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Historical Artist - Washington Allston (1779 - 1843)
American painter, Washington Allston was a leading figure of the Romantic movment in the United
States. He lived and worked mostly in Boston, although he traveled to Europe twice. From 1801 to
1808, he studied in London under Benjamin West and then returned to Europe again from 1811 to
1818. His later work consists mainly of landscape, putting the emphasis on mood rather than
observation. Also a writer, Allston produced poetry, novels, and art treatises.
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 Margaret Fuller and Sophia
Peabody, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The influential critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold
dedicated his famous anthology The Poets and Poetry of America to Allston in 1842. 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."
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.
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.
Contemporary American Artists
Art Galleries in the United States of America
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