Author's note: A version of this paper was presented as a Smithsonian Fellow's Lecture at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. I am grateful for the support of the Smithsonian Institution and want especially to thank Dr. Lillian B. Miller and Marc Pachter of the National Portrait Gallery, who criticized the paper through several drafts. Jack Salzman has been a patient and helpful editor. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Lawrence Buell, David Robinson, and Andrew Delbanco. My greatest debt is to Barbara Novak.

For permission to quote from manuscript material, I am indebted to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, and the Harvard University Archives. I have received generous assistance from Kathy Catalano, Longfellow National Historic Site; Virginia Audet, Massachusetts Historical Society; Jonathan Harding, Boston Athenaeum; Carol Troyon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Arthur Breton and the staff of the Archives of American Art; and the staffs of the American Antiquarian Society, the University of Virginia Manuscript Collection, and the Manuscript, Newspaper, and Rare Book Divisions of the Library of Congress.

1. “Allston Gallery,” Daily Advertiser, 04 26, 1839.Google Scholar

2. Evening Transcript, 05 2, 1839Google Scholar; Daily Advertiser, 04 31, 1839.Google Scholar

3. Tuckerman, Henry T., Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1867), p. 146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 143. The exhibition and its important body of criticism are mentioned in the most recent study of the artist, Gerdts, William H., “The Paintings of Washington Allston,” in “A Man of Genius”: The Art of Washington Allston (1779–1843) (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), p. 139Google Scholar; see also Richardson, Edgar P., Washington Allston. A Study of the Romantic Artist in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1967), pp. 179–80Google Scholar: “Allston's retrospective exhibition of 1839 made an effect different from anything that had proceeded it.”

5. Holmes, to Dana, R. H. Sr., 01 6, 1840Google Scholar, ms. copy in “Friends” Notebook, Longfellow National Historic Site [LNHS]; Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Allston Exhibition,” North American Review, 50 (04 1840), pp. 358–81Google Scholar; Fuller, Margaret, “A Record of Impressions,” Dial, 1, 1 (07 1840), pp. 73–84Google Scholar; Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Channing, W. H., Clarke, James Freeman, eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1852), vol. 1, p. 47Google Scholar; The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. 2, edited by Hudspeth, Robert N. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 75.Google Scholar

The other major reviews of the show were by Huntington, J., M.D., “The Allston Exhibition,” The Knickerbocker, 14 (08 1839), pp. 163–74Google Scholar (The author probably was Jedediah Huntington [1815–1862], brother of artist Daniel Huntington. He brought a letter of introduction from S.F.B. Morse.); two articles by “W. H. C.” (probably William Henry Channing) in the Western Messenger, 7, 2 (06 1839), pp. 200–9Google Scholar, which quoted a letter to the New York Literary Gazette; and 7, 4 (08 1839), pp. 327–32Google Scholar, which was largely a reprint of Elizabeth Peabody's 1836 article for the American New Monthly Magazine; and the most widely circulated (which I will discuss in detail below), Peabody, Elizabeth, Remarks on Allston's Paintings (Boston: W. Ticknor, 1839)Google Scholar, reprinted from six articles in the Evening Transcript. Scholars have often confused the authorship of the pamphlet, assigning it mistakenly to W. Ticknor.

6. Channing, W[alter], “Reminiscences of Washington Allston,” Daily Advertiser, 07 24, 1843.Google Scholar

7. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton University Press, 1983), pt. 1, p. 304; pt. 2, pp. 16–17.

8. For a discussion of Coleridge's conception of the imagination and its relation to poetic form, see Biographia Literaria, Introduction by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate; Hodgson, John A., “Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge's Method of Allegory and Symbol,” Harvard English Studies 9. Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, edited by Bloomfield, Morton W. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; The best discussion of Allston's relationship with Coleridge is Hunter, Doreen, “America's First Romantics: Richard Henry Dana and Washington Allston,” New England Quarterly, 45 (1972), pp. 3–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hunter overlooks, however, the significance of the mature Coleridge's religious beliefs for Allston.

