Self-portrait, circa 1805 by artist Washington Allston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Kaminski House Museum has a small portrait by artist Washington Allston, who was in Julia Pyatt Kaminski’s family line. It is a portrait of Reginald Heber (1783–1826), English bishop, man of letters and hymn-writer. Washington Allston and Heber traveled in the same English Romantic circles during Allston’s residency in England. When Heber was consecrated as bishop of Calcutta in 1823, a number of artists painted his portrait, most eminently Thomas Phillips, whose similar “Portrait of Reginald Heber” hangs in the British Library.
Washington Allston (1779-1843) was born at Brookgreen Plantation to Rachel Moore and Captain William Allston. His father served with General Francis Marion in the Revolution but died when Washington was a small child. A few years later, his mother married Dr. Henry Collins Flagg, a physician from Rhode Island who was serving as surgeon general of the Army in the South. The family moved to Newport, Rhode Island. Washington started drawing at a young age. In a letter compiled in his biography, he wrote, “I used to draw before I left Carolina, at six years of age” and enjoyed “making little landscapes about the roots of an old tree in the country.”
After attending a classical school, Newport Academy, he attended Harvard, where he was called “The Count” due to his fashionable attire. He made an impression on his fellow students. He “gave himself up to painting and poetry,” his classmate and friend, Leonard Jarvis wrote in a letter. Jarvis wrote that “those who hated each other most heartily—and there were good haters in our class—and who agreed in nothing else, united in respectful and kindly feelings toward him.” And: “His countenance, once seen, could never be forgotten.” Jarvis praised Allston’s “smooth, high, open forehead, surrounded by a profusion of dark, wavy hair, his delicately formed nose, his peculiarly expressive mouth, his large, lustrous, melting eye.” Allston had a face, according to his friend, which was “irresistibly attractive, and which, united with his gentle, unassuming manners, secured him the good will of all his classmates.”
Allston graduated from Harvard with honors in 1800 and spent the following year in Charleston, where he set up a studio. He was accompanied by Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807), a miniaturist from Rhode Island who Allston knew from studying art in New England. In Charleston, they met Charles Fraser (1782-1860), at the time a lawyer with a passion for art. Fraser later became the premier miniature painter in Charleston, influenced by Malbone's style.
Alston’s step-father, Dr. Henry Collins Flagg (who he adored), as a physician “was earnest with him to follow that profession,” Jarvis recalled, but Allston was determined. To fund an art education, he sold his inheritance from his father, which was Springfield Plantation, one of the four plantation properties that today comprise Brookgreen Gardens. In 1801, he traveled to London with Edward Greene Malbone and entered the Royal Academy in September of that year. Inspired by his teacher Benjamin West (1738-1820), an American-born painter of historical, religious, and mythological subjects who had a profound influence on the development of historical painting in Britain, Allston resolved to become a “history painter.”
Reginald Heber by Washington Allston, circa 1801-1923. Collection of the Kaminski House Museum
From 1801 to 1818, Allston spent most of his time in Europe, where he made a study of the collections of the great museums of Paris and Italy. He returned to Boston in 1809 to marry Ann Channing from Newport, Rhode Island, the sister of the Boston Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing. They returned to England in 1811, and he remained there for seven years. During his earlier jaunts around Europe, Allston—who himself became the author of The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems in London (1813) — met and befriended the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His portrait of Coleridge, painted in 1814, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Several other of his works, including Rebecca at the Well and Uriel in the Sun, were well received at the Royal Academy and resulted in his being made an academy associate in 1819.
Allston and his fellow artists of the same mien were attempting to elevate American art from portraiture and give it a monumental form which would equal the great artistic epochs of the past. Among these American artists, the “historical style" was the ideal. Allston’s efforts ultimately brought to America such exciting and grandiose subjects as Elijah in the Desert, and Diana in the Chase. Revered by other artists, the American public in general did not take to his work, preferring an indigenous art to his imported, strongly Italianate style. He continued to produce portraits, - the most lucrative use of an artist’s talents in that day – although he sought to imbue his portraiture with a romantic sensibility.
His wife’s sudden death in England in February of 1815 left Allston bereft. Soon his depleted finances and to quote Allston's own words: "A homesickness which (in spite of some of the best and kindest friends and every encouragement that I could wish as an artist) I could not overcome, brought me back to my own country in 1818." He spent the remainder of his life near Boston in the circle of artistic and philosophical enlightenment which centered there. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1826. The first American exhibition of his work was in 1827, when twelve of his paintings were shown at the Boston Athenæum. What was to be his masterpiece, Belshazzar's Feast, which he had begun in England in 1817, occupied his attention for the next forty years and remained unfinished at the time of his death. Therefore the total production of the last quarter century of his life was devoted as much to philosophical writings and poetry as to painting, and to his nephews. As the uncle of artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both studied painting under him.
In 1830 Allston married Martha Remington Dana (1784-1862), a daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and a cousin of his first wife. They lived in Cambridgeport (now Cambridge), where Allston established a studio adjacent to their house.
In 1841, he published Monaldi, a romance illustrating Italian life, and in 1850, a volume of his Lectures on Art, and Poems.
Just before Allston’s death in Cambridge, though not well, he attended the Boston banquet in honor of Charles Dickens, who was touring America as the most famous writer in the world Before departing for England, Dickens visited Allston at his “ivy-studded studio in Cambridge” to make a farewell call on a friend he called “a fine specimen of old genius.”
Allston died on July 9, 1843 at age 64. He was buried in Cambridge by torchlight -- just as the slaves of his youth interred their dead, at night by torchlight in the remote wooded areas of the South Carolina plantations that now comprise Brookgreen Gardens. Washington Allston is entombed in the Old Burying Ground at Harvard Square, Cambridge.
Sources:
Flagg, Jared Bradley, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (C. Scribner's Sons), 1892.
Truelian Lee and Jacqueline P. Patel, “Allston Who? Ever wondered how Allston got its name?” Harvard Crimson, February 22, 2018 at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/2/22/washington-allston/
“New Additions to the National Portrait Gallery,” The Morning Post, [London, England] (August 6, 1864): 6.
By: Jennie Holton Fant, 2021
