Washington Allston, A. R. A. Born in South Carolina. Graduated at Harvard College, 1800. Entered the schools of the Royal Academy in London soon after. His first work of importance, “The Dead Man Revived,” gained a prize of two hundred guineas from the British Institute, and was purchased by the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. This was followed by “St. Peter liberated by the Angel,” “Uriel and the Sun,” “Jacob’s Dream,” and several smaller pictures, which are in private galleries in England. They were generally exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, of which he was an associate. In 1818 he opened a studio in Boston, and spent the remainder of his life in his native country. Among the better known of Allston’s works are, “Jeremiah,” (in Yale College) and “The Witch of Endor;” “Miriam,” owned by the late David Sears of Boston; “Rosalie,” owned by Nathan Appleton; “Belshazzar’s Feast,” in the Boston Athenæum; “Madonna;” “Spanish Girl;” and “Spalatio’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,” painted in Cambridge, Mass., in 1832, for H. S. Ball, of Charleston, S. C., and sold in the collection of John Taylor Johnston, in 1876, for $3,900. It has been made familiar and popular by means of the engraving. It was at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, as was also a landscape of Allston’s belonging to the estate of Mrs. S. A. Eliot; “Rosalie;” “Isaac of York” (property of the Boston Athenæum); and “The Head of a Jew.” In 1831 he published “The Sylphs of the Season,” a poem, and a little later, “The Paint King” and “The Two Painters.” His romance of “Monaldi,” which followed these, attracted some attention in the literary world, and has been dramatized. Among Allston’s portraits are Benjamin West, in the Boston Athenæum, and Coleridge, the poet, in the National Portrait Gallery, of England.

Personal

  Allston has a mild manner, a soft voice, and a sentimental air with him,—not at all Yankeeish; but his conversation does not indicate the talent displayed in his paintings.

  Nothing new in Boston, except an old painting by Allston, just brought to light and for show. A beautiful fancy-sketch; two girls,—one from Titian, the other his own dreamerie. They talk of getting up an exhibition of all his paintings, for his benefit. He needs it. O ye gods! how hard a fate! This old painting, which he loved and cherished as a child of his youth, and valued at fifteen hundred dollars, he has been obliged to part with for five hundred.

  His MS., notwithstanding an exceedingly simple and boyish air, is one which we particularly admire. It is forcible, picturesque, and legible, without ornament of any description. Each letter is formed with a thorough distinctness and individuality. Such a MS. indicates caution and precision, most unquestionably; but we say of it as we say of Mr. Peabody’s (a very different MS.), that no man of original genius ever did or could habitually indite it under any circumstances whatever.

  No picture is more pleasing to my heart and fancy than to see Mr. Allston, seated at his parlor fire in the evening, after a day spent in his studio, his eyes resting meditatively upon the fire, his beautiful countenance marked with taste and thought, the smoke from his cigar going up in little clouds and mingling among the gray curls of his hair, and then rising, to etherealize the whole, with the social glass of wine on the table which he has placed before his visitor,—the whole is painted with warm colors in my mind.

  As we contemplate the life and works of Allston, we are inexpressibly grateful that he lived. His example is one of our best possessions. And yet, while rejoicing that he has done much, we seem to hear a whisper that he might have done more. His productions suggest a higher genius than they display; and we are disposed sometimes to praise the master rather than the work. Like a beloved character in English literature, Sir James Mackintosh, he finally closed a career of beautiful, but fragmentary labors, leaving much undone which all had hoped he would do. The great painting which haunted so many years of his life, and which his friends and country awaited with anxious interest, remained unfinished at last. His Virgilian sensibility and modesty would doubtless have ordered its destruction, had death arrested him less suddenly. Titian died, leaving incomplete, like Allston, an important picture, on which his hand was busy down to the time of his death. A pious and distinguished pupil, the younger Palma, took up the labor of his master, and, on its completion, placed it in the church for which it was destined, with this inscription: “That which Titian left unfinished Palma reverently completed and dedicated to God.” Where is the Palma who can complete what our Titian has left unfinished?

  Once in a winter, or possibly oftener, his evening hearth was brightened by the presence of Washington Allston. He loved this friend for his lofty purity of character, as much as he admired his grand genius; and the courtesy with which each recognized the other’s greatness was most noble. Mr. Allston was prompt to seek his friend’s judgment of a new picture, so much did he confide in his simple instincts of beauty and truthfulness of taste. And by the hour would Dr. Channing listen, rapt and silent, with childlike animation on his spiritual countenance, whilst the painter poured forth his golden floods of high idealism, devout sentiment, criticism, anecdote, description. He joyfully made the sacrifice of wasted days following such wakefulness, for the artist’s best hour for talk was midnight.

  He took particular pleasure in works of devout Christian speculation, without, however, neglecting a due proportion of strictly devotional literature. These he varied by a constant recurrence of the great epic and dramatic masters and occasional reading of the earlier and the living novelists, tales of wild romance and lighter fiction, voyage and travels, biographies and letters. Nor was he without a strong interest in the current politics of his own country and of England, as to which his principles were highly conservative.

  To the eye of the multitude his life glided away in secluded contentment, yet a prevailing idea was the star of his being—the idea of beauty. For the high, the lovely, the perfect, he strove all his days. He sought them in the scenes of nature, in the masterpieces of literature and art, in habits of life, in social relations, and in love. Without pretense, without elation, in all meekness, his youthful enthusiasm chastened by suffering, he lived above the world. Gentleness he deemed true wisdom, renunciation of all the trappings of life a duty. He was calm, patient, occasionally sad, but for the most part happy in the free exercise and guardianship of his varied powers.

  So refined was his whole appearance, so fastidiously neat his apparel,—but with a neatness that seemed less the result of care and plan than a something as proper to the man as whiteness to the lily,—that you would have at once classed him with those individuals, rarer than great captains and almost as rare as great poets, whom Nature sends into the world to fill the arduous office of Gentleman…. A nimbus of hair, fine as an infant’s, and early white, showing refinement of organization and the predominance of the spiritual over the physical, undulated and floated around a face that seemed like pale flame, and over which the flitting shades of expression chased each other, fugitive and gleaming as waves upon a field of rye. It was a countenance that, without any beauty of feature, was very beautiful. I have said that it looked like pale flame, and can find no other words for the impression it gave. Here was a man all soul, his body seeming a lamp of finest clay, whose service was to feed with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that wavering fire which hovered over it. You, who are an adept in such matters, would have detected in the eyes that artist-look which seems to see pictures ever in the air, and which, if it fall on you, makes you feel as if all the world were a gallery, and yourself the rather indifferent Portrait of a Gentleman hung therein.

  I first became acquainted with Washington Allston, early in the spring of 1805. He had just arrived from France, I from Sicily and Naples. I was then not quite twenty-two years of age—he a little older. There was something, to me, inexpressibly engaging in the appearance and manners of Allston. I do not think I have ever been more completely captivated on a first acquaintance. He was of a light and graceful form, with large blue eyes and black silken hair, waving and curling round a pale expressive countenance. Everything about him bespoke the man of intellect and refinement. His conversation was copious, animated, and highly graphic; warmed by a genial sensibility and benevolence, and enlivened at times by a chaste and gentle humor … a man whose memory I hold in reverence and affection, as one of the purest, noblest, and most intellectual beings that ever honored me with his friendship.

Art

  The admirable works exhibiting now by Allston; whose great picture, with his Hebe, landscape, and sea-piece, would of themselves suffice to elucidate the fundamental doctrines of colour, ideal form, and grouping; assist the reasoner in the same way as the diagrams aid the geometrician, but far more and more vividly.

  What painter (excepting perhaps Raffaelle) ever came near his own conception or that of any other man?