9. Allston, Washington, Lectures on Art, and Poems (1850; rpt. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1967), p. 106Google Scholar; although Allston used the term “philosophical palette” to describe Gilbert Stuart's palette, it well describes the metaphysical significance that he perceived in color harmony. See Johns, Elizabeth, “Washington Allston. Method, Imagination, and Reality,” Winterthur Portfolio 12 (1977), pp. 14–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Haskell, Francis, Rediscoveries in Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

11. Delbanco, Andrew, William Ellery Channing. An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allston's most supportive patrons were active Unitarians: Nathan Appleton and Samuel A. Eliot (who had attended Harvard Divinity School) owned pews in William Ellery Channing's Federal Street Church; Edmund Dwight was a member of King's Chapel; George Ticknor had converted to Unitarianism under the influence of J. S. Buckminster; Franklin Dexter's grandfather had left a bequest of $5,000 to Harvard for the encouragement of liberal Biblical studies. His Episcopalian patrons, David Sears, Mrs. M. Gibbs (Dr. Channing's mother-in-law) and Charles Codman, patronized him on his return from England but did not keep in close touch with him in the 1830s. For the Unitarian elite's control of the Boston Athenaeum, which was the city's single most important art institution, see Story, Ronald, “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807–1860,” American Quarterly, 27, 2 (05 1975), pp. 178–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Not until 1842 did Boston artists succeed in organizing an artist-run association, long after New York and Philadelphia.

12. “On the Fine Arts,” North American Review, 3 (07 1816), p. 196Google Scholar; “American Art and Art Unions,” Christian Examiner, 48 (03 1850), pp. 205–6Google Scholar; see also Flood, Verle Dennis, “A Study of the Aesthetics of Taste in America: The Role of Common Sense Philosophy in the Literary Criticism of the Boston Anthologists,” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Iowa State University, 1959Google Scholar, Chapter 2 and Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), Chapter 7.Google Scholar

13. Channing, William Ellery, “Milton,” Christian Examiner (1826)Google Scholar; rpt. in The Works of William Ellery Channing, D. D. (Boston, 1848), I, 13.Google Scholar

14. Daily Advertiser, 04 26, 1839.Google Scholar

15. Richardson, , Washington Allston, p. 5.Google Scholar

16. Dexter, (1793–1857)Google Scholar is described as a connoisseur in “Our First Men,” or a Catalogue of the Richest Men of Massachusetts (Boston: Fetridge & Co., 1846).Google Scholar He assisted Allston with financial advice, helped hang his paintings in Athenaeum shows, copied several of Allston's oil sketches and wrote one of the first major analyses of Allston, 's art in North American Review 33 (10 1831), pp. 506–15.Google Scholar Dexter was a leading member of the Fine Arts Committee of the Boston Athenaeum, who spoke for most Boston patrons in the January 1828 North American Review, pp. 207–24Google Scholar where he criticized (and slightly distorted) the “democratic” ideas behind the founding of the National Academy of Design in New York.

17. In addition to the Bostonians, Dexter was assisted by the Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully, who arranged the loan of Dead Man Restored to Life from the Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts and Donna Mencia in a Robbers Cavern from a private Philadelphia collection: Sully, , “Journals,”Google Scholar Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution [AAA]; the most detailed account of the installation is “The Allston Exhibition,” Daily Advertiser, 05 8, 1839.Google Scholar

18. Reviews appeared during the eleven-week run in most of the Boston newspapers, including the Boston Atlas, Daily Advertiser, and, the most influential, Evening Transcript. Dexter and Ticknor had written newspaper puffs for Allston in the past, and they were among those who arranged for the reviews that accompanied the retrospective. There were also a number of poems inspired by works in the show, including verses by James Freeman Clarke, Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell and Samuel Gray Ward. Among the lectures given about the show were those by Rev. Orville Dewey and J. Huntington to the Apollo Association in New York in the spring of 1840, and by Rev. Waterston, R. C. at Tremont Temple in 1840.Google Scholar

19. Tuckerman, , Book of the Artists, p. 146.Google Scholar

20. Daily Advertiser, 05 8, 1939.Google Scholar

21. Dana, R. H. to Bryant, William Cullen, 05 17, 1839Google Scholar, Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society [MHSL]; within two weeks, attendance exceeded that at the Boston Athenaeum for the entire 1838 season.

