An Anglo-American Friendship: Allston and Coleridge

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.