Washington Allston
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Washington Allston (November 5, 1779 - July 9, 1843) was a U.S. poet and influential painter, born in Waccamaw, 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.
Education and travel
Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800, then sailed to Europe, where he spent the next three years studying art at the Royal Academy in London, England, of which the Anglo-American 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 Coleridge, his lifelong friend. 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.
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.
Writings and death
Allston also wrote a good deal of verse including The Sylphs of the Seasons (1813) and The Two Painters, a satire. In 1841 he published Monaldi, a romance illustrating Italian life, and in 1850, a volume of his Lectures on Art, and Poems.
He 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
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 Sophia Peabody—who married Nathaniel Hawthorne—and Margaret Fuller.
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.