  The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that shone through rather than in them, and the harmony of colouring were as unlike anything else I saw, as the “Vicar of Wakefield” to Cooper’s novels. I seemed to recognise in painting that self-possessed elegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in literature; I thought with delight that such a man as this had been able to grow up in our bustling, reasonable community, that he had kept his foot upon the ground, yet never lost sight of the rose-clouds of beauty floating above him. I saw, too, that he had not been troubled, but possessed his own soul with the blandest patience; and I hoped, I scarce knew what; probably the mot d’enigme for which we are all looking. How the poetical mind can live and work in peace and good faith! how it may unfold to its due perfection in an unpoetical society!

  Our country has the right to claim, then, at least one great name upon the list of living artists. On him descended those nameless influences, which, in all countries and ages, have from time to time fallen upon such as Heaven has chosen to delineate and adorn in various modes the images that fill the worlds of reality and of dreams. In the midst of the trials and fatigues of common life, from which none of us, and least of all the artist, escape, he has been laboring for us and for our children, to combine the scattered beauties of nature, to reproduce in more permanent form the shapes that alternately are moulded and melted away among the clouds of imagination, to call back in renewed existence the creations of the past. And it is not mere natural genius to which we owe our admiration and gratitude, but genius improved by patient study, refined by still seclusion, warmed by good affections, and therefore diffusing itself in images as finished, as pure, as full of gentle feelings; even as one planet is reflected with the same light from the bosom of many waters.

  All the pictures to which I have just referred, and many others, to which I shall presently turn your attention, are examples of that peculiar charm, in art, styled by the critics, repose. There is hardly a work from the hand of Allston which is not, either in the whole, or in some considerable part, an instance in point. The word Repose alone, perhaps, with sufficient accuracy, describes the state of mind, and the outward aspect of nature intended by it.

  Allston’s style was extremely varied, as were the subjects he treated. His was no formal manner, operating with the regularity, fecundity, and swiftness of a machine. Who would assign to the same hand the landscapes at Boston and the “Desert,” purchased by Mr. Labouchere? When I reflect upon the character of his works and the immense labor bestowed upon them, I am surprised that this age, so prone to regard art as a handmaid of luxury, should have employed him as it did. When I remember the astonishing rapidity of his execution, the ease with which his hand and eye mirrored the beauty before him, when I remember that his will alone stood between his poverty and the most prolific outpouring of production, with all the renown and emolument that accompany it, then I form a clear idea of the character of his genius. His was truly a great and a noble example. Was such ever thrown away? Surely never. More even than his works do I believe that he will live in the awakened minds of American art, and who shall say where the republic will carry the achievements of painting with him for her first-born poet-painter.

  It seemed to me that in him America had lost her third great man. What Washington was as a statesman, Channing as a moralist, that was Allston as an artist.

  It was Allston who first awakened what little sensibility I may possess to the beauties of colour. He first directed my attention to the Venetian school, particularly to the works of Paul Veronese, and taught me to see, through the accumulated dirt of ages, the exquisite charm that lay beneath. Yet, for a long time, I took the merit of the Venetians on trust, and, if left to myself, should have preferred works which I now feel to be comparatively worthless. I remember when the picture of “The Ages,” by Titian, was first pointed out to me by Allston as an exquisite work, I thought he was laughing at me. It is but fair to myself, however, to say, that from the first I was delighted with the Raffaelles in the same collection (the Bridgwater).

  The method of this artist was to suppress all the coarser beauties which make up the substance of common pictures. He was the least ad captandum of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours, glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing attitudes, no asking for admiration,—but a severe and chaste restraint, a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven’s light shines through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each form a presence.

  With the name of this great painter, painting reached its acme of excellence among us. In genius, character, life, and feeling, he emulated the Italian masters, partook of their spirit, and caught the mellow richness of their tints…. From an Alpine landscape luminous with frosty atmosphere and sky-piercing mountains to moonbeams flickering on a quiet stream, from grand scriptural to delicate fancy figures, from rugged and solemn Jewish heads to the most ideal female conceptions, from “Jeremiah” to “Beatrice,” and from “Miriam” to “Rosalie,” every phrase of mellow and transparent—almost magnetic color, graceful contours, deep expression, rich contrasts of tints—the mature, satisfying, versatile triumph of pictorial art, as we have known and loved it in the Old World, then and there, justified the name of “American Titian” bestowed on Allston at Rome.

