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

thumb|left|180px|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.

thumb|250px|Landscape with Lake (1804)

thumb|250px|Italian Landscape

thumb|250px|Elijah in the Desert, 1818, [[Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]]

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.

thumb|[[The Flight of Florimell, 1819]]

thumb|Belshazzar's Feast, 1817–1843, [[Detroit Institute of Arts]]

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

<gallery widths="140px" heights="140px" perrow="4">

Image:Storm Rising at Sea.jpg|Storm Rising at Sea, 1804, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Image:Moonlit Landscape.jpg|Moonlit Landscape, 1809, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Image:Allston, Washington - Coast Scene on the Mediterranean, oil on canvas, 1811.jpg|Coast Scene on the Mediterranean, 1811, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina

Image:1811 PoorAuthor RichBookseller byWashingtonAllston MFABoston.jpeg|The Poor Author and the Rich Bookseller, 1811

Image:Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Washington Allston retouched.jpg|Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814, Dove Cottage, Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, England

Image:1815 DonnaMencia byWashingtonAllston MFABoston.jpeg|Donna Mencia in the Robber's Cavern, 1815

File:Washington Allston - Hermia and Helena - Google Art Project.jpg|Hermia and Helena, (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) from c. 1818

Image:1819 Beatrice byWashingtonAllston MFABoston.jpeg|Beatrice, 1819, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Image:1831 SpanishGirl byWashingtonAllston MMA.jpg|The Spanish Girl in Reverie, 1831

File:Two Artists in the Old Library, Washington Allston's Picture, 'Jacob's Dream', Hanging over the Fireplace ('The Artist and the Amateur').jpeg|Two Artists in the Old Library, Washington Allston's Picture, 'Jacob's Dream', Hanging over the Fireplace ('The Artist and the Amateur'), J. M. W. Turner, 1827

File:William Ellery Channing by Allston.jpg|Portrait of William Ellery Channing

File:Washington Allston, American - Scene from Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" (Katharina and Petruchio) - Google Art Project.jpg|Scene from Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" (Katharina and Petruchio)

</gallery>

Additional works

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

References

Sources

  • Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC [http://collection.corcoran.org/collection/work/landscape-after-sunset?apcat=1]

Further reading

  • Allston, Washington, Lectures on Art and Poems, 1850 (facsimile ed., with Monaldi, 1841, 1967, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ).
  • Washington Allston in the New Students Reference Work.
  • Google Art Project, Washington Allston
  • Guide to Washington Allston's papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University
  • Washington Allston at American Art Gallery
  • Washington Allston letter fragment, 1818 Mar. 2 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
  • Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections