Washington Allston

Washington Allston (November 5, 1779 – July 9, 1843) was an American painter and poet, born in Waccamaw Parish, South Carolina. Allston pioneered America's Romantic movement of landscape painting. He was well known during his lifetime for his experiments with dramatic subject matter and his bold use of light and atmospheric color. While his early artworks concentrate on grandiose and spectacular aspects of nature, his later pieces represent a more subjective and visionary approach.

Biography Allston painted by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1818. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Allston was born on a rice plantation on the Waccamaw River near Georgetown, South Carolina. His mother Rachel Moore had married Captain William Allston in 1775, though her husband died in 1781, shortly after the Battle of Cowpens. Moore remarried to Dr. Henry C. Flagg, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant from Newport, Rhode Island.

Named in honor of the leading American general of the Revolution, Washington Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, for a short time before sailing to England in May 1801.

From 1803 to 1808, he visited the great museums of Paris and then, for several years, those of Italy, where he met Washington Irving in Rome and Coleridge, his lifelong friend. In 1809, Allston married Ann Channing, sister of William Ellery Channing. His wife died in February 1815, leaving him saddened, lonely, and homesick for America.

In 1818, he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for twenty-five years. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1826. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom studied painting under him.

The first American exhibition of Allston's work was in 1827 when twelve of his paintings were shown at the Boston Athenæum. Allston also exhibited five paintings at the National Academy of Design, but this number is low given his place in the artistic community of the time. Four of his paintings were engraved and published in The Atlantic Souvenir and The Token annual gift books in the 1820s and 30s. Among them were Moonlight and The Mother and Child, the latter being considered by Allston to be one of his best works.

In 1830 Allston married Martha Remington Dana (daughter of Chief Justice Francis Dana), the sister of the novelist Richard Henry Dana Sr.; Dana was a cousin of Allston's first wife.

In 1841, he published Monaldi, a romance illustrating Italian life, and in 1850, a volume of his Lectures on Art, and Poems. He worked for years on what he envisioned would be his masterpiece: a painting called Belshazzar's Feast; he died before finishing it.

His artistic genius was much admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was strongly influenced by his paintings and poems, but so were both Margaret Fuller and Sophia Peabody, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 17 years after Allston's death, wrote that: "One man may sweeten a whole time. I never pass through Cambridge Port without thinking of Allston. His memory is the quince in the drawer and perfumes the atmosphere." Contemporary critic James Miller of the same city held him in high regard, saying, "He labors in the highest walks of art." Another contemporary critic, John Neal of The Yankee, felt Allston had unrealized talent: "Mr. Allston's faculties are a very uncommon union of the bold and beautiful", and yet he lacks "that sort of inward fervor which flashes into spontaneous combustion, whenever it is excited or exasperated." Historian David S. Lovejoy nevertheless judged Allston "doubtless the finest American romantic painter". The term, subsequently made famous by T.S Eliot in essay on Hamlet (1919), denotes a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of a particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

The west Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Allston is named after him, as is Allston Way, in the "Poets Corner" neighborhood of Berkeley, California.

Allston was buried in the Dana family plot in the Old Burying Ground.

Gallery

Additional works

A Landscape after Sunset, c. 1819, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.