George Washington Wearing a Toga?

This post on the Smithsonian Eye Level Blog describes Horatio Alger’s George Washington statue monument, which was moved to the Smithsonian American History Museum in 1963. An excerpt:

“Horotio Greenough’s statue of George Washington on the Capitol grounds (photographer and date unknown) is from the American Sculpture Photograph Study Collection, Photograph Archives (S0001154).

Before construction began in 1884 on the world’s tallest stone structure, the Washington Monument, commemorating our first president, Horatio Greenough had already created the first Washington monument on the National Mall honoring him. The statue was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841 and moved several times after that. In 1963 the statue was moved to its current location in the National Museum of American History (on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

Recently American Art awarded the 2010 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Kirk Savage for his 2009 book Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Savage writes: “Greenough’s soon-to-be-infamous statue of a semi-nude Washington, seated rigidly on a huge throne in the posture of Jupiter, has gone down in the annals of American art history as the most reviled public statue ever erected.”

Click here to read the complete post. To read an excerpt and even purchase a copy of Monument Wars, the text that the post quotes, visit its page on the California University Press site here.

Image in the post is of Horatio Alger’s statue, from the Eye Level post.