Art Gallery

Allston, Washington (1779 - 1843), one of the earliest romantic painters in America, claimed the impetus for his imaginative bent stemmed from his childhood in Georgetown, South Carolina. There he fashioned figures out of wild ferns and was terrified and enthralled by local folk tales of hags and witches. Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1800 he sailed for London, where he studied with Benjamin West. In Paris he met John Vanderlyn (1775-1852), with whom he traveled to Rome in 1805. There he developed a style derived from the Venetian Renaissance artists that earned him the title the "American Titian."

It was in Rome that Allston came in contact with the flourishing international society of artists and poets that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). After viewing Allston's painting Diana in the Chase (also entitled Swiss Scenery), a heroic landscape on exhibition in Rome, Coleridge wished to meet the artist. The painting reminded Coleridge of his own poetic writing "Lines Before Sunrise in the Valley of Chamonix" of 1802. Sensing in one another a sympathetic spirit, the two men began a lifelong friendship. Coleridge's belief in the common nature of the inspiration of poetry and the plastic arts perhaps began while visiting galleries with Allston in Rome. Conversely, Coleridge undoubtedly helped the artist gain deeper insight into romantic ideals.

. His admiration of Coleridge is further substantiated by the fact that there were more books by Coleridge in his personal library than by any other author. Allston urged all artists to read as extensively as the poet. He believed that to increase the powers of the imagination one must increase the powers of the mind. Nearly one-third of his known paintings involve themes drawn from literature, including works by Coleridge. The poet, in turn, titled at least one of Allston's paintings.

In this portrait Allston placed his intellectual confidant within a Gothic setting. The cathedral-like windows lend an air of reverence to a man considered to be one of the great religious thinkers of his time. The radiant Coleridge, surrounded by darkness, appears to personify his embracement of the philosophy of organicism, a belief that one's own dynamic system constitutes life. There is also perhaps deeper significance to Allston's choice of a religious setting. Allston followed Coleridge into the Episcopal church, a return for both to traditional Christianity. Their shared idealism caused them to base their art on a more profound spiritual view of life than that of the skeptical, rational eighteenth-century Deists, who valued reason alone as proof of the existence of God.

Of the finished portrait, which the study closely resembles, Allston wrote the following:

So far as I can judge . . . the likeness of Coleridge is a true one, but it is Coleridge in repose; . . . it is not Coleridge in his highest mood, the poetic state, when the divine aŻatus of the poet possessed him. When in that state, no face that I ever saw was like his; it seemed almost spirit made visible with a shadow of the physical upon it. Could I then have fixed it upon canvas!

William Wordsworth, a close friend of Coleridge, was not as harsh a critic as Allston and praised the portrait as the "finest likeness of Coleridge." He remarked on the "ever-working intellect" evident in the far-off look in the poet's eyes and the "sense of thought-movement in every line of his noble face." Indeed, Coleridge was constantly at work and yielded a remarkable body of criticism, poetry, and philosophy filled with intense feeling and skilled phraseology.

The similarities between the two men are numerous. Allston and Coleridge utilized the supernatural to illustrate common human emotions. Both placed great emphasis on the imagination and through that faculty hoped to continually transform their ideas. They exemplified the fragility of the romantic mood in their inability to complete projects--Coleridge with his great unfinished poems and works in mass that have been called a "collection of fragments" and Allston with his monumental Belshazzar's Feast begun in 1818 and worked on sporadically until his death a quarter of a century later.

From: Source unknown