22. Morning Post, 05 3, 1839Google Scholar; Dana to Bryant, April 1839, ms. copy in “Allston II” Notebook, LNHS, and May 17, 1839.

23. Evening Transcript, 05 2, 1839.Google Scholar

24. Trumbull's visit was noted by the Evening Transcript, 09 16, 1839.Google Scholar He had remained in Boston to paint portraits.

25. Evening Transcript, 04 27, 1839Google Scholar, and May 2, 1839; see also Morning Post, 05 8, 1839.Google Scholar

26. Ticknor, George to Dana, , 02 22, 1837Google Scholar, Dana Papers, MHSL.

27. The catalog is reprinted in Ware, William, Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852), pp. 143–54Google Scholar; Daily Advertiser, 04 30, 1839Google Scholar regretted the omission of the paintings' dates.

28. Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. 2, p. 75.Google Scholar

29. Evening Transcript, 05 2, 1839.Google Scholar

30. Dana, to Bryant, , 05 13, 1839, Dana Papers, MHSL.Google Scholar

31. E.g., Daily Advertiser, 06 26, 1839Google Scholar; July 1, 1839; July 6, 1839.

32. For Herring's invitation, see Dana, to Bryant, , 05 17, 1839Google Scholar; June 12, 1839, Dana Papers, MHSL; S.F.B. Morse, to Allston, , 07 8, 1839Google Scholar, Morse Papers, Library of Congress.

33. Cheney, Ednah Dow, Gleanings in the Field of Art (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1881), p. 293.Google Scholar

34. For Belshazzar's Feast, see Gerdts, , “Paintings,” pp. 129–31Google Scholar; Dunlap, William, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: George P. Scott & Co., 1834), p. 188.Google Scholar For Allston's anxiety about his reputation, see Flagg, Jared B., The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (1892; rpt. New York: DaCapo Press, 1969), pp. 277–79Google Scholar; Dana, to MrsArnold, Sarah R., 05 15, 1839Google Scholar, Dana Papers, MHSL: “People do not now ask if Mr Allston works; and he has now convinced them of his industry and genius; & all seem greatly pleased.”

35. E.g., Evening Transcript. 06 11, 1839.Google Scholar

36. The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Vol. 2, Edited by Killer, Andrew (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 134–36.Google Scholar

37. Alexander, to Powers, , 02 1839Google Scholar, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA.

38. Eliot, Samuel A., “Cash Book, 1825–33,”Google Scholar Harvard University Archives. He paid Allston in four installments over eleven months.

39. General information about Allston's finances is found in Gerdts, “Paintings.” The term “Boston notion” was coined by Jarves, James Jackson, “Art and Artists of America,” Christian Examiner 75 (07 1863), p. 116.Google Scholar

40. Allston, to Pickering, Henry, 03 18, 1820, Allston Papers, MHSL.Google Scholar

41. Allston, to Collins, William, 05 18, 1821Google Scholar, ms. copy, Allston Papers, MHSL.

42. New York Review (10 1838), pp. 475–76Google Scholar; see also Dana, H. W. L., “Allston in Cambridgeport 1830–1843,” Cambridge Historical Society, Publication 29. Proceedings for the Year 1943, pp. 13–67.Google Scholar Dana incorrectly located the studio some distance from Allston's 1830–41 residence. Robert H. Nylander as researcher for the Cambridge Historical Commission identified the house and studio as being on adjacent lots on the site of today's Central Square, within easy walking distance of Harvard. I am grateful to Charles Sullivan of the Cambridge Historical Commission for his assistance in clarifying this material.

43. For Allston's taxes, see Cambridge, Mass. Tax rolls and Assessor's Records, on microfilm, Cambridge Public Library. For Allston's financial problems in 1834, see Dana Papers, MHSL, and Morse Papers, Library of Congress.

44. Rezneck, Samuel, “The Social History of an American Depression,” The American Historical Review (07 1935), pp. 662–87Google Scholar, and Charvat, William, “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837,” Science & Society, 2, 1 (Winter 1937), pp. 67–82.Google Scholar

45. Mason, to Cole, , 11 5, 1839Google Scholar, Thomas Cole Papers, AAA.

46. Allston, to Flagg, G. W., 10 29, 1840, AAA.Google Scholar

47. Sully, , “Journal,” 03 1839Google Scholar: “… it might be sold for $6000.”

48. Delbanco, , Channing, 156–57.Google Scholar

49. Quoted in Ibid., p. 58.

50. For the impact of industrialization and growth, see Rose, Anne C., Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 4–37.Google Scholar

51. The Athenaeum, 5 (1819), p. 137.Google Scholar

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53. Quoted in Charvat, , “American Romanticism, p. 78.”Google Scholar

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57. Robinson, David, Apostle of Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 7Google Scholar; for the “revolution in American Unitarian historiography,” see Robinson, , “Unitarian Historiography and the American Renaissance,” ESQ, 23 (1977), pp. 130–37.Google Scholar The major sources for my discussion are: Howe, , Unitarian ConscienceGoogle Scholar; Buell, Lawrence, “Unitarian Aesthetics and Emerson's Poet-priest,” American Quarterly 20, 1 (Spring 1968), pp. 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Robinson, , Apostle of Culture and “The Legacy of Channing: Culture as a Religious Category in New England Thought,” Harvard Theological Review, 74, 2 (1981), pp. 221–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Robinson, , Apostle of Culture, p. 9.Google Scholar

59. Channing, William Ellery, “National Literature,” Christian Examiner, 36 (01 1830), p. 275.Google Scholar

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61. The expression is Delbanco, 's, Channing, p. 85.Google Scholar

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68. Robinson, , Apostle of Culture, p. 12.Google Scholar

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71. “Prospects for Art in this Country,” Christian Examiner, 89 (01 1839), p. 311Google Scholar; see also Eliot, Samuel A., “Exhibition of Pictures,” North American Review (10 1830), pp. 309–11Google Scholar; and Memoirs of William Ellery Channing, vol. 3, edited by Channing, William Henry (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848), p. 26Google Scholar: In 1837, Channing suggested that art be available for contemplation in a “public gallery freely open.”

72. Channing's lecture was sponsored by the Franklin Society, an organization founded for the improvement of manual laborers. It was published as a pamphlet in Boston in 1838.

73. Evening Transcript, 05 2, 1839.Google Scholar

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76. Daily Advertiser, 05 8, 1839.Google Scholar

77. Evening Transcript, 05 2, 1839.Google Scholar

78. Allston described the experience, which ended in his spontaneous recitation of a poem, “The Atonement,” to Peabody, Elizabeth, Last Evening With Alistan, and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lothrop and Company, 1886), pp. 6–9Google Scholar; The artist Charles Robert Leslie recorded Allston's anguished state following the death of his wife and the help he received from Coleridge, Leslie, C. R., Autobiographical Recollections, vol. 1, edited by Taylor, Tom (London: John Murray, 1860), p. 51Google Scholar; Allston's confirmation, reported by Leslie, is not quite clear. I have found no record of it in the archives of the Diocese of London. He had, however, been baptized as an Episcopalian in South Carolina.

79. “The Athenaeum Gallery,” North American Review (07 1829), p. 67.Google Scholar

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100. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, Translated and introduced by Mackenzie, Kenneth; with 111 engravings by Flaxman, John (London: The Folio Society, 1979)Google Scholar, from the 1807 edition. Allston owned this edition. For Allston's acquaintance with Flaxman and his preparatory sketches, see Leslie, , Autobiographical Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 71–72.Google Scholar

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