WASHINGTON ALLSTON

'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.

Contents

Education and travel

Recognition

Gallery

References

External links

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. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom studied painting under him.

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.^[1]
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. Allston also wrote a good deal of verse including ''The Sylphs of the Seasons'' (1813) and ''The Two Painters'', a satire. He also produced a novel, ''Monaldi''.
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.
In 1818 he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years, where 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.
The west Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Allston is named for him.

Gallery

References

1. Poets of Cambridge, USA Vetter, H.F

External links

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★ Washington Allston in the New Students Reference Work.