  The versatility of Allston in painting at will historical compositions, portraits, ideal heads, landscapes, marines, and genre pictures was accompanied with a minute and delicate finish bestowed on all alike. It was a matter of wonder, when his pictures were collected in Boston, how so much work could have been crowded into one short life, and that a crippled one. The grand figures of his prophets and kings were not more carefully and minutely painted than the accessories of still-life,—the vases, jewels, and back-grounds. But this versatility was fatal to the master’s pre-eminence in American art, for life is not long enough for the noblest mind and deftest hand to attain illustrious excellence in so many departments of endeavor. He should have confined himself to small ideal subjects, with which he had full sympathy. Allston’s love for sublimity was hardly less than his devotion to beauty, though it was not so often displayed in his art…. In expression, or the power of portraying emotions and dispositions, Allston found another of his noble characteristics, though he withheld a display of this gift in a majority of his pictures, preferring to paint calm and passionless faces, full of tender and thoughtful beauty, and giving free scope to the imagination. Dignity is paramount, a grand abstraction, a passive majesty.

  He is one of our great men. Pure in his life as a child, modest in his character, and of a delicacy and refinement of imagination in his art that entitles him to take rank with the great masters. When I remember the place in which he worked, the difficulties which he had to encounter, the absence of all stimulus save that which he found within himself, his prosaic surroundings, the want of models and means for his art, and in every way the restrictions of his position, the works that he produced were almost marvelous; but genius makes its own place, and time breaks the difficulties of circumstance…. He filled my mind with his own enthusiasm and taught me the dignity of art, the sincere devotion it demanded. The earnest study, the consecration of the whole mind and heart it required. And he led me into its precincts as a high-priest leads the trembling neophyte to the altar. I can never be grateful enough to him for the high standard which he set before me, as before all who came into his presence.

  Some of those who mark in much of Allston’s work the gap which divides intentions from accomplishments, and mark also the non-pictorial, “literary” character of these intentions, are led to think that he should not have tried to paint at all—that he was meant to be an artist in words, and not in lines and colours. But the volume of poems he has left does not in the least confirm such theories. Within certain narrow limits he was successful in his pictures, while he never even approached success in verse. His prose writing, however, is very interesting; and if space sufficed I should like to show how fine and keen and sane a critical instinct he possessed…. And yet, if a pathetic fact for himself, it was a fortunate fact for us that his ideals and ambitions—these being but the translation of his whole nature—were so much loftier than his gifts and opportunities. If his pictures can have no notable influence upon American art, his life and character had an immense and happy influence upon the reverence for, and appreciation of, art in America. What we needed fifty years ago was not so much great artists as a great prophet and apostle and servant of art. We may wish, if we will, that Allston had left us finer works and more voluminous critical writings; but after all, the best service he could have done us was to work in the spirit he did and to be the man he was. I do not think I underestimate the value of his painting when I say that he was by no means the potent artist our fathers thought him. But I am sure I could not over-estimate the value of his life, of his example, of himself—a strong and needed and gracious influence while he lived, and to-day a helpful, an inspiring tradition.

  His outline drawings, which have been much admired, are round and unaccented, and show little sense of structure. His composition often seems mechanical rather than organic. The “Dead Man Revived” seems pieced together, and has no unity of arrangement. His costumes are in a curious, hybrid, pseudo-classic taste, and his prettily feminine angels, with their hair dressed in the fashion of Lawrence’s portraits, are strangely in contrast with the heavy-muscled prophets and apostles after Michael Angelo and Raphael, which have sometimes an undeniable dignity. “Handling” he avowedly despised, and his technical methods were of the elaborate kind common when artists still believed in “the secret of Titian,” and the old art of “painting in oils” had not succumbed in the struggle with modern demands…. Allston must, on the whole, be classed, as one of the failures in art.

General

  Though we have not allowed to Mr. Allston a mastery over the more intense passions, yet he seems filled with the milder feeling and to have nothing pass through the imagination untouched by them. All that the world contains is, with him, a sentiment, and quickens the feelings and thoughts. Indeed, it seems to be peculiarly the character of his, and almost all good modern poetry, to make all that surrounds us within doors, and in our daily affairs abroad, administer good to our hearts and minds, so that, if it does not make poets of us all, it will cause us to be wider and more accurate thinkers, as well as better men. Besides this character, the poems before us, in many parts, run up into the wild, and visionary, and magnificent, and the eye brightens and enlarges, and the spirits are lifted, as we enter into them. All, however, is of the same joyous temperament; for if the scene, viewed alone, would be dark and awing, you find it in the midst of satire and humour, and their lights are observed, playing and sparkling over it, as in “The Paint King,” and “The Two Painters.”

  “The Two Painters,” an admirable satire, intended to ridicule the attempts to reach perfection in one excellency in the art of painting, to the neglect of every other, proves equally his descriptive powers. These poems, and the “Paint King,” a singularly wild, imaginative story, evidence, also, his creative genius. They are all original, in their fable, style, and cast of thought; and all have the purest and most cheerful influences upon the mind.

  No man ever possessed a more exquisite appreciation of the Beautiful, than Washington Allston, one of the most gifted of painters, and yet no man ever kept the Beautiful in more severe subordination to the Good and True, in the productions of both his pencil and pen. That appreciation made him shrink from frequent efforts in the higher department of his art, for he felt the impuissance of his hand in the delineations of the glorious visions of his genius.

  His poems, though few in number, are exquisite in finish, and in the fancies and thoughts which they embody. They are delicate, subtle, and philosophical. Thought and feeling are united in them, and the meditative eye

  Comparatively little known as a writer to the present generation of Americans, there is yet much in his prose and poetical productions to please the fancy and to elevate and refine the taste.

  As a poet, however, he is now but little known. As a prose writer, his lectures on art, and especially his romance of “Monaldi,” show that he could paint with the pen as well as with the brush. It is difficult to understand why “Monaldi” has not obtained a permanent place in our literature. There is in one description of a picture representing the visible struggle of a soul in the toils of sin which in intensity of conception and passion exceeds any picture he ever painted.

  He wrote a romance, “Monaldi,” which had many excellences, but not the quality of impressiveness; unless we except the description of a picture of a soul struggling in the toils of sin, which is more effective than any of Allston’s actual pictures…. Finally, he produced some sonnets which are placid and pale-hued records of personal feeling, and whose chief merit is the negative one of being free from vulgarity. But though the definite information to be had about Allston arouses a certain intellectual impatience, it would be wrong to dismiss him as a vapid and featureless pretender.

  His appearance was indeed impressive. No one could see him without feeling something of his character. To those who have seen him, it is not surprising that the genial poet of Boston needed no one to designate Allston. There was in him a remarkable symmetry of endowment. As an artist he seemed to possess every gift requisite to produce the best effects in every department. As a poet he had the same fulness of natural qualities…. Allston was not deficient in strength or in the adventuring boldness of genius. Beauty did not check, if we may so express it, the effrontery of his imagination, or smoothe the rugged strength of his thought. Symmetry was ever present, but never to weaken his work. His exquisite adjustment of all elements in the production of effects, his love of symmetry, with harmony, distinguished him to a remarkable degree. The gentle stood not alone, or as over-balancing the grand.

  While his poems have many beauties, it is chiefly as an influence that he is remembered in literature. Compared with many of his contemporaries, his production was small indeed, yet it should not be forgotten that, in introducing America to the culture of Europe, Allston did a service to our literature second only to that rendered by Longfellow.