8.27.2007

Washington Allston - American artist


Washington Allston Washington Allston was born in November 5, 1779 - July 9, 1843 was a U.S. poet and significant painter, born in Waccamaw, South Carolina. Allston pioneer America’s Romantic group of landscape painting. He was well known throughout his lifetime for his experiments with dramatic subject matter and his bold use of light and atmospheric color.
Education and travel


Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800, and then sails to Europe, where he exhausted 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 for a number of years those of Italy, where he met Coleridge, his lifelong friend. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of Allston’s art pupils and accompanies Allston to Europe in 1811. After wandering throughout Western Europe, Allston finally settled in London, where he won reputation and prizes for his pictures. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom intentional in painting under him.


Recognition
Flourmill’s Flight, 1819.Allston was from time to time called the “American Titian” because his style resembles the great Venetian Renaissance artists in their display of dramatic color contrast. His work greatly prejudiced the development of U.S. landscape painting. Also, the themes of many paintings were strained from literature, especially Biblical stories.


His artistic mastermind was much accepted 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 send-up. He also shaped a novel, Monaldi.In 1818 he returns to the United States and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years, where he died on July 9, 1843, at age 64.