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Washington Allston

Artist Info
Washington AllstonAmerican, 1779 – 1843

Departing for Europe nearly a year after graduation from Harvard in 1800, Allston had already determined to become a painter. After studying with Benjamin West in London he traveled about on the Continent, and became especially enamored of the epic-scale paintings and noble themes of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Mingled with this was a romantic delight in the mysterious and the bizarre - a characteristic he shared with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the early years of the new century Allston, along with John Vanderlyn, attempted to elevate American art from the limiting confines of portraiture and give it a monumental form which would equal the great artistic epochs of the past. Allston brought to America such exciting and grandiose subjects as Belshazzar's Feast, Elijah in the Desert, and Diana in the Chase. The public in general, however, did not take to him, preferring an indigenous art to his imported, strongly Italianate style. Allston returned to America in 1818 and spent the remainder of his life near Boston in the circle of artistic and philosophical enlightenment which centered there, but the total production of that last quarter century was devoted as much to philosophical writings and poetry as to painting.

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