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Washington Allston
1779 - 1843
Washington Allston was a U.S. poet and influential painter, born in Waccamaw, South Carolina. Allston pioneered America's Romantic movement of landscape painting. He was well known during his lifetime for his experiments with dramatic subject matter and his bold use of light and atmospheric color.
Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800, then sailed to Europe, where he spent the next three years studying art at the Royal Academy in London, England. From 1803 to 1808 he visited the great museums of Paris and then for several years those of Italy. After traveling throughout Western Europe, Allston finally settled in London, where he won fame and prizes for his pictures. He was the uncle and master of the well-known artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg.
Allston was sometimes called the "American Titian" because his style resembled the great Venetian Renaissance artists in their display of dramatic color contrasts. His work greatly influenced the development of U.S. landscape painting. Also, the themes of many of his paintings were drawn from literature, especially Biblical stories. Allston wrote a good deal of verse including The Sylphs of the Seasons (1813) and The Two Painters, a satire. He also produced a novel, Monaldi.
His artistic genius was much admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sophia Peabody and Margaret Fuller. They all were strongly influenced by his paintings and poems. Washington Allston coined the term "objective correlative," which T.S. Eliot described as a situation or a chain of events that acts as a formula and is used in art to evoke emotion.
In 1818 he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years, where he died on July 9, 1843, at age 64. The west Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Allston is named for him.
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