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As well as achieving fame as America’s first major landscapist and the country’s premiere exponent of Romanticism, Washington Allston also won acclaim as a painter of portraits, history subjects and scenes from the Bible. His urbane style, his penchant for Venetian glazing methods, his masterful draftsmanship and the diversity of his motifs appealed to the most sophisticated and cultivate art lovers of his day. His many admirers included the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called him a “man of genius, and the best painter yet produced by America,” and the novelist, Anna Jameson, who declared that he was “Not only the greatest painter America has yet produced, but one of the greatest painters of the age. An admirable designer, a rich and harmonist colourist, and a true poet in his art.”
Allston was born in Georgetown, South Carolina on November 5th 1779 to an affluent family of landowners. He began drawing as a young boy, while attending Mrs. Colcott’s school in Charleston. When he was eight years old, his parents sent him to Newport, Rhode Island to receive the type of education that would suitably prepare him for Harvard. It was there that he made drawings after prints and began working in watercolor. He also received his earliest art lessons, from the portrait painter and instrument maker Samuel King, and befriended the miniature painter Edward Greene Malbone.
In 1796 Allston began his studies at Harvard College, painting landscapes and a few portraits in his spare time and serving as class poet. Despite family opposition, he decided to pursue a career as an artist. Indeed, following his graduation in the spring of 1800, he returned to South Carolina, selling some of his personal property in order to raise funds to study art abroad. Accompanied by Malbone, he traveled to London in 1801, spending the next two years studying at the Royal Academy with the American expatriate painter Benjamin West and the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli and developing the romantic classicism for which he became known. During this period, he painted his first important oil, The Dead Man Revived, which was awarded a prize of two hundred guineas from the British Institute and was subsequently purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
In 1803, Allston left England and began traveling the Continent. While visiting Paris, he studied Old Master paintings at the Louvre, along with his friend and fellow artist John Vanderlyn. He also painted one of his earliest Romantic canvases, Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea (1804; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), a dark and dramatic work that reflects the influence of the British painter J.M.W. Turner. In 1805 he went to Rome, where he spent three productive years painting pastoral landscapes that, in their emphasis on order and symmetry, reveal a debt to the great classical landscapist, Nicholas Poussin. Allston’s penchant for rich colors, delicate atmospheric effects and his painstaking application of glazes prompted members of the German art colony in Rome to dub him the “American Titian.”
Allston returned to Boston in 1808 and spent the next few years painting portraits and landscapes. However, by 1811 he was back in England, accompanied by a pupil, Samuel F.B. Morse. In the ensuing years, he endured illness and the death of his wife, Ann. However, he continued his prolific activity as an artist, creating dramatic, large-scale portrayals of religious, historical and allegorical subjects, among them The Angel Releasing Saint Peter from Prison (1814-16; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Painted for the noted art patron Sir George Beaumont, the work brought him widespread acclaim from English collectors and critics and election as an associate of the Royal Academy. In fact, Allston’s success was such that he was actually the first American painter who did not have to depend on portraiture to earn his living.
By the time Allston returned to Boston in 1818, he was at the height of his critical and popular success, a well-known and highly regarded figure in international art and cultural circles. His later paintings are characterized by a greater degree of lyricism, mood and intimacy, as exemplified in works such as Moonlit Landscape (1819; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and The Spanish Girl (1831; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In general, his painting output decreased towards the end of his career, due in part to his attempt to complete his Belshazzar’s Feast (Detroit Institute of Arts), a grand manner history painting that he had begun in England in 1817 and that remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Although Allston’s romantic style was eventually eclipsed by the detailed, transcriptive approach of the Hudson River School, he remained a pivotal figure in the history of American art. His aesthetic and philosophical ideals and his cosmopolitan outlook embraced the spirit of the age of Rr\omanticism and served to inspired a younger generation of American painters, among them the aforementioned Morse, as well as the sculptors Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford. His passion for color set an example for a number of mid-nineteenth century painters, such as William Page and George Fuller.
Allston died in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts on the evening of July 9th 1843, having spent an exhausting day working on Belshazzar’s Feast, during which he had to constantly ascend and descend a ladder in order to evaluate his progress.
In addition to his activity as a painter, Allston was also a writer, publishing a novel, Monaldi, in 1841. A series of his lectures on art, as well as a number of his poems, were published in posthumously in 1850. The artist’s work is represented in major public collections throughout the United States and England, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Baltimore Museum of Art; the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida; Detroit Institute of Arts; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the Toledo Museum of Art; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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