Allston, Washington (1779-1843)

US painter and writer. A pioneer of the Romantic movement in the USA, he is best known for his landscapes, though he also painted classical, religious, and historical subjects. His handling of light and colour earned him the epithet ‘the American Titian’. His writings include Lectures on Art 1850.

Allston was born at Waccamaw, South Carolina. After graduating at Harvard 1800, he went to Europe to study, first in London, then in Paris and Rome. He worked in London for a number of years, and was elected Associate of the Royal Academy 1818, the year of his return to the USA. He was admired by Coleridge, whose portrait he painted (National Portrait Gallery, London), and was a friend of John Martin, with whose imagination he had much in common. His earlier work was grandiose and dramatic, The Deluge, 1804 (New York Metropolitan Museum), being an example. On one large picture, Belshazzar's Feast (in which he gave a subject to Martin), he worked unhappily for many years after he settled in Boston, though his work there is better represented by smaller paintings of dreamy reverie such as his Moonlit Landscape, 1819 (Boston). He wrote a novel, Monaldi 1841.