Biography from AskART:
| Achieving an international reputation as a romantic painter, poet and
art philosopher, Washington Allston did historical, portrait and
historical painting in a dark, wild, mystical, lofty style.
His many years spent abroad became a major influence for American
artists to study in Europe. He also affected the changing image
of United States artists from being slightly disreputable artisans to
romantic, poetic idealists.
He was born in Georgetown, South
Carolina, and graduated from Harvard College in Boston in 1800.
From 1800 to 1818, excepting three years that he spent in Boston, he
was in Europe where he adopted a romantic classicism that influenced a
number of painters who followed him.
He studied at the Royal
Academy in London with Benjamin West and traveled and painted with John
Vanderlyn. In 1805, he settled in Rome until 1808, and became
friends with Washington Irving, Samuel Coleridge and other well-known
Americans living abroad.
In England, he became recognized as
one of the important history painters, especially in Biblical themes
rather than the classical subjects he had painted in Italy. An
impediment to his productivity was years of struggle on a large
painting, Belshazzar's Feast, begun in 1817 with the ten-thousand dollar subscription of ten wealthy Americans. He never completed it.
By
1818, he was settled in Boston, and lauded as the nation's top
artist. However, the demand for history painting was minimal, and
he turned to smaller works, both figural and landscape, many of them
romanticized, pastoral figures in landscapes.
His place in
American art history is hard to pinpoint. His styles changed from
Classicism to Romanticism, and his subject matter was wide
ranging. He had tremendous influence on succeeding generations of
artists who admired him for his refined sensibilities and serious,
professional approach to fine art, but Thomas Cole, leader of the
Hudson River School of landscape painting, was critical of Allston for
his lack of interest in the virgin American wilderness. However,
this new approach of artists finding personal inspiration in their
native soil was rejected by Allston, whose interest in landscape was
rooted in the European "Virgilian aesthetic", meaning rooted in
history. For Allston, nature was dignified only by its
association with human history. "It followed that American
scenery, which bore less than any other the marks of cultivation, was
of all nature the least paintable. . . .When in Massachusetts Allston
created a landscape, it was a memory of Italy, rendered in an
unrealistic style that Cole was later to denounce." (Flexner, 15)
Sources include:
Michael David Zellman, "300 Years of American Art"
James Flexner, History of American Painting: That Wilder Image, Volume III
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Biography from AskART:
| ALLSTON, WASHINGTON
Washington Allston was one of the leading painters of the American School. During his lifetime, he was considered, by admirers on both sides of the Atlantic, the first great American painter--an opinion that reflected his personal charm as much as the beauty of his art. He was born in Maccamaw, South Carolina in November 1779. He graduated from Harvard College, then lived in Charleston, South Carolina until 1801 when he went to London, determined to be an artist in spite of his family's objections. He entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he became acquainted with Nathaniel West who was president. In 1804, he traveled with Vanderlyn to Paris and Rome, where he became good friends with Washington Irving and Coleridge.
Allston returned to America in 1809 and married Ann Channing, then went back to London where he painted a great deal and was quite successful. In 1816 he returned to America and settled in Boston, weakened in health from overwork and sorrow at the death of his wife. That same year he was elected an Associate at the Royal Academy. In America, his reputation continued to grow.
Gradually his style became more elegiac and intimate. He had brought the unfinished canvas of 'Belshazzar's Feast,' 12' x 17' from Europe and continued to be obsessed by it the rest of his life. He began working on it in 1817 with a ten-thousand dollar subscription of ten wealthy Americans. He never completed it.
One report (in Time Magazine) claimed that the mature Allston wasted most of his talent on huge Biblical canvases hopelessly designed to shake the world, e.g., his unfinished "Belshazzar's Feast." Trapped in the cheerful, chilly Boston of the transcendentalists, the well-springs of his art running dry, he looked back longingly to the Mediterranean world that he had always been too much of a Puritan to grasp.
In 1830 he married again, to Martha Dana. He spent the remainder of his life in secluded industry, often ill. He painted his best work, "Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand," remarkable for light and shade and facial expressions. He excelled in portraiture as well as historical painting. The pride of his country, he was called the American Titian because of his remarkable beauty and power of coloring but he painted also with a fondness for the terrible.
He was working on 'Belshazzar' the day he died, in July 1843 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California
Sources include:
Time Magazine, February 29, 1960
internet
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Washington Allston is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Painters of Nudes
Paris Pre 1900
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