If there’s one American monument that’s difficult to love, it’s Horatio Greenough’s George Washington (1841). Now located at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the twelve-foot tall marble statue is a commemorative portrait of the Father of Our Country in the neoclassical style—Washington as some combination of Greek god and Roman senator, one hand pointing to the heavens and the other proffering a sword in its scabbard as the man himself stares straight ahead. And that’s the problem. The toga, the sandals, the exposed torso with its ripped abs, the rhetorical gesture (which means what, exactly?) all give this work a faintly comical air, the opposite, needless to say, of what the artist intended.

That’s predictable enough as a twenty-first-century view. But what’s remarkable, as we learn from Harry Rand’s absorbing and groundbreaking Horatio Greenough and the Form Majestic, is that it’s the way the statue was perceived from the very beginning, not just after its unveiling but even while the artist was working on it, a fact which makes this book not only timely, but also revelatory.1

Rand, a senior curator at the nmahand the author, previously, of an important study of the Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky, has subtitled his book “The Biography of the Nation’s First Washington Monument.” But it is far more than that: a tale of origin about both American sculpture and the country’s monumental tradition; a distant mirror in which we see reflected many of the issues