Horatio Greenough (September 6, 1805 – December 18, 1852) was an American sculptor best known for his United States government commissions The Rescue (1837–50) and George Washington (1840).

The son of Elizabeth (née Bender) and David Greenough, he was born in Boston on September 6, 1805, into a home with ethics for honesty and emphasis on good education.

Before graduating from Harvard, he sailed to Rome to study art where he met the painter Robert W. Weir, while living on Via Gregoriana.

He modeled busts such as Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard, Samuel Appleton and John Jacob Astor.

In an attempt to establish a greater reputation he sought out to make a portrait of President John Quincy Adams.

[4] His sculptures reflected truth and reality, but also ancient classical aesthetic ideals learned from Washington Allston.

Some of his other most famous and important sculptures include James Fenimore Cooper (1831), Castor and Pollux (1847), and Marquis de Lafayette (1831–32).

Here Greenough repeatedly criticized contemporary American architecture for its imitation of European historical building styles, wrote enthusiastically about the beauty of animal bodies, of machine constructions, and of ship design, and argued that as to architecture, formal solutions were inherent in the functions of the building; in this he anticipated the later functionalist thinking (see Functionalism).

In a letter to Emerson, Greenough wrote:"Here is my theory of structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their gradated importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all makeshift and make-believe.