the Athenasum in 1869.
Like his brothers, Richard Greenough was at home in many lands. He lived and worked in Boston, Massachusetts, in Newport, Rhode Island, in Paris, in Florence, and in Rome, the greater part of his studio life being spent in Rome, where he died at the age of eighty-five.
Greenough's best-known work is probably a statue of Benjamin Franklin which stood in front of the Old City Hall (Boston). The statue on Boston's Freedom Trail, fell from its ten-foot pedestal in the early summer of 2016, but sustained almost no damage and is currently being repaired. Other ideal works in marble are his “Cupid Bound, ” his “Circe and Ulysses, ” and his “Psyche. ” The “Psyche” was shown at the Athenaeum in 1849; a replica was placed in the Protestant cemetery, Rome, as a monument to his wife, who died in Austria in 1855.
On October 20, 1846, he married Sarah Dana Loring of Boston.
