Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:41:34.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An Anglo-American Friendship: Allston and Coleridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John R. Welsh
John R. Welsh
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the most interesting and intense of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's various friendships, and one which especially affected the poet, sprang from his association with the American cosmopolite, Washington Allston. Though largely forgotten now, or ignored if remembered, Allston was an artist of great prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century, acclaimed in the United States as the foremost American painter. His writings—consisting mainly of a slender volume of verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, and an Italian revenge tale, Monaldi—were also highly praised in journals and among the literati. But when the ‘historical style’, a term applied to romantic idealism in painting, went out of fashion, Allston's high standing as painter went with it; nor were his writings of the volume or quality to sustain a literary reputation. There exists no doubt, though, that Allston was the first skilled all-round American painter, for the simple reason that no American before him had painted competently such a broad range of subjects in the different genres. Neither is there any doubt as to Allston's influence upon contemporary artists and writers. He was a catalyst who seemed to stir others to expression wherever he went. His 1839 exhibition of paintings in Boston caused a mild sensation and was written about by Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Peabody. Washington Irving's story ‘The Wife’ in The Sketch-Book was based on Allston's married life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 1971 , pp. 81 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For a technical discussion of this, see the excellent study, primarily of Allston as a painter, by Richardson, Edgar P., Washington Allston: A Study of the Romantic Artist in America (Chicago, 1948), pp. 174–5.Google Scholar

2 See The Dial, 1 (1840), 73–84, and 174–5Google Scholar; The North American Review, 50 (1840), 358–81Google Scholar; Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers (Boston, 1886), pp. 30–61.Google Scholar

3 Williams, Stanley T., The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), vol. 1, pp. 182, 429.Google Scholar

4 Stewart, Randall (ed.), The American Notebooks (New Haven, 1932), pp. 100, 101Google Scholar; and Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston and New York, 1882), pp. 526–7.Google Scholar

5 Rusk, Ralph L. (ed.), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1939), vol. 3, p. 182.Google Scholar

6 1 (1840), 73–84.

7 MrsJameson, A. B. M., Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals (London, 1846), p. 167.Google Scholar

8 Morse, Edward L. (ed.), Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals (Boston and New York, 1914), vol. 1, p. 110.Google Scholar

9 For example, see Analectic Magazine, 6 (1815), 151–8Google Scholar; and The North American Review, 71 (1850), 149–68.Google Scholar

10 54 (1842), 397.

11 (3rd ed. rev., Philadelphia, 1843), p. iii.

12 Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (London, 1847), p. 310.Google Scholar

13 Flagg, Jared (ed.), The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (New York, 1892), pp. 61–2Google Scholar; hereafter cited as ‘Flagg’.

14 Griggs, Earl L. (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1956–1959), vol. 2, p. 1173.Google Scholar Coleridge frequently spelled Allston with one ‘1’.

15 Coburn, Kathleen (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1961), vol. 2 (Text), Entry 2796.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., Entries 2813, 2831.

17 The portrait is in the Dana Collection, Cambridge, Mass.

18 Notebooks of Coleridge, vol. 2 (Text), Entry 2909.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., Entry 3110.

20 In a letter dated October 1843, to R. H. Dana, Sr; quoted in Flagg, pp. 369–70.

21 See, for instance, Coleridge's impassioned letter of 1814 calling for more favourable newspaper reports on Allston's work in Collected Letters of Coleridge, vol. 3, p. 534.Google Scholar Coleridge's thesis, repeated at other times, is that Allston was mistreated or ignored because he was an American.

22 Flagg, , p. 63.Google Scholar

23 Leslie, Charles R., Autobiographical Recollections, ed. Taylor, Tom (Boston, 1860), pp. 23–5.Google Scholar

24 Flagg, , p. 96.Google Scholar

25 Collected Letters of Coleridge, vol. 3, p. 444.Google Scholar

26 Flagg, , p. 106.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 104.

28 Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 1, p. 171.Google Scholar

29 See Coleridge, , Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, J. (London, 1907), vol. 2, pp. 304–5.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., p. 304.

31 Ibid., pp. 223, 234.

32 Griggs, Earl L. (ed.), Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1932), vol. 2, p. 114.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 116.

34 Collected letters of Coleridge, vol. 3, p. 509.Google Scholar

35 Unpublished Letters of Coleridge, vol. 2, p. 121.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., pp. 121–2.

37 Flagg, , p. 356.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 355.

39 Leslie, , pp. 34–5.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., p. 35.

41 Flagg, , pp. 115–17.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., p. 118.

43 Sybilline Leaves (London, 1817), p. 276.Google Scholar

44 Flagg, , pp. 141–2.Google Scholar

45 The Poetical Worlds of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (London, 1838), vol. 10, p. 239.Google Scholar

46 Flagg, , pp. 133–4.Google Scholar Wordsworth has reference to Allston's paintings, perhaps specifically to ‘Jacob's Dream’, one of his best works.

47 Unpublished Letters of Coleridge, vol. 2, p. 245.Google Scholar

48 Collected Letters of Coleridge, vol. 4, p. 927.Google Scholar

49 Flagg, , p. 170.Google Scholar

50 Unpublished Letters of Coleridge, vol. 2, pp. 305–6.Google Scholar

51 Gilman, William H. et al. (eds.), The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–5), vol. 4, p. 408.Google Scholar

52 Sweetser, Moses F., Allston (Boston, 1879), p. 140.Google Scholar

53 Flagg, , p. 64.Google Scholar

54 Emerson uses almost exactly the same words in his Journal entry of 20 September 1837, reference to Allston's poem ‘Diary of an Ennuyée’. See Emerson, E. W. and Forbes, W. E. (eds.), Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–1872 (Boston and New York, 1910), vol. 4, p. 295.Google Scholar

55 Dana, Richard Henry Jr, (ed.), Lectures on Art, and Poems (New York, 1850), pp. 27, 28, 111.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., pp. 155, 12.

57 Ibid., p. 109.

58 Ibid., p. 18.

59 Ibid., p. 11.