Allston, WASHINGTON, an American painter, was born at Waccamaw, South Carolina, in 1779. He graduated at Harvard in 1800, and went next year to London to study art at the Royal Academy under Fuseli. From 1804 to 1809 he resided in Rome, studying the old masters and attaining some distinction; and there he formed an intimacy with Thorwaldsen and Coleridge. After a short stay in America (1809) he once more visited England, and in 1811 gained the 200-guinea prize of the British Institution. In 1817 he went to Paris, and the year after returned to America, and permanently fixed his residence at Cambridge Port, near Boston, where he lived, cultivating his art and the muses, till his death on 9th July 1843. In 1819 he had been elected a London A.R.A. His pictures are very numerous, the best being scriptural subjects. A composition of great size, 'Belshazzar's Feast,' occupied from time to time the last twenty-five years of his life, but was left unfinished. Allston's style is noble, his ideas are imaginative, and many of his paintings evince a true poetic spirit. In colouring, he imitated the
Venetian school, and for this reason he has been styled 'the American Titian.' Coleridge said of Allston, that he was surpassed by no man of his age for artistic and poetic genius. He was author of a poem, The Sylphs of the Seasons (1813), the art-novel, Monaldi (1842), and Lectures on Art (ed. by Dana, 1850). See his Life by Flagg (1893).