Art: Unfinished Feast

Boston of the 1820s had no doubts that Washington Allston was a great painter—the greatest that the U.S. had yet produced. His English friend Samuel Coleridge wrote: “To you alone of all contemporary Artists does it seem to have been given, to know what Nature is—not the dead shapes, the outward Letter—but the Life of Nature itself.” His friends and admirers were transatlantic giants of the day: Wordsworth, Southey, Bryant, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Then the blazing colors of impressionism came in, and the taste for his dimly lit, Italianate landscapes went out. Not since 1881 had Washington Allston’s work been given a full showing. Two years ago, Edgar P. Richardson, director of Detroit’s Institute of Arts, decided that Allston’s works were “the first important landscapes of mood painted by an American artist.” Richardson rounded up 66 paintings and drawings, put them on exhibition. Last week, after two months in Detroit, the Allston show opened in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

The massive canvases which Allston prized most, and which his own age most admired—such ambitious subjects as The Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison—seemed merely pretentious. Modern critics were impressed by the classic cleanliness of his drawings. They liked the grace and casual strength of his nudes (see cut), which Allston had sketched simply as studies for larger pictures. And they warmed to the easy, affectionate handling of portraits like that of William Ellery Channing and aging Benjamin West.

Allston, the son of an aristocratic South Carolina family, first went to Boston as a student at Harvard, was infected with Boston’s quickening interest in Europe’s classical culture. He visited Italy and France, studied the immense compositions of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. In 1811, he settled in England to paint like them. When he returned to Boston seven years later, his fame seemed secure.

He brought back with him an unfinished canvas of Belshazzar’s Feast. Tart-tongued Gilbert Stuart promptly advised him to change the whole perspective. Allston tried. But he never got the picture right. For 25 years, while admiring Harvard students sat at his feet, while Boston’s great dropped in at his romantically dusty studio for chats that continued long past midnight, Allston struggled with Belshazzar’s Feast. He painted minor works, but kept returning to Belshazzar. Six hours before his death in 1843, he was still at work at it, and getting nowhere.