Allston.-First compositions.-Figures and landscapes.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

Allston was born in 1779, in the state of South Carolina. The climate not agreeing with his constitution, he was sent, by the advice of physicians, at a very early age, (between six and seven,) to Newport, Rhode Island, and was there at school until 1796, when he was transferred to Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mr. Allston, speaking of his boyhood, says: "My chief pleasure now was in drawing from prints-of all kinds of figures, landscapes, and animals. But I soon began to make pictures of my own, at what age, however, I cannot say. The earliest compositions that I remember, were the Storming of Count Roderick's Castle, from a poor, (though to me delightful) romance of that day, and the Siege of Toulon; the first in India ink, the other in water colours. To these succeeded many others, which have likewise passed into oblivion. Though I never had any regular instruction in the art, (a circumstance both idle and absurd to boast of,) I had much incidental instruction; which I have always through life been glad to receive from those in advance of myself.

"My leisure hours at college, were chiefly devoted to the pencil to the composition equally of figures and landscapes. I do not remember that I preferred one to the other; my only guide in the choice was the inclination of the moment. There was an old landscape in the house of a friend in Cambridge, that gave me my first hints in colour in that branch; it was of a rich and deep tone, though not by the hands of a master.

"In the colouring of figures, the pictures of Pine, in the Columbian Museum, in Boston, were my first masters. Pine had

First pictures exhibited.-Gallery of the Louvre.

certainly, as far as I can recollect, considerable merit in colour. But I had a higher master in the head of Cardinal Bentevoglio, from Vandyke, in the college library, which I obtained permission to copy one winter vacation."

At the period of his return to South Carolina from college, in 1800, Mr. Allston painted a head of St. Peter, when he hears the cock crow, and one of Judas Iscariot. In 1801, at the age of twenty-two, he embarked with his friend Malbone for England. In one of his letters he says: "I arrived in England about the middle of June. The next year was the first of my appearing before the public, when I exhibited three pictures at Somerset House. The principal one, a French Soldier telling a Story, (a comic attempt;) a Rocky Coast, with Banditti; and a Landscape with Horsemen, which I had painted at college, as before alluded to. I received two applications for the French Soldier; which I sold to Mr. Wilson, of the European Museum, for whom I afterwards painted a companion to it, also comic-the Poet's Ordinary, where the lean fare was enriched by an incidental

After three years' residence in England, Mr. Allston passed over to France, and in the letter before mentioned, thus expresses his feelings on visiting the Louvre, that splendid accumulation of plunder: "Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese, absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subjects. When I stood before the Peter Martyr, the Miracle of the Slave, and the Marriage of Cana, I thought of nothing but of the gorgeous concert of colours, or rather of the indefinite forms (I cannot call them sensations) of pleasure with which they filled the imagination. It was the poetry of colour which I felt; procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause. I did not, however, stop to

The great colourists.—A wide liker.-Modelling in clay.

analyze my feelings-perhaps at that time I could not have done it. I was content with my pleasure without seeking the cause. But I now understand it, and I think I understand why so many great colourists, especially Tintoretto and Paul Veronese gave so little heed to the ostensible stories of their compositions. In some of them, the Marriage of Cana, for instance, there is not the slightest clue given by which the spectator can guess at the subject. They addressed themselves not to the senses only, as some have supposed, but rather through them to that region (if I may so speak) of the imagination, which is supposed to be under the exclusive dominion of music, and which, by similar excitement, they caused to teem with visions that 'lap the soul in Elysium.' In other words, they leave the subject to be made by the spectator, provided he possesses the imaginative faculty-otherwise they will have little more meaning to him than a calico counterpane."

In pursuing the subject, Allston says: "I am by nature, as it respects the arts, a wide liker. I cannot honestly turn up my nose even at a piece of still-life, since, if well done, it gives me pleasure. This remark will account for otherwise strange transitions. I will mention here a picture of a totally different kind, which then took great hold of me, by Ludovico Caracci. I do not remember the title, but the subject was the body of the Virgin borne for interment by four apostles. The figures are colossal; the tone dark, and of tremendous depth of colour. It seemed, as I looked at it, as if the ground shook under their tread, and the air were darkened by their grief."

Mr. Allston spent about four years in Italy, the principal part of the time in Rome. His studies while there were not confined to drawing and painting. He made modelling in clay a separate branch of study, and devoted much time to it. He has said

Friendship of Coleridge.-The American Titian.

of this study, in after life: "I would recommend modelling to all young painters, as one of the best means of acquiring an accurate knowledge of the joints."

At Rome he became acquainted with Coleridge. It is only his own words that can do justice to his estimation of the great poet. In one of his letters, after mentioning a friend, he proceeds: "I have had occasion in former letters, more than once, to mention the name of another most valued friend, of whom I would gladly say more, did I not feel that it is not for me to do justice to his extraordinary powers. I would observe, however, that to no other man whom I have known do I owe so much, intellectually, as to Mr. Coleridge, with whom I became acquainted in Rome, and who has honoured me with his friendship for more than five-and-twenty years. He used to call Rome the silent city; but I never could think of it as such, while with him; for, meet him when and where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living stream seemed especially to flow for every classic ruin over which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato, in the groves of the Academy. It was there he taught me this golden rule-never judge of any work of art by its defects; a rule as wise as benevolent; and one that, while it has spared me much pain, has widened my sphere of pleasure."

Mr. Allston returned to America, in 1809. When Robert W. Weir, Esq., of New York, was studying in Rome, many years after, the artists there asked him after an American painter, for whom they had no other name than the American Titian. When Weir mentioned the name of Allston, they exclaimed-"that's the

man!"

First prize of the British Gallery.-Portraits.

Sully and others say, that Allston's colouring is more

like Titian than that of any modern artist.

After remaining in his native country three years, he returned to England; where the first work in which he engaged, was his great picture of the Dead Man revived by the touch of Elisha's Bones. He writes to a friend: "My progress in this picture was interrupted by a dangerous illness, which, after some months of great suffering, compelled me to remove to Clifton, near Bristol. It was first exhibited at the British Gallery-an institution patronized by the principal nobility and gentry-the Prince Regent then president; it there obtained the first prize of two hundred guineas. As I had returned to London chiefly to finish this picture, that accomplished, I went back to Bristol, where I painted, and left a number of pictures; among these were halflength portraits of my friend Mr. Coleridge, and my medical friend, Mr. King, of Clifton. I have painted but few portraits, and these I think are my best."

The great picture of the Dead Man restored to Life by touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, was put up in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in April, 1816, in a good light; and has been a source of delight to the citizens and artists. The size is 13 feet by 11. The passage on which it is founded is as follows: "And the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year. And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men, and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived." 2 Kings, chap. xiii. verses 20, 21.

The sepulchre of Elisha is supposed to be in a cavern among the mountains. In the foreground is the man at the moment of reanimation; in which the artist has tried, both in the action