ONE of the first painters of assured genius developed in the United States, Washington Allston lacks nothing except the quantity of his literary work to give him, as an essayist on art, the same high rank he attained by expressing his intellect with his brush. He is governed by the same reverence for nature, the same belief in its supernatural origin and in the possibility of learning more from it than can be expressed in words, which governed Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ruskin.

  He was born near Georgetown, South Carolina, November 5th, 1779. After graduating at Harvard, he sold his estate in South Carolina and went to Europe that he might devote himself wholly to art. He spent nearly eighteen years in London, Paris, and Rome, and, on his return to America, took up his residence in Massachusetts, where he painted many of his best pictures, notably “The Angel Uriel in the Sun” and the unfinished “Belshazzar’s Feast.” Besides his essays and lectures on art, he published a volume of poems which were included in the collection edited after his death by Richard H. Dana, Junior. He died July 9th, 1843, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.