Washington Allston

In his paintings and in his influential writings, Washington Allston, one of the first academically trained artists to make a career in America, blended the legacy of European tradition with the contemporary cultural movement known as romanticism, which exalted sublime emotion and drama over reason, clarity, and objectivity. The son of a South Carolina plantation owner, Allston studied art as a child while living with an uncle in Newport, Rhode Island, and after graduating from Harvard College in 1800, he pursued further training in Europe. In London, Allston studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and joined the important circle of American expatriate artists led by American-born history painter and Academy president Benjamin West (1738–1820). Working subsequently in Paris and in Rome, Allston became a member of an international community of artists and writers that included English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who hailed him as “a man of genius.” Allston painted heroic landscapes and portraits equally influenced by Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters and by his contemporaries in Rome; in particular, his work reflects then-current interest in mystery, dramatic revelation, and dreams and visions—all preoccupations of romanticism.

Allston returned to Boston in 1808 for a five-year period, during which he composed poetry and painted several comic images of contemporary life. Disappointed by meager support for the arts in his native country, in 1811 he again departed for London, accompanied by portrait and history painter Samuel F. B. Morse, his pupil. These years in London were perhaps the most productive of Allston’s career. His monumental history paintings, many on biblical themes, won him recognition and patronage in England. Nonetheless, in 1818, Allston finally returned to Boston, determined to introduce the high ideals of European practice and tradition in America. This time, he found a receptive group of supporters who loyally underwrote his attempts to complete his magnum opus, Belshazzar’s Feast (The Detroit Institute of Arts), begun in London in 1817. Thwarted by technical challenges and the lack of a sympathetic artistic community, Allston never finished this ambitious project. During his last decades, he painted a number of dreamy, idealized landscapes and figural works, including the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Lorenzo and Jessica (TF 2000.3), that demonstrate contemporary taste for evocative, elegiac images and literary themes. His collected essays on art, composed in the 1830s and first published in 1850, are considered the first art treatise by an American. Allston died a much-loved and admired figure, a symbol to his contemporaries of the potential and of the frustrations of American artistic creativity.