Washington Allston

Washington Allston ARA (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.

Biography
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. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in London in September, when painter Benjamin West was then the president.

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. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of Allston’s art pupils and accompanied Allston to Europe in 1811. After traveling throughout western Europe, Allston finally settled in London, where he won fame and prizes for his pictures.

Allston was also a published writer. In London in 1813, he published The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems, republished in Boston, Massachusetts, later that year. 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.

In 1830 Allston married Martha Remington Dana (daughter of Chief Justice Francis Dana), the sister of the novelist Richard Henry Dana; 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.

Allston died on July 9, 1843, at age 63. Allston is buried in Harvard Square, in “the Old Burying Ground” between the First Parish Church and Christ Church.

Recognition
Allston was sometimes called the “American Titian” because his style resembled the great Venetian Renaissance artists in their display of dramatic color contrasts. His work greatly influenced the development of U.S. landscape painting. Also, the themes of many of his paintings were drawn from literature, especially Biblical stories.

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. The influential critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold dedicated his famous anthology The Poets and Poetry of America to Allston in 1842. 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.”

Boston painter William Morris Hunt was an admirer of Allston’s work, and in 1866 founded the Allston Club in Boston, and in his arts classes passed on to his students his knowledge of Allston’s techniques.

Washington Allston was the first to use (apparently) the term Objective Correlative in 1840 which subsequently revived and made famous by T.S Eliot in essay on Hamlet (1919). The term denotes a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that 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.

Work
The “Resurrection”, the first work of the painter during his second stay in England from 1811 to 1818, earned him the recognition of his peers and the award of a prize of 200 guineas of the British Institution; this work is now at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia). He will then paint the Deliverance of Saint Peter by the Angels (offered in 1877 at the Asylum in Worcester, Massachusetts), Uriel in the Sun (1817, private collection) and the Dream of Jacob (Petworth House, Sussex), Elijah in the desert, etc.

In 1813, he published The Sylphs of the Seasons and other poems, a collection of poems that reveals his love of nature and his knowledge of human sensitivity.

After returning to the United States in 1818, he painted the Prophet Jeremiah (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut), Saul and the witch of Eudor, the Song of Miriam, Dante and Beatrice, and one of his works mistresses Spalatro seeing the bloody hand (based on the novel the Italian by Ann Radcliffe). Upon his death, he will leave unfinished the Feast of Balthazar (Athenæum of Boston, Massachusetts), painting on which he worked since 1817.

He also wrote a satire The Two Painters as well as a tragic novel Monaldi whose scene takes place in Italy (published in 1841); his Lectures on Art was posthumously published in 1850 by his brother-in-law Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815-1882).

Analysis of the work
Despite a neoclassical training and environment and Washington Allston’s ambition was primarily to be a painter of history and biblical scenes, the artist was sensitive to the romantic aesthetic and assimilated the influence of Joseph Mallord William Turner. His landscapes emanate an atmosphere of mystery and dream, as evidenced by Landscape in the Moonlight (1809, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts) or Lorenzo and Jessica (1832). He was one of the first painters, or even the first, to introduce romanticism in the United States before the movement led by Thomas Cole.and the Hudson River School. He has also made many portraits, particularly Benjamin West and Coleridge (National Portrait Gallery, London) or his Self-Portrait (1805, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts) that show that the artist also succeeded in this genre.

The charm of his color, his way of using light and colors and his power of dramatic effect earned him the nickname “American Titian”.

List of works
Paintings
1804 The Flood (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
1804 Emerging thunderstorm on the sea (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1804 Landscape with a lake (private collection)
1804 Landscape with a lake (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1805 Self Portrait (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1805 Classical Landscape ((in) Addison Gallery of American Art [ archive ], Andover, Massachusetts)
1805 Dream of Joseph (?)
1809 Moonlight Landscape (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1811 Resurrection (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia)
1814 Italian Landscape (Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio)
1814 Portrait of Dr. John King of Clifton (Art Museum, San Francisco)
1815 Study of Life or Study of an Angel for the Deliverance of Saint Peter by Angels (Private Collection)
1817-1843 Feast of Balthazar (Athenæum, Boston)
1817 Portrait of Issac of York (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1817 Portrait of Jew (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1817 Uriel in the sun (Mugar Memorial Library, Boston, Massachusetts)
1818 Elijah in the desert (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1818 Jacob’s Dream (Petworth House, Sussex)
1819 Florimel Removal (Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan)
1819 Moonlight Landscape (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)
1832 Reverie of a young Spanish girl (private collection)
1832 Lorenzo and Jessica (?)
18 ?? Chant of Myriam (?)
18 ?? Dante and Beatrice (?)
18 ?? Deliverance of Saint Peter by Angels (Worcester, Massachusetts),
18 ?? Landscape in the moonlight (?)
18 ?? Italian Landscape (Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan)
18 ?? Portrait of Benjamin West (National Portrait Gallery, London)
18 ?? Portrait of Coleridge (National Portrait Gallery, London)
18 ?? Prophet Jeremiah ((en) Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut)
18 ?? Saul and the Eudor pythonis (?)
18 ?? Spalatro seeing the bloody hand (?)

Poetry
1813 The Sylphs of the Seasons with Other Poems

Novels
1841 Monaldi

Other works
1850 (posthumous) Lectures on Art

Source from Wikipedia