Washington Allston

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(b Waccamaw, SC, 5 Nov 1779; d Cambridgeport, MA, 9 July 1843). American painter. The son of a prominent South Carolina plantation owner of English descent, he began to draw around the age of six, and he moved to his uncle's home in Newport, RI, at the age of eight. While there he came into contact with the portrait painter Samuel King, but it was the exhibited portraits of Robert Edge Pine that offered him inspiring models of glazing and colouring. Dubbed 'the Count' by his Harvard College classmates for his way with fashion, Allston explored alternatives to the portrait tradition with landscapes, as well as with depictions of irrational figures, for example Man in Chains (1800; Andover, MA, Phillips Acad., Addison Gal.). After graduating in 1800, he sold his patrimony to fund study abroad.

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America's first important painter of the romantic movement, Washington Allston (1779-1843) created landscapes, historical scenes, and literary pieces that exude dramatic terror as well as quiet mystery.

Washington Allston was born in South Carolina in 1779. After graduating from Harvard College in 1800, he returned to Charleston and sold his share of the family property to finance his career as an artist. In May 1801 Allston and the miniaturist painter Edward G. Malbone left for England.

Years in Europe

Allston studied at the School of the Royal Academy in London. He learned the use of under painting and glazes to produce the rich atmospheric effect necessary to the realization of his later romantic paintings. Allston was in Paris in 1803-1804 and in Rome from 1804 to 1808, where he knew the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American author Washington Irving. In Italy he especially admired the work of the great Venetian painters Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. He appreciated the bravura of their technique and the resonance of their tone (which, he later wrote, moved not only his senses but his imagination). He tried to emulate these qualities in his own grandiose historical and literary paintings and his landscapes and seascapes, such as the Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea (1804).

Allston returned to America in 1808 and stayed in Boston, occupying the very room that the painters John Copley and John Trumbull had used. During this period he married and did many portraits of his family and friends, such as the soft, languorous portrait of William Ellery Channing (1809-1811), as well as humorous genre scenes. In 1811 he sailed with his wife and Samuel F. B. Morse for England, where his wife died in 1815. Among the paintings of this second English period were the Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison (1812) and the Dead Man Revived by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811-1813), both developed into scenes of Gothic suspense.

American Period

Allston returned to America in 1818 (where he would remain for the rest of his life), residing in Boston but spending much time in Cambridge. His friends at this time included the portrait painter Thomas Sully and the sculptor Horatio Greenough. In 1830 Allston married Martha R. Dana, the sister of the novelist Richard H. Dana; Dana was a cousin of Allston's first wife. The couple settled in Cambridgeport, Mass. Allston continued to lead a rather rarefied existence: his friends were exclusively artists and writers. Allston's lack of sympathy for the widely popular president Andrew Jackson and all that he represented in terms of mass culture was behind his refusal of a commission to decorate the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington.

Times had changed in the United States, and Allston felt out of place. His old confidence was gone. The literati - people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dana - admired his work, but to the public he meant nothing. In America, portraiture and, to some extent, landscape were all that most people cared for. In Europe, Allston had painted scenes of either a dramatically bizarre or a sweetly joyous nature. In Europe he had pandered more openly to the emotions, liking especially themes of supernatural salvation; his American paintings are usually more intimate and smaller in scale than those done in Europe.

Allston painted from memory several Italian landscapes, the most memorable being Moonlight Landscape (1819); with four mysterious figures in the foreground, it casts a quietly eerie spell. The heroic Belshazzar's Feast (1817-1843) was out of keeping with the more subdued mood of the American period. This huge canvas, begun in Europe, was taken up, put down, and taken up again at the end of Allston's life but never finished. Allston was preparing to work on the figure of the King on the day of his death. The painting was commissioned by 10 friends for $10,000; the image of the prophet Daniel interpreting the handwriting on the wall haunted Allston to the point that he found himself unable to undertake other commissions. Dana spoke of it as "that terrible vision … the tormentor of his life… " In a sense, Allston's failure to complete this work demonstrates the isolation and frustration of the American artist who wished to do something more than portraiture and landscape in the first half of the 19th century.

Literary Inspiration

Few American painters of Allston's time drew from literature, and certainly none as deeply and broadly as he. He made frequent use of his literary background and interests in his painting: Uriel in the Sun (1817) was drawn from Book III of Milton's Paradise Lost, and Flight of Florimell (1819) from Spenser's Faerie Queen. Allston knew the Old and New Testaments well and sometimes chose to depict obscure passages, such as the Dead Man Revived from the account of 2 Kings, chapter 13. He produced a volume of poems in 1810 called The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems. "The Sylphs of the Seasons" dealt with the influence of each of the seasons upon the creative imagination. The most important of his writings, Lectures on Art, published posthumously in 1850 but neglected until the early 20th century, set forth a theory of art as creation and imagination and dealt systematically with such abstruse topics as invention and originality.

Allston's Importance

Allston probably influenced the course of 19th-century American painting more profoundly than any other artist. He did this not only in a general way by extending the scope of painting beyond the bounds of portraiture but also by originating certain fashions and propounding ideas that were continued. For example, the scene of the tiny figure dwarfed pictorially by the grandeur and vastness of nature (Elijah Being Fed by the Ravens, 1818) was taken up by many painters of the later Hudson River school. His tendency to think cyclically in terms of the beginnings and endings of periods of nature and empires (Belshazzar's Feast) led to the "catastrophic" paintings of Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" series and others. Allston's insistence that colors and forms could produce psychological reactions in the spectator, regardless of the subject of the painting, anticipated the work of James McNeill Whistler and the thinking of early-20th-century theoreticians of nonobjective painting. Most specifically, Allston was the first American painter to draw more from the workings of his personal inner vision than from external reality. In the 19th century alone, he was the forebear of such painters as John Quidor and Albert P. Ryder.

Further Reading

Edgar P. Richardson and Henry W. L. Dana, Washington Allston: A Study of the Romantic Artist in America (1948), is a catalogue of the existing and recorded paintings by Allston. See also Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America (1949; rev. ed. 1960). Virgil Barker, American Painting: History and Interpretation (1950), and James T. Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies, 1760-1835 (1954; new ed. 1969), offer contrasting interpretations of Allston's work.

Washington Allston
Born	November 5, 1779(1779-11-05) Near Georgetown, South Carolina
Died	July 9, 1843 (aged 63) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Occupation	Painter Poet

Washington Allston (November 5, 1779 – July 9, 1843) was an American poet and influential painter, 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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Recognition 3 Gallery 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

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.^[1] Moore remarried to Dr. Henry C. Flagg, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant from Newport, Rhode Island.^[2]

Named in honor of the leading American general of the Revolution^[3], 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.^[2] He was admitted to the Royal Academy in London in September, when painter Benjamin West was then the president.^[4]

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,^[5] and Coleridge, his lifelong friend. In 1809 Allston married Ann Channing, sister of William Ellery Channing.^[2] 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.^[6] His wife died in February 1815, leaving him saddened, lonely, and homesick for America.^[7]

In 1818 he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom studied painting under him.

In 1841 he published Monaldi, a romance illustrating Italian life, and in 1850, a volume of his Lectures on Art, and Poems.^[8]

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

Allston died on July 9, 1843, at age 64. Allston is buried in Harvard Square, in "the Old Burying Ground" between the First Parish Church and Christ Church.

Recognition

Florimell's Flight, 1819.

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.^[9]

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.^[9] The influential critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold dedicated his famous anthology The Poets and Poetry of America to Allston in 1842.^[10] 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."^[2]

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.^[11]

Washington Allston coined the term "objective correlative," which T. S. Eliot described as a situation or a chain of events that acts as a formula and is used in art to evoke emotion.

The west Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Allston is named after him.

Gallery

Coast Scene on the Mediterranean, 1811, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina Moonlit Landscape, 1809, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Storm Rising at Sea, 1804, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

References

1. ^ Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 274.
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 275.
3. ^ Planters, Pirates & Patriots: Historical Tales from the South Carolina Grand Strand, Rod Graff, Pelican Publishing, 2006
4. ^ Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 276.
5. ^ Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. Basic Books, 2007:43. ISBN 978-0-465-00853-7
6. ^ Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 277.
7. ^ Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 278.
8. ^ Ware's Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston (Boston, 1852) and Artist Biographies, Allston (1879).
9. ^ ^{a b} Vetter, H.F. "Poets of Cambridge, USA". Harvard Square Library (2006). http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/allston.php. Retrieved 2007-06-12. 
10. ^ *Pattee, Fred Lewis (1966). The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers. pp. 279. 
11. ^ Wright, Nathalia. The Correspondence of Washington Allston, Published by University Press of Kentucky, 1993, ISBN 0813117089

Further reading

• Allston, Washington, Lectures on Art and Poems, 1850 (facsimile ed., with Monaldi, 1841, 1967, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 9780820110011).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Washington Allston

• Works by Washington Allston at Project Gutenberg
• Washington Allston in the New Students Reference Work.
•  "Allston, Washington". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